Recent updates

Great news - we have just deployed Role Based Access Controls in Plannr!

What does this mean? Let’s take a look.

🚀 Your firm can now create its own roles within your Plannr site (e.g. Tea boy, Head of Entertainment, Keeper of the Knowledge, etc) and choose exactly what each one can do and see across your site.

ℹ️ Everyone keeps the access they have today (Owner, Admin & Member), and you only need to act if you want to.

What's changed

Previously, you had just three roles available, and their permissions were set by us. You can now build custom roles that reflect how your team actually works and choose their permissions individually rather than accepting a fixed level of access.

The three standard roles

OWNER, ADMIN and MEMBER remain exactly as before, and they are locked - they can't be edited or deleted. This keeps every firm on Plannr working from a consistent baseline, which means access stays predictable and our support team can always help you reliably.

ℹ️ You don't have to start from scratch. If a standard role is nearly right but not quite, clone it and adjust the copy. The original stays untouched.

Where to find it

Go to Settings → User Permissions. Roles are created and managed from here.

ℹ️ Access to User Permissions is itself permission-controlled, so if you can't see it, speak to whoever holds the Owner role at your firm.

Creating a role

1. Go to Settings → User permissions.

2. Select Create new.

3. Give the role a clear name your team will recognise at a glance - Paraplanner or Client Services rather than someone's initials.

4. Work through the permission list and switch on everything the role should be able to do.

It’s that simple!

Choosing permissions

Permissions are granular - instead of one blanket level of access, you choose what the role can do area by area across Plannr.

A few principles worth applying:

• Start from the job, not the person. Think about the tasks someone does day to day and grant those. Roles outlast individuals.

• Be deliberate about deleting. The ability to remove records is worth restricting more tightly than the ability to view or edit them.

• Watch the settings areas. Permissions covering firm configuration, integrations and user management have the widest reach.

• Fewer roles are easier to maintain. Review your list periodically and retire any that are no longer used.

Then, from your employee records, you can (edit the record) assign these new roles to your team and achieve the granular permissions you want to for each role within your business.

ℹ️ Full information is in the support article here, and if you need any further assistance our support helpdesk are available to take any questions you might have.

Fact finding

Today we’ve released a couple of fact finding quick wins. The first is the ability to archive a fact find template no longer in use, without having to go the whole hog and deleting it. This hides the template from your day to day list of available fact finds but means you won’t lose any of the data or history from fact finds previously completed under these templates. Huzzah!

Just some reassurances, if any sessions are still open for a fact find template you’re archiving, the session will be unaffected and your client(s) will still be able to continue filling it out and saving it as normal.

If the template has been used in an automation block, you’ll get a warning pop up when you go to archive the template, letting you know which automations it features in so you can go and swap it out for a current version instead.

Our usual support article is here with additional notes and info, but let us know if you have any questions on this new functionality.

Next up is the ability to give your fact find templates an internal name and a client facing name. Your templates now have two fields for Template and Display names which means you can have your internal label (e.g. Annual Review FF - v3) and the one your clients see (e.g. Your Annual Review).

Your snapshots will adopt the Display name so if you share these with the client in their portal documents they’ll see the client facing title instead of the internal label.

If you’re searching for a template you can search under either the Template name or the Display name, both will return a match.

Here’s the full fact find template builder support article with further details!

Finally, we’ll be shortly releasing some work we’ve been doing on the snapshot too with your firm branding - keep your eyes peeled for that release once we’ve passed all our internal QA checks.

Circles

We’ve got a brand new circles export for all of you that want to extract that data for additional reporting etc.

Owing to the complexity of AUM calculations and percentage ownerships, it’s worth checking out our support article on this to understand what the data pulled out is showing for your circle participants and circles as a whole.

In addition to this you can now import notes against circles, meaning any notes added via the importer will display against each circle and circle participants at the dashboard level. You can find the notes importer in the usual business menu Imports area, you just add the circle UUID instead of the individual’s UUID when importing circle notes, support guide is here. Everything else in the notes importer remains unchanged.

Opening a client document used to mean downloading it, finding it in your downloads folder, and opening it in something else. Now you can just click it.

Any image or PDF in a client, case, plan or circle's documents area opens right inside Plannr. Click the row, or the eye icon, if you prefer - have a look, and close it again. Nothing lands on your computer unless you want it to.

Still need the actual file? The download button hasn't moved, and there's another one inside the preview.

A few things worth knowing

• Images (JPG, PNG, GIF and WebP) and PDFs can be previewed. Word documents and spreadsheets still download as before.

• Very large files - over 50MB - will download rather than preview.

• Holding ⌘ or Ctrl while clicking still downloads the file in a new tab, just as it did before.

Happy Tuesday 🎉 a few releases to announce this morning, let’s take a look!

New Business Export

Our new business export has had a little upgrade and now also features a couple of additional columns at your request. You’ll now see the firm name, and the created at date, for when the new business entry was added to Plannr. Useful!

Joint expenditure now syncs to your joint circles

The Sync to circle tool copies the expenditure held in a joint account's Joint column into the Shared column of a selected circle. This brings the shared expenditure into one place for use within the circle. This is part of a wider move to flesh out circle functionality, all planned for the coming year.

For ease, where you might have recorded a custom expenditure in the joint record, if that doesn’t exist in the destination circle we’ll automagically create that custom expenditure field for you when you hit sync.

In addition to this, we’ve added a new expenditure report! The Client or Circle Expenditure Import is a CSV import that mirrors the focused expenditure export. It supports both individual-client expenditure and shared circle expenditure.

Out of Office replies

Brand new to Conversations, we have added the ability to set an out of office message when you know you’re going to be away. Out of Office lets you set the dates you'll be away and a message your clients will automatically receive when they contact you.

Head to Settings > Account > Out of Office to set this up!

Nothing to see here - RBAC Phase 1

We have released phase 1 of the Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC) work and at this stage of the release, you should notice absolutely nothing different. This is an essential part of the process to open up the customisation functionality in the next release, but currently just mirrors our existing setup. This was a mammoth piece of work and huge kudos to the dev team for engineering something that touches every single piece of code. No mean feat! As a reminder:

When you go to add a new employee you’ll still be offered the option to select whether they are an owner, admin or member, but in a slightly new layout:

✅ Nothing else changes for you. We have upgraded how Plannr manages access behind the scenes. Your three existing roles - Owner, Admin and Member - are recreated exactly as they work today. Everyone keeps the same access they already have, and there is nothing you need to do.

The benefit comes later: because access is now built from smaller building blocks, in future your firm will be able to create custom roles tailored to how your team actually works, so your employee list will be full of all the new roles you have defined. Phase 2 will be released in the next month, as the heavy lifting has been done!

Adding new clients to your fact finds

When adding a new person to a fact find, the system now checks whether the details entered match someone already in the fact find. If a match is found, the person is not added twice - your client will verify if the person they’re trying to add is the same individual.

This prevents duplication of clients in your site when clients add other participants to their fact find.

That’s it for today! Have an amazing Tuesday!

Two new releases today for you 🚀

Firstly we’ve made some enhancements to the Conversations experience in Plannr! Following feedback from users around our Conversations functionality in Plannr, we’ve undertaken some work to improve the experience for clients and your teams.

From the client’s perspective, starting a new conversation with their advice team offers much more clarity on who the message will be delivered to, along with the title block and message description now being in the same pop out window. No more long messages being sent in the title field!

If there isn’t anyone in the ‘assigned team’ in your Update Basic Details > Service tab then the message will show as being sent to the ‘team at your firm who looks after you’.

For accessibility purposes, messages are now displayed in clear to read colour / contrast blocks:

From the adviser portal perspective, if the conversation doesn’t warrant all members of the team being in the discussion, it’s simple to remove individuals by clicking on the participants icon. Useful if it’s something the admin team can deal with without needing adviser input. Equally other employees can be added, or the client’s partner, if the conversation needs opening up to more participants.

Starting a new thread in the adviser portal follows the same updated view, with the message recipients, title and content available in one screen.

Next up we have improvements to recording your risk scores in Plannr!

Where the risk profiling is completed off-Plannr and a score needs recording against a client record, we would historically just capture the individual’s rating along with a time horizon.

Now, you can add additional information where a risk score is being logged, but may not necessarily match the outcome of an ATR questionnaire.

Along with some additional improvements to the data capture, you now have a clearer at-a-glance view of current risk ratings within the Work area of your client record.

Some of this was completed in readiness for an incoming integration with Dynamic Planner - so keep your peepers peeled for next month to see that one land!

Abi and the Plannr Team 💫

Hey everyone!

Great news, if you were able to join us on this morning’s Community Call you’ll have seen that we’ve released two brand new bits of functionality into Plannr today.

First up we have Checklists in Tasks. This has been requested heavily by many of you, opening up task management to even more simplicity!

Instead of building a series of sub tasks to remember specific items of work that need carrying out by the team, you can now build checklists within single tasks, so that you and your team know what needs doing - in detail - before the task is marked as complete ✨

Checklist functionality is available in your Workflows too, so you can customise all your repeatable tasks with the breakdown of to-do’s for even more consistency across your financial planning. 💪🏼

Check out the support article here for a full rundown of the new functionality!

Our second brand new feature is Engagement & Portal Stats! In keeping with Consumer Duty requirements, you can now identify at a glance how regularly your clients are engaging with you and their client portal, to ensure continuity of service and engagement.

We’re tracking where they land on a scale of engagement, with metrics as follows:

More info as ever in our support article, but we hope this delivers a bit of insight into your client bank activity to help you capture anyone running quiet. 💫

More to come next week but hope these new features make a difference to your every day!

Abi and the Plannr Team ✨

Duplicate Client Monitoring

Plannr now helps you identify any duplicate records that might have been created - or you’re trying to create - where the first name, last name and date of birth match on multiple records. Plannr flags the record as a Potential Duplicate so you can review and decide what to do. The check runs in four places: client creation, client editing, bulk import and retrospectively across your existing records.

To help you verify whether this is a unique record or not, you can compare the potential duplication with a side by side view of the matched records here:

We will be adding a merge function in the future, to combine duplicate records, but for now you will need to manually delete or archive the ‘spare’ by changing the client status to Inactive - keeping you in complete control of your client bank. We recommend archiving, in case there is data in the duplicate record that you later need to transpose over to the original.

New webhooks

We have added a couple of additional webhooks for those of you taking advantage of our webhook functionality!

Head to Settings > Webhooks > Add New to see what’s available now!

New flag for deceased clients

The Deceased field already exists on every Client record under Basic Details - you can already mark a Client as Deceased and record the date of death. This update doesn't add any new capability or change how that data is captured. It simply makes the information you've already recorded more visually obvious across the Client record, tile, and including it under the search and export filters.

The aim is to improve visualisation around knowing if a Client is deceased at a quick glance, as well as the ability to filter and export your deceased Client base - useful for compliance, estate handling, and clean-up purposes.

You will also see a Deceased tag on the contact tile too, for at a glance views across your client bank.

We’ve also added a new filter for deceased clients within your Contacts area, as well as within the client export, for only reporting on the clients you want to, when you need to.

💡 Something to consider - if you already have tags you have manually added for Deceased clients, you can remove these in bulk via the client importer should you wish to, now we have this new feature.

New Imports

We’ve added in two new importers for Relationships and Dependents so you can enhance your data in bulk once more, with additional family or business client information.

As usual, sample CSV files are available with the correct column headers, and our full guide on using the importers are in the Knowledgebase library for you to refer to as needed.

New Export for Income & Employment

We’ve updated the available exports to include Income & Employment for your client base!

New filter in Exports for Plans

Your plans export now has additional filters for Plans that are under advice or in your agency, to further drill down the clients you’re actively servicing.

1️⃣ New indicator if a task spawned from a workflow

Plannr now shows the name of the originating workflow on tasks that were created by a workflow. You can see this at a glance on the task itself, on your task list and board, and you can filter your tasks by each workflow too.

Why this is useful

👀 Easily identify the source workflow of any task without opening or navigating away.

👏🏼 Filter your task list to a specific workflow to manage workflow-driven work more effectively.

2️⃣ New Client Service Levels

You can now set your own client service levels in Plannr to help with client management! Heading to Update Basic Details and the Service tab, you can select from a dropdown list (once you have created your service levels in Settings > Firm), which will then show on the client record in the core display box.

Full details of how to add these, and which permissions you need to do this, are in the support article here.

😎 System touch points: These can be updated in bulk via our importers, reported on via our exporters, are also included in our form builder linked fields, and show in your client record audits when service level changes are made against a client.

3️⃣ New Vulnerability visuals

Where you have marked a client as being either vulnerable or possibly vulnerable, we have enhanced the view when accessing the client record to flag to any of your team working with the client that there is a vulnerability recorded.

When you open a client record a clear banner will now appear at the top of the record reading:

"[Client Name] is flagged as vulnerable."

Or, for potentially vulnerable clients, an amber banner will display.

⚡️ Click the banner to jump straight to the Core Details section where the full vulnerability information lives.

⚡️ The banner is read-only - to update vulnerability status, you'll continue to edit core details as you do today.

When viewing your contact list, you’ll have new vulnerability indicators on the contact record tile too:

😎 System touch points: New filters have been added to the client search, and your client export also has this filter added for reporting on clients with vulnerability markers too.

The support article details how to update client vulnerability here if you haven’t been using the functionality until now.

4️⃣ New filters in Plans for under advice and agency in your name

Two new toggle filters have been added to the Plans dashboard (Investments & Plans) so you can quickly narrow the list down to plans flagged as Under Advice and/or with Agency in your name.

This is purely an addition to existing filtering - nothing changes about how the underlying Under Advice and Agency in your name data is captured against a Plan. You'll continue to set those values when adding or updating a plan as you do today.

Plans where the Under Advice or Agency in your name question has not been answered (i.e. left blank) will not be included when either filter is active. Only plans with an explicit Yes or No are returned.

👀 Coming soon will be the same filters available in your plan exports, to help with your plan servicing management 🔥

5️⃣ New filters on your imports

New details within your Imports area in Plannr, which now display who has run the imports, what type of import was run and when, with corresponding filters in the Import area of Plannr for easy viewing. Select from the following list to pull only the information you need:

More audit trail love for consistency and compliance within your business!