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Common Usage Scenarios for Accounts, Groups, Clients, and Households

Contents

Introduction

Your clients trust you with financial data that can be quite complicated. Tamarac includes different types of entities to manage different aspects of client relationships: accounts, groups for reporting and rebalancing, client records, and Households. For details about each of these entities, see Introduction to Accounts, Groups, Households, and Clients.

This page provides some possible ways you could use these different entities depending on different client situations. These examples demonstrate how you can flexibly combine different entities to meet the needs of real-life scenarios.

Scenario 1: Single with Basic Accounts and Goals

• Michael Abbey is single. Michael gets his own Household and is set up as a client.

• Michael has both an individual account and a traditional IRA account. Both of these accounts are in the same group for reporting. Michael's advisor enables the group for rebalancing.

• Michael's advisor adds the group to Michael's Household because both of these accounts are used to determine whether he will meet his goal of being able to retire at 65.

• Michael deals with enough passwords in his life and would prefer to simply receive his statements on paper. Although he won't have a client portal, the advisor still sets up a client record for him and simply doesn't enable client portal access.

Although Michael has a single set of goals and only two accounts, it's still a good idea to build out the structure above. By building out the appropriate Household, groups, clients, and accounts, you establish a consistent system, and are prepared in case your client's circumstances change.

Scenario 2: Married with All Accounts Combined and Shared Goals

• Michael, from the previous example, married Georgia. Because Michael's relationships have already been created—with a supporting Household and group—Georgia can be created as a client and added to the Abbey Household. This gives Georgia access to all the accounts or groups assigned to this Household.

• Georgia has an IRA. Because Michael and Georgia want to share access and information, the advisor adds accounts to the existing Abbey group, which is already assigned to the Abbey Household. These accounts are enabled for group rebalancing as well, allowing them to take advantage of tax-advantaged rebalancing.

• The Abbeys want all of their accounts to contribute to their new shared goal of retiring at 65 and sailing around the world. This is why all of their accounts are included in one group within their Household.

• Georgia is more tech-savvy than Michael and enjoys viewing their accounts online each week; Michael prefers to review their printed quarterly statements and does not want online access (although we'll still create the client record for both). Because each of them has their own client data, you are able to customize your reporting to their preferences.

Scenario 3: Married but Keeping Personal and Business Finances Separate

• Sarah and Will Brown are married.

• They both have traditional IRA accounts; they also share a trust account.

• Sarah and Will share the goals to retire early at age 50 and build their dream home. The two traditional IRA accounts and the trust account all count towards these goals. These accounts share a common beneficiary—Sarah and Will—so they are included in a group for rebalancing and reporting.

• They both prefer to review their statements and reports on their phones, which means you'll need to set both of them up with client portal access and the mobile app.

• Will owns his own dental practice: ABC Dental. He manages the company's 401(k) account. The goal of this 401(k) is to support the retirement of Will's employees.

• Because the ABC Dental 401(k) account supports a completely different set of goals than the Brown's personal goals, and because Sarah shouldn't see the 401(k) details, it belongs in a separate Household. This ensures that the value of the account does not skew the results of the Brown's goal-based planning.

• The advisor creates a second Will Brown client using his work email address and contact information. This second Will Brown client entity receives client portal access, but Sarah cannot see ABC Dental's 401(k) information.

• Even though Will is just one individual, he now has two unique client entities set up so that he can keep his business finances and personal finances completely separate and discrete.

Scenario 4: Married but Separate Finances

Sometimes families, or even other individuals under the same roof, want to pool their resources and have their money managed in a coherent system while reaching higher billing tiers within your billing structure. However, they may prefer that you communicate with them privately and individually. Below is an example of how you can accomplish this:

• Brad and Carol Gardner are married.

• Brad and Carol have very different ideas about when they want to retire. Brad is an electrician and wants to retire at 55. Carol is a professor and wants to work as long as possible, with a goal to work until 70.

• Brad and Carol are private people and each want only their own assets taken into account for their goals. They prefer to receive only their own personal paper statements. This means that we'll still set them up as clients, but we won't enable client portal access.

• To keep their accounts separate, their advisor creates one group for Brad's accounts and a separate group for Carol's accounts.

• Because they have such different goals and different accounts funding those goals, the advisor assigns Brad and Carol their own individual Households. The advisor assigns Brad's group to his Household and Carol's group to her Household.

• Even though they are private people, Brad and Carol know a good deal when they see one. They've chosen to have their assets managed in a similar way so that all their assets contribute to total billable value. The advisor adds all their accounts to one billing group to ensures that they get the best deal possible on their management fees.