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Home > Tamarac Reporting > Accounts-Groups-Households > Introduction to Accounts, Groups, Households, and Clients
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Introduction to Accounts, Groups, Households, and Clients
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Single Relationships: Accounts and Clients What's the Difference Between an Account and a Client? Complex Relationships: Groups and Households What's the Difference Between a Group and a Household? |
Your clients trust you with financial data that can be quite complicated. Because of this, the Tamarac platform provides tools to build this data into relationships. By creating these relationships using your clients' accounts and data, you can use the Tamarac platform's available features to automate processes including reporting, administrative functions, and rebalancing, allowing you to spend more time with clients and less time maintaining their data.
Below is a description of the relationship types you can create in the Tamarac platform, as well as common scenarios and how to use these relationship types to achieve the desired outcome for clients.
These individual relationships can be customized in various ways to accurately represent your clients and their needs. These single relationships can then be combined into more complex relationships.
Accounts have the following characteristics:
Accounts in the Tamarac platform can then be added to complex relationship structures like Households, billing groups, groups, and groups enabled for rebalancing.
Access accounts on the Accounts page.
For more details on managing accounts, see Learn More About Accounts.
Clients have the following characteristics:
The clients you create are assigned to Households. You can then grant client portal access to those clients within the Household.
A client can only be assigned to one Household.
To access clients, choose Clients/Client Portals on the Accounts menu
To learn more about clients, see Learn More About Clients.
An account represents a single financial relationship. One person can have several financial accounts—for example, Jane has an IRA and a brokerage account.
A client is a single point of contact represented by a unique email address. A client can have multiple financial accounts. In the case of accounts with more than one account holder, a single account can have multiple clients—for example, Jane and John are a married couple with a single joint account.
A client can also be granted client portal access.
The following are the more complex relationship types in the Tamarac platform. Each of these relationships is built using accounts and clients.
You can distinguish accounts from groups on the Accounts page because groups appear in a bold font.
Households are found on the Households page. Households link clients, financial accounts, and groups, and are used in many integrations.
Billing groups only appear on the Billing groups page and are the basis for generating invoices in Tamarac.
A group is a collection of accounts you combine to facilitate group-level activity. One of the ways you can use groups is for group-level performance calculations and reporting.
Groups have the following characteristics:
A separate entity that contains financial accounts.
You can put as many accounts or other groups into a group for reporting as you wish.
A group can be added to other groups or to Households.
To access groups for reporting, choose Accounts on the Accounts menu; groups are shown in bold
For more information about groups for reporting, see Learn More About Groups.
A group for rebalancing is a group that is created the same way you create a reporting group. Use groups for rebalancing for group-level trading and rebalancing. By rebalancing accounts as a group, you can better manage the placement of assets within the accounts, as well as take advantage of tax management best practices during the rebalance process.
Designating a group for rebalancing involves the following steps:
You may place an account in multiple groups for reporting, but you can only enable that account for rebalancing in one group.
When deciding which accounts within a group should be included in rebalancing activity, a good rule of thumb is to consider the beneficiary of an account. Accounts with a common beneficiary can be included in rebalancing activity together.
To access groups for reporting, choose Accounts on the Accounts menu; groups are shown in bold
For more information about groups for rebalancing, see Learn More About Groups for Rebalancing.
A billing group has the following characteristics:
A collection of accounts that have the same billing settings and aggregate toward a total billable value.
Often mirror Households or groups, but don't have to.
Any account that pays the billing fees for the billing group must be included in that billing group.
If your firm has a tiered billing structure, you may elect to add more family members' accounts into a billing group in order to obtain a lower billing rate.
Billing groups are created on the Billing Groups page, not on the Accounts page.
To access billing groups, choose Billing Groups on the Billing menu.
For more information on billing groups, see Understanding Billing Groups.
A Household has the following characteristics:
A Household combines accounts, groups, clients, and client portals together in one place. Some reporting is done at the Household level, like the Net Worth or Financial Plan Summary report. In addition, the membership within your Households determine what clients can see within client portals. Households also allow you to use third-party integration tools like MoneyGuide, Finance Logix, and eMoney.
A good rule of thumb for what should be placed in a Household is goal-based: Each of the relationships in that Household should share a common goal. Often, Households reflect clients' actual living arrangements, but they don't have to.
When Households reflect clients' actual living arrangements, you can maintain the address at the Household level and have them sync down to accounts/groups for easier maintenance.
There are two types of groups: reporting groups and rebalancing groups. The differences are:
One important difference between groups and Households is that you can run dynamic reports on groups but not on Households—with the exception of the Net Worth and Financial Plan Summary reports.
Service teams are built to service Households. When you create Households, you can then associate service teams to your Households.
The following example illustrates how accounts, groups, clients, and Households all interact together.
John and Georgia Abbey are your clients. You manage the following assets:
For John: A tax-exempt IRA, taxable brokerage account. He also has a closed 401(k).
For Georgia: A tax-exempt IRA, a taxable brokerage account. She also has two other closed accounts.
For both: One joint brokerage account.
Each of these is an account because it's a financial relationship. In order to report on the performance of all of these accounts as a whole, you create a group, the Abbey Reporting Group, which contains each of John and Georgia's accounts.
In order to rebalance these accounts together as a group, you add each of these accounts to the Abbey Rebalancing Group. Then, you enable that group for rebalancing and choose Include in Group Rebalancing for all the accounts except the 401(k) and Georgia's closed accounts.
Although John and Georgia have eight accounts under your management, they each want to have access to their shared client portal. You use John's email address to establish him as a client and Georgia's email address to establish her as a separate client.
John and Georgia share a goal for these accounts: To retire at 65 and sail around the world. Because each of the accounts, client relationships, and the Abbey Group—used for reporting and group rebalancing—all work towards this same goal, each of these relationships are each placed in a Household, the Abbey Household. This Household also serves as the source of the address for the financial accounts, and is crucial for the MoneyGuide, Schwab, and Fidelity integrations you use for them.
You can combine accounts, groups, clients, and Households to accommodate a wide variety of different financial situations. For some additional complex examples demonstrating how to use these entities in Tamarac, see Common Usage Scenarios for Accounts, Groups, Clients, and Households.