Every client has this one thing in common … they want to reduce their taxes. And tax planning is immediate. It’s one of the few things an advisor can do for clients that’s not based on helping them to make behavioral changes. Plus, tax planning is a great way for an advisor to show value every year. It’s a tangible way for you to say, if we do this you can save this much money.
On this Elementality, Abby interviews Roger Pine of Holistiplan, a company that helps simplify tax planning for advisors so they can simplify tax planning for their clients. Holistiplan reads a client’s tax return and creates a customized, white labeled tax report for the advisor—complete with relevant, meaningful observations.
Podcast Transcript
Roger Pine:
A tax return for a financial advisor is just such an amazingly valuable document. It’s an incredible window into your client’s financial life that by the way, by law, they have to file every year. So we as advisors, we beg our clients, please update your will. Please. It’s way outta date. Please update it. And they’re like, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll get to it next year. I’ll get to it next year.”
Abby Morton:
Yeah. We totally get that. Yes.
Roger Pine:
But the tax return they have to do every year by law. And so that’s a great document for us to start with, right? So what Holistiplan does is, you upload that document, it reads it in, it kind of runs it through a big old checklist and then it gives you this report that you can share with the client. Just have a great conversation about taxes, explaining what’s going on with taxes. It’s complicated, just explaining what’s going on is valuable.
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use elements to grow their business and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality everyone. Today, I’m your host, Abby Morton, here with Roger Pine from Holistiplan. Hey, Roger.
Roger Pine:
Hi there. Great to be here.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Thank you so much for taking time to meet with me. As our listeners know, I like to interview kind of different types of software and tech tools, different things that financial advisors need to help scale and grow their practice. And so I’m always looking for products that other advisors like to use and I feel like Holistiplan is what I hear all of the time. And so I wanted to bring you on the podcast today to learn a little bit more about you, about Holistiplan and how you guys are helping to change the industry for the better for financial advisors.
Roger Pine:
Okay. Great. Let’s do it.
Abby Morton:
All right. So Roger, I’d love to even just start learning a little bit more about you. What role do you actually play at Holistiplan and kind of what’s your background?
Roger Pine:
Sure. Yeah. Well, I am… My title is the CEO. I was one of the two co-founders of the company. Really, honestly, I spend most of my time as like a product guy. I still write code and I’m very deep into that, so…
Abby Morton:
Awesome.
Roger Pine:
That’s where like 95% of my time is spent, even though that’s not my title. But yes. I also touch some other parts of the business as well.
Abby Morton:
Okay. Awesome. And what was your background before Holistiplan?
Roger Pine:
Oh. Sure. Yeah. So prior to Holistiplan, actually for 10 years prior to starting the company, I was a financial advisor. I was in a very planning, heavy firm. The only financial advisory firm in Texas. And yeah. I’d done that for 10 years. I had clients, I had the whole deal. I was a partner in the business, but then a midlife crisis came along and I wanted to do something new. I was really interested in programming computers too. That’s something I love doing. And something I had taught myself halfway through my time as an advisor, and I was building a lot of stuff within my firm and I wanted to really scratch that itch some more and start to make that my career. And so that’s when I switched over to becoming a tech entrepreneur, I guess you could say.
Abby Morton:
And so was the idea behind creating Holistiplan is as a financial advisor yourself, you kind of like saw this need or a way to be able to do tax planning more efficiently or did you try lots of different things in your development phase and this one was kind of the one that like jumped out to you as the biggest potential?
Roger Pine:
Yes. So that’s a very astute question. I think because you’re within a startup yourself, you know that it’s… The answer is the latter.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. It’s so true.
Roger Pine:
No great idea springs from one’s head fully formed. So yeah. I’ll give a longer story about it. So I quit my job as an advisor at the end of 2017. Which is when I turned 40 perfect time for a midlife crisis.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Exactly.
Roger Pine:
For the entirety of 2018, I was actually trying to build a direct to consumer, build-your-own-financial-plan sort of product. And that was a complete and utter failure just… I didn’t make a single dollar in revenue. I couldn’t even get beta testers who were trying it for free.
Abby Morton:
Oh, wow.
Roger Pine:
To stay on the product. I learned a lot of things from that…
Abby Morton:
So discouraging, I’m sure. Right?
Roger Pine:
Oh my God. It was a very difficult year. Yeah. Absolutely. Of course no one ever hears that story, but…
Abby Morton:
Well that’s… Yeah. I’m like, “Let’s talk a little bit about it.” I think it’s interesting to learn a little bit more about the background behind it.
Roger Pine:
Sure. Yeah. Oh. I mean, when it really comes down to it, and this is… And your listeners are largely financial advisors, I’m sure. The good news for financial advisors is I don’t think your clients want to do it themself. They really don’t. What I found myself doing as part of this, I was trying to build like a choose your own adventure, build your own plan sort of thing. The problem was, especially if you can’t see who the client is, as he is going through this process, you don’t know how much they know. So, I mean, think about the most basic… I’ll throw a tax planning thing out there. “Hey, your client, you’re in a low tax bracket this year. You might consider converting some IRA money to Roth.” We as financial advisors know exactly what that means, why you would do it in a low tax bracket year. But if you’re just putting something out into the internet and you don’t know who the client is going through it, you gotta explain what an IRA is, how the taxes work on that. You gotta explain what a Roth is, then you gotta explain what marginal tax. Right? I was just building a ton of educational content.
Abby Morton:
Oh. Okay. Okay.
Roger Pine:
And I wanted to be a computer programmer.
Abby Morton:
Yeah [chuckle]
Roger Pine:
And so yeah. But I was at it. So I spent a year doing that. People just didn’t wanna go through hours of learning about how to be a financial advisor for themself. They just wanted to make the best decisions. So at the beginning of 2019, I was pretty down, but fortunately I was kind of sharing my progress with some friends of mine who are financial advisors, which is something I highly recommend people do. Don’t work in a vacuum as an entrepreneur. Show people what you’re doing, tell people about the highs and the lows. And this friend of mine, Kevin Lozier, who’s another financial advisor, he said, “What you’re doing is really interesting, but this needs to be something that you put in front of advisors.” ‘Cause because the idea of like a decision engine or a guided checklist is a thing that we as advisors benefit from. And so if you can kind of pull some of the variability out of the advisors process of delivering, in this case tax planning or some other types of planning, it’s still very valuable. And then you don’t have to explain what is a Roth conversion, right. What is a Roth IRA, what is an IRA. And so that was a critical pivot.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. I think we definitely at Elements even resonate with that idea. If it was just as easy as someone knowing what to do, Google would be enough, right? The answers are out there for everyone. It’s not like us financial advisors getting our CFPs get some special knowledge that everyone else can’t have. Right? It’s not that, but it’s more of the accountability partner, right? It’s like someone to just double check your math with. It’s someone… Or I think that an advisor brings so much more than just a checklist of things to do, right?
Roger Pine:
Absolutely.
Abby Morton:
So that’s… I think, what you’re also alluding to is like, end clients didn’t want that, right? They want the human involved in that aspect. And so how can you create something for advisors that helps them be more efficient, which ultimately helps them serve their clients better, right?
Roger Pine:
Absolutely. And I was just writing this analogy the other day, but there are plenty of professions where this is true. I mean, there’s really sophisticated autopilot technology out there. But at the end of the day, I want a human pilot in the cockpit. You know what I mean?
Abby Morton:
So true.
Roger Pine:
And the tools that the pilots have today are way better and way different from what they had 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 50 years ago. But you still want a human in the chair. Most of the time.
Abby Morton:
Yep. Totally. Totally.
Roger Pine:
I think all the time. But most of the time, right? And there’s so many professions like that. Medical doctors, so many things where yes, we have decision engines, we have research, but you still need a human being to actually connect it with you as a client and to explain it to you and all that stuff. So anyway, that was the major pivot for us. There was still a lot of work to get to the idea of tax planning as the thing that we would do. The idea of uploading documents. There was a lot of stuff that just, we had to listen to our customers and that first nine months in business where Kevin and I joined forces… Having a co-founder is really important, by the way for people listening on their own entrepreneurial journey.
Abby Morton:
As a side caveat, I think it’s really very, very common for advisors to be an advisor and then pivot or have something else on the side. Right? So that’s why I’m loving this information because I think a lot of our audience does exactly what you’ve done, you know?
Roger Pine:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Abby Morton:
I think that’s helpful.
Roger Pine:
A lot of advisor technology came from… And lawyers have a lot of this too. There’s something that someone… It wasn’t in the market, and so they built it themself. But then the real challenging part is the amount of focus it takes to really launch a software business. Right?
Abby Morton:
Totally. Totally.
Roger Pine:
And that’s the hard part is that I don’t… I think people will struggle if it’s just a side hustle to start a software business, because there is a lot that goes into it. It just gets harder as you go. It doesn’t get easier as you go. And it’s just one of those things that really takes a lot of dedication. I was glad that I was focused 100% on it and not working part-time as an advisor. I know some people can do it.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Right. Right.
Roger Pine:
But I’m not capable of it.
[chuckle]
Abby Morton:
Well, I think that’s interesting. Like you said, you stopped being an advisor in 2018 and were developing this. Sounds like in 2019… Had you settled on taxes, but you didn’t know quite like what it was going to be like? ‘Cause it sounds to me, I was just like, you have your website, weren’t you the FinTech winner of 2019 at the XYPN show?
Roger Pine:
We were. Yes. And that was in the fall of 2019. So…
Abby Morton:
So like early 2019 you started… So then that wasn’t even in development for that long when after you were that award, right?
Roger Pine:
Correct. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.
Abby Morton:
That’s surprising to me. I didn’t realize it was that short of a time span.
Roger Pine:
Yeah. I mean, I can break it down further. So Kevin and I kind of started talking in February of 2019, and I was really fixated on this idea of automated checklists and stuff like that. And we were actually looking at all types of planning. Tax and property casualty and all that stuff. And I was all excited ’cause Kevin was bought into this idea. And so I started building… Version one was this thing I built that had like 8,000 boxes where you had to fill in a bunch of information. And I was like, “Kevin, look at this. It’s awesome.” All you have to do is fill in these 8,000 bits of information. He’s like, “I am never, ever going to fill in 8,000 boxes of individual information.”
Abby Morton:
Yeah [chuckle]
Roger Pine:
And he had the idea that, “Okay. Well you know what you gotta read in the documents.” That was his critical insight. And so really we looked at maybe pulling stuff from like Kelley Blue Book or like WhatsApp. But really the place where we knew there was a document that had structured data was taxes. That was really like all the thinking that went into it. It’s like…
Abby Morton:
Interesting. Yeah.
Roger Pine:
We’ll just start with a thing that looks like it’s structured data that might be easy to read in. It’s not easy to read in. And we just ran with that. But then over the summer of 2019, it was just a lot of feedback from advisors, “Here’s what we want, this is where we want it to go.” And by the time we got to that XYPN conference in the Fall, we had paying customers, we had a lot of feedback from real customers about what they wanted this thing to do. And by that time, yes. It was a tax planning product. When yeah as recently as six months prior, that’s not what it was. You know what I mean?
Abby Morton:
That… Yeah. That is so, so fascinating. And as you said, like I get that being at a startup at Elements too or what you started day one is never what you have at the end. Okay. So, great. So 2019 really was your launch. Fast forward, what? Four years. You are, where you are today. Tell us a little bit about then, for those who might not be… For those who might not know what Holistiplan is. Obviously we know tax planning software, but tell us a little bit more like the details about it. What does it do? How does it help advisors?
Roger Pine:
Yeah. I mean, it honestly does a lot of what it did back in 2019, which is, it all starts with uploading a tax return. A tax return for a financial advisor is just such an amazingly valuable document. It’s an incredible window into your client’s financial life that by the way, by law they have to file every year. So we as advisors, we beg our clients, “Please update your will, please. It’s way outta date please update it.” And they’re like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll get to it next year. I’ll get to it next year.”
Abby Morton:
Yeah. We totally get that. Yes.
Roger Pine:
But the tax return they have to do every year by law. And so that’s a great document for us to start with, right? So what Holistiplan does is, you upload that document, it reads it in, it kind of runs it through a big old checklist and then it gives you this report that you can share with the client, just have a great conversation about taxes. Explaining what’s going on with taxes, it’s complicated. Just explaining what’s going on is valuable. And then take…
Abby Morton:
Do you feel like… Is the report putting it in such a way that’s more digestible for the client or is the report written more for the advisor to read? Like you said, the difference between a Roth conversion and knowing all the details there.
Roger Pine:
Right. Right. And that’s an area where we’ve had to kind of build new things. Because originally it was purely for advisors. And slowly over time we’ve added more things that make it more client friendly ’cause ultimately, and I know this is kind of a tagline for y’all at Elements as well, which is we’re trying to drive valuable conversations with clients, right?
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Yeah.
Roger Pine:
Let’s have some conversation that’s different from, “Hey, the S&P 500 was up or down last week. What is a thing that’s…
Abby Morton:
So true.
Roger Pine:
And taxes. I mean, first of all…
Abby Morton:
People love talking about their taxes, right? And every client comes to you, “How can I save more money on taxes?” That’s all they want to talk about.
Roger Pine:
Yeah. And again, it happens every year. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great way for an advisor to show value every single year. It’s a tangible way to say, “Hey, if we do this, it could save you X number of dollars next year.” Versus the more, like… We still have to do it as planners, but it’s like, “Hey, if we do these behavioral changes today, when you’re 85 years old, 40 years from now, you’re gonna be better off.” We still need to do that as planners, but it’s not as tangible. They don’t see the result. But even beyond just the planning, just explaining what’s going on with your taxes is valuable to clients. A tax return is an ugly, poorly designed document and if you can help people understand it, that’s valuable in and of itself. So anyway, that’s a big part of it.
Abby Morton:
Do you find that even just a lot of CPAs aren’t taking the time to really explain it to their clients?
Roger Pine:
CPAs are in a different business, right? A CPA generally… A tax preparer. I think that’s what you mean when you say CPA.
Abby Morton:
Yes. Yes.
Roger Pine:
We’re talking about the people who prepare the taxes. Their job is different. Their job is to file a return that to the best of their knowledge adheres to the law. They’re in the compliance business and also it’s more of a volume business in general. And so yes. In general clients don’t get that sort of conversation from their CPA. I mean, you’ll get that cover page. I mean, I work with a CPA and I get the cover page. It’s like, last year was this and this year was this, and it’s a bunch of numbers, but it’s just about as ugly as the tax return.
Abby Morton:
Right. Right.
Roger Pine:
And I wanna see… For my… I wanna see the advisor’s logo. Show me what I paid in ordinary income taxes versus capital gains taxes. But that’s not in a tax return anymore. Tell me that. Right?
Abby Morton:
Right. Right.
Roger Pine:
Show me what I could have been doing. “Hey, I noticed you donated to charity last year. Did you know that you could group that charity into alternating years with the donor-advised fund?” Donor-advised fund, et cetera. That’s the sort of stuff that CPAs, they don’t… I mean, tax preparers are in a different business. That’s not always what their business is to explain that story.
Abby Morton:
Right. Right. And you probably have the good tax preparers or CPA firms that do take that time. But that’s probably where advisors can really add value then is taking that tax return, helping the client understand it. And that’s what you’re saying the report does. Right? It helps advisors quickly be able to see all these different things. You even mentioned a couple of them just now and how can I then take those points and help my client understand like, “This is what you did and this is why we did that.” And “Does it make sense to continue doing it going forward or not?”
Roger Pine:
Exactly. So that’s always been like the major… That’s what won us that FinTech competition. We’re showing that demo. People were like, “Wow. That’s amazing. That used to take me 45 minutes and now it’s a minute.” Then we have a lot of tools downstream of that if we’re looking forward. We just talked about looking backwards, but now we need to look forward. How do we model it? Okay. You’re recommending I do a Roth conversion, but how much? How much is gonna fill that 12% bracket where I’ve got these stock… It can get deeper and into more complicated stuff. But that’s the idea. We’re trying to create an end-to-end tax planning tool within Holistiplan. And that’s basically what people get. If they’re interested in financial planning, if they’ve done it for a long time and they wanna do it more efficiently, or if they’ve never done it before and they want kind of an on-ramp to being able to do it at the level that… I don’t know. Nerds like me were doing it for all those years. You know what I mean? That’s what the idea is behind a Holistiplan.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. No. That’s so, so great. So are there any… Today, are there any aspects or schedules in the tax return that Holistiplan can’t read yet? And so advisors still have to maybe dig in a little more?
Roger Pine:
Oh. For sure. Yeah. I mean, so… And that’s been another thing that’s been over time, like adding more and more things. So for example, in our first… I don’t know. 11 months of existence, we didn’t even bother trying to do alternative minimum tax. It was just like, “Well we don’t do that yet.” Now we do obviously, but there’s still… So there’s a thing called Schedule J. So if you’re a fisherman or a farmer, there’s a thing where you can average out your income over 10 years. And it’s one of those things that one out of…
Abby Morton:
It’s kind of nuanced. Yeah.
Roger Pine:
Yeah. Now if I’m an advisor and I’m sitting in a farming community, I really need that. But for most advisors, that’s one out of every 1000 thousand returns. And so, yeah. Sorry. That’s a thing you’ll have to do a more manual review on. But what we’ve done is as we get more and more of those. That’s what our job is as a software company, is to always be improving. One recent one we did was the foreign earned income exclusion. That’s a pretty complicated different way of calculating the entire tax bill. Well, we went for a couple years without supporting that and now we do. That sort of stuff.
Abby Morton:
Okay. How are you been deciding what kind of schedules or additional forms to then build out in the product and support it in the product going forward? Is it more just like a volume of what we’ve seen now, so many of these, so now we’re gonna build that out, how do you make those decisions?
Roger Pine:
That’s largely it. That’s our job, is to listen to our customers. So when we see patterns to what people are asking for… I mean, that’s one of the hard parts about running a software business. In your first year when you have six customers, it’s super easy to listen and then digest all the inbound you get, but then when you have thousands of customers, how do you not drown under the weight of all that noise? ‘Cause there’s some great ideas in there, there’s a terrible ideas in there, you gotta find the patterns. And that’s what… That’s where the execution comes in to running a software company is being able to distill that down to what are the actionable, prioritized things we need to do. And yeah, it’s gonna be a combination of people in the industry who’s judgments we trust a great deal, but also just what is the volume that we’re getting uploaded into our system? And that’s the sort of thing that happens.
Abby Morton:
Interesting. Yeah, I love that. That’s really helpful. How big is Holistiplan today, how many advisors are you serving?
Roger Pine:
It’s approaching 6000 firms at present. And the way our product works it’s like we don’t charge different amounts based on the number of advisors, so there’s many thousands more of advisors in the system. But really our firm… If you’re a firm, you come and you sign up and it’s about 6000 these days, I think.
Abby Morton:
Okay, and all the pricing… I was just looking earlier, before I jumped on here, it looks like all the pricings that are listed out on the website, there’s no hidden information, it seems like it is all out there.
Roger Pine:
Yeah. We’re not one of those call for details types of companies. No, no, no.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, we might be a give us your email and then we’ll give you the details of the pricing. I totally, totally get that. Talk to us about something dealing with taxes, I think that’s hard as tax laws are changing all the time, so how are you guys… How do you handle that? And how soon after laws are put into place, do you feel like Holistiplan is adjusted to meet those changes?
Roger Pine:
Yeah, so that’s part of the fun. And if you think back, if we started in 2019, there were some tax law changes between then and now, including some… There was one that happened in March during the pandemic, that was retroactive. In general we’re able to get those done pretty quickly like hours or days. It kind of depends how deep it goes, the good news about tax is the calculations are not proprietary, it’s public, it’s the law, it’s super complicated and poorly explained, but it is public. And so our job is just to keep up-to-date with what’s the latest news when we see something is working its way through Congress, it’s our job to know what’s coming, so even before the bill signs, we’re aware of what’s coming. And so even I remember we came close a couple of times in the fall, I guess, a couple of years ago, to a couple of new tax laws changing, and we had everything built and then it never passed and so we kind of had toss and like that’s just part of the fun of doing… And there’s a federal level, and then there’s the state level too, right? The federal…
Roger Pine:
It makes the national news when the federal tax laws are changing, but the states are always doing goofy stuff. So any given week, we’re probably touching the state tax rules once or twice, three times.
Abby Morton:
Well, yeah, that’s a good point. It may be a segue into state taxes, so we’ve talked, I think a lot about federal, but it sounds like then you even help from a state perspective as well.
Roger Pine:
Right, so on the state tax side, we don’t read in the documents the way we do at the federal side, it’s like 43… I think there’s 43 states that have state tax and just they all have their own forms is like maybe one day, but that just… That’s a crazy huge project.
Abby Morton:
They’re all different. Yeah.
Roger Pine:
But remember I talked about part of the software is that forward-looking, we call it scenario analysis where you’re running numbers on what’s the tax bill likely to look like next year if we do X, Y or Z, if X, Y, or Z happens. And that’s where people generally have said, “Look, I need to be able to see the state implications of this thing I’m doing,” especially in a place like California, where like you’re marginal rate can get up into double digits, right?
Abby Morton:
Totally.
Roger Pine:
And so, yeah, so the… What we call scenario analysis, the forward looking piece, yes, there’s an add-on kind of module where you can add state tax calculations as well.
Abby Morton:
Okay, very, very interesting. So then that’s just the advisor putting in the numbers and what they think from the tax return that they’re seeing… From the state tax return that they’re seeing?
Roger Pine:
Yeah, generally, so I’ll admit I’m not as deep into state as some other people in the company, but… Fine, in a state where you get a deduction for doing a 529 plan contribution, for example, and if I wanna show the client… If I wanna demonstrate to the client the benefits of doing this, you can just put money into a brokerage account or you can put it into this 529. Let me show you both cases your tax bill in both cases, you would create a scenario and then you would make that little adjustment at the state level. Most state taxes start with the federal, like AGI, and then you make little additions and subtraction. So you don’t have to build out a huge mega thing, there’s some states that are kind of annoying, they know who they are, but in general, you start with the federal and you make a few tweaks, and so that’s the type of example where you’d be showing that.
Abby Morton:
Okay, very interesting. Yeah, and so talking about these different scenarios and having this kind of one number, does Holistiplan show, by doing this scenario, I’m gonna save you this much on taxes compared to the previous year? Is that an easy number to get out of Holistiplan?
Roger Pine:
Right. Yeah and that’s a typical thing people do. So remember, you start with uploading a tax return, right?
Abby Morton:
Yeah.
Roger Pine:
And so one thing that we do is, we already have all your numbers from last year, so let’s use that as a starting point for this year. And then, so then your job as the advisor is just to talk with a client like, “Hey, you got a bonus and a raise, and then you’re not gonna sell the beach house this year, but you’re doing this.” Like a couple of tweaks but you don’t have to enter everything… You’ve got last year as a starting point, then you’ve got this year, so yeah you can… If you’re trying to show… Let me show you this year versus last year, that’s one way of doing it, or if you’re trying to show this year we have two options to do this thing or do that thing, and let me show you the cost or the savings associated with that. That’s something you can do a side by side, a lot of times with tax planning, we’re either bringing… We’re purposefully bringing income into the year, or purposely pushing income out of the year into a different year. That’s generally what we’re doing. And so what you’re trying to demonstrate for the client is in either case, let me just show you what’s happening when we make those moves in or out.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, really helpful. So give us a little sneak peek into like what’s on the horizon? What are you guys working on right now, what can we look forward to seeing?
Roger Pine:
Okay, well, we’re doing an event next week actually, that is we’re gonna show a demo of a property and casualty module we’re doing. That’s our first thing outside of tax, it’s actually the first thing we build, if you remember the origin story.
Abby Morton:
Oh, cool.
Roger Pine:
We built the stuff…
Abby Morton:
You brought it back.
Roger Pine:
And just left it for four years, but one of our customers asked us like, “Hey look, we like what you’re doing with tax, I’m interested in property casualty” and we’re like, “Sure. Okay.” So that’s coming out. I’m really interested in not just the checklist of running this stuff through our system, but also what it takes for an advisor to get this information from the source as well. I think y’all do a good job at this, ’cause our system… Let’s say I’m a client with 100 clients, I’m an advisor with 100 clients. I still gotta email 100 clients and say, “Hey, can you email me your PDF tax return?” And they get their email and then they push the button to upload it into Holistiplan, and like that’s a lot of stuff.
Abby Morton:
Well, and two, I’m wondering how many… I know sometimes as an advisor I’d get the nicely formatted, probably easy to read in OCR document and then you get the awkwardly scanned PDF. I assume… Can you read those documents as well?
Roger Pine:
Oh man! Yeah, sometimes it’ll get flagged and then we have a team of people to go in and do their best to read it. You would not believe some of the stuff we’ve seen, I’ve definitely seen iPhone pictures of a tax return on somebody’s lap with the picture of their legs in the thing.
Abby Morton:
I’m sure, me too, seems like you know. You’re like, “Oh, I can tell what that is. Okay. Yes.”
Roger Pine:
Yeah. We’ve seen things. Yeah, anyway, yeah, I can do that. So yeah, that whole step of getting the documents and putting them into this system, I would love to streamline that as well. So that’s another thing we’re working on to allow advisors to get their clients involved in that and the clients to have their own portal for uploading that information. Any way that we can shave off 1% or 2% of the effort on something that we’re doing at scale, it makes a big difference.
Abby Morton:
Right. Yeah, definitely.
Roger Pine:
And so that’s what we’re really interested in trying to do.
Abby Morton:
Okay, well, cool. Well, maybe we should talk about an integration from Elements, ’cause we got the tax return, we give you the tax return, you put your numbers into our little tax rate element. That’s what we should be talking about next.
Roger Pine:
Yeah, that’s a great example of something we can do, so we actually have the ability to upload documents through an API, and so yeah, we can build an integration like that. Great idea.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, cool. Well, that’s exciting, thanks for giving us a little bit of the inside scoop there, and thank you so much for sharing your story and a little bit more about Holistiplan. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of information on your website and a lot of really good videos, so definitely advisors, if you’re curious about pricing, spend some time and go check that out. But Roger, any final words for our listeners today? Any final thoughts you’d wanna leave them with?
Roger Pine:
I would just say that I really am inspired by what advisors do, it’s important work, it really is. It wasn’t the right career for me long-term, but I draw inspiration from the advisors who have chosen the profession to help other people. And so our job as software providers is to do everything we can to make advisors better at that work, and so they can serve more clients, help more people. So just continue listening, thank you for doing what you do.
Abby Morton:
I love it, I love it. And at Elements, we totally agree with that sentiment, we just wanna help make your jobs easier ’cause I really believe that what we’re doing as advisors, is changing lives, helping them feel better about finances, which is a large part of everyone’s life. So definitely agree and echo everything you just said. So thank you so much again for your time today. I appreciate it.
Roger Pine:
Thank you.
Abby Morton:
Have a good one.
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
David Haynes:
The high net worth individual, the 2.5 million that I was talking about, he liked the wealth management proposal and the retirement income plan and all that. But he kept going back to the score card and talking about that and being able to monitor everything on a quarterly basis, and having everything in one central hub for he and his family. I know, I got that client because of Elements.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.