Spectrum Input was founded to help financial planners in their never-ending quest to become more efficient at serving their clients. Our main product, PreciseFP ™ , was developed to be a tool for all financial planners, from the solo practitioner, all the way up to the larger ensemble practice. Our goal, in developing PreciseFP ™ , was to create a non-proprietary data gathering tool that uses industry-standard communication methods (e.g. XML, PDF), so that client data can be collected, processed, and stored in the most efficient manner.

Where in a financial planner’s job description does it say “Must do data entry and decipher client’s chicken scratchings”? We couldn’t find any such job description, yet that is exactly what planners all across the country do each and every day. Financial planners send out questionnaires (typically via US mail), and wait for the client or prospect to fill it out and then mail it back. Once the planner finally receives the document – several days or more after originally sending it out – he must make sense of the handwriting and then manually enter this data into his financial planning, CRM, (and other) software applications. We think that a financial planner’s time is better spent serving clients than deciphering handwriting and performing data entry tasks.

In addition to making the planner’s job less monotonous and the data collection/entry process less error-prone, we wanted to allow the financial planner to serve clients better and to be able to serve more types of clients. Since PreciseFP ™ saves the planner time, reducing the total hours spent on creating a financial plan, planners can serve higher net worth clients better by focusing more time on enhancing their financial picture. Similarly, “middle market” –level clients can now be served more cost effectively since fewer hours are spent up front, allowing the planner to create a plan for this underserved market, while still maintaining profitability.

Finally, in an ever-increasing electronic world, we wanted to allow the financial planner to start the relationship with his new client off on the right foot – a paperless one! We believe that if the smaller financial planning practice is to survive (and thrive!), it needs to become more efficient. By keeping the planning process paperless – from start to finish – financial planners can spend less time performing menial tasks and more time serving clients and growing their business. PreciseFP ™ , being a web-based application, allows the planner to receive, modify, export/import, and archive client data in the most efficient manner.

 
No mailing, no scanning, and no repetitious data entry. It’s financial planning for the 21st century!