Truth Software Release Notes 2017

The software has been updated with the income tax rates and allowances announced in the Autumn Budget 2017, these include the increased Personal Allowance of £11,850 and the reduced Dividend Allowance of £2,000 from 2018/19 onwards.

We’ve added Wealthtime to our rapidly growing list of platforms and provider integrations.  If you have a client with Wealthtime holdings, you can now instantly create new or update the values of existing Wealthtime investment items.

Objectives Statement now LIVE!

It’s been tweaked and improved, and we’re pleased to say our Objectives Statement is now LIVE!  Thanks to our beta testers for all of your feedback and suggestions.

• The new statement, available from the Planning menu, is a place to record and prioritise client objectives.
• Each objective can either be a:
  • Spending Objective
    • Something that needs to be paid for with a known cost, start date and target completion date. e.g. buy a sports car in 5 years’ time.
  • Saving Objective
    • Something to be accumulated with a start and target completion date. e.g. to have 1 million pounds in a bank account.
  • Non-financial Objective
    • Something they’d simply like to be able to do that may not have a cost, e.g. learn the piano, give up smoking, lose weight.
  • Financial objectives can be linked to items (e.g. a bank account) and the software will monitor the value of the item and let you know whether the objective is on track, not on track, or even achieved.
  • An interactive timeline of the objectives is displayed at the bottom of the page.

A detailed Objectives PDF is available here.

Improvements to Stochastic Calculator

We’ve overhauled our Stochastic Calculator to make it easier for clients to understand.

Move your mouse along the chart to show the values of each of the lines for each year of projection.  Quickly see the likely values of the client’s portfolio at any stage, and at the end of projection.  A simple result is displayed in the top-right corner, illustrating the probability of success.

To access the tool, go to the Calculators menu from the toolbar and choose “Stochastic Calculator”.

Speed Improvements!

We want you to have the best client meeting experience possible.  We’ve massively reduced the time it takes to switch between statements and financial planning scenarios. We’ve also done some clever things with drawdown crystallisations and now they’re rapid too.  Net Worth and Cashflow statements are instantaneous.

Readily Realisable Pensions

Before Pension Freedoms, pension funds were an absolute no-no in our lifetime cashflow capital chart (although you could force them to be readily realisable if you felt necessary).  Now, we’ve added a facility for you to make them become readily realisable only when each client attains their minimum retirement age.  So here (Planning>Settings>Statement Headings>Net Worth), you can customise the headings and their order, as well as then classifying where each fact find item type should be displayed under.  In the screenshot below, you can see that we’ve made two categories for Pension Funds, ‘unavailable’ and ‘available’ for pre and post minimum retirement age (MRA), with the latter being ticked as readily realisable.  The tick box at the bottom of the screen lets you make this happen and choose their post MRA heading.  The MRA can be set in the personal details item for both partners.

This is how it affects the statements:-

The cashflow capital chart will only add in the pension funds when they can be truly accessed, in this case Michael’s age 55.

For the Net Worth Statement, you can see the values of available and unavailable funds, which transposes onto the lifelong chart beautifully. Looks like based on current assumptions that Michael & Jane’s pension funds will be depleted at his age 72!

Flexi-Access Drawdown – Sustainable Income Calculator

When a ‘drawdown’ crystallisation is selected , you have always been able to select an income figure.  You can look at the Drawdown table and see what impact the selected income will have on the fund.  It may be that it uses the fund up too soon and won’t last until the client’s projected mortality age, or that they could enjoy more spending if there’s still something in the pot.  Now we’ve added  Sustainable Income Calculator next to the ‘proposed income’ field.  Here we guessed at £10,000 per month:

Selecting the Sustainable Income Calculator, instantly shows the maximum sustainable income figure for the selected period and assumptions.

We’ve added this handy tool to all Death Benefits too, where the surviving partner takes drawdown.

More Detail Available for Pension Income Crystallisations

The software has always distinguished between the various types of crystallisation.  Each element was either shown as ‘taxable’ or ‘tax-free’ on the Income Statement.  Now, if you prefer, you can breakdown the crystallisation types with their own headings on the Income Statement.  This is done from Planning>Settings>Statement Headings>Income.

Here you can see the granular  breakdown on the Income statement and both income charts.

Wealthtime Integration

We’ve added Wealthtime to our rapidly growing list of platforms and provider integrations.  If you have a client with Wealthtime holdings, you can now instantly create new or update the values of existing Wealthtime investment items.  Another massive time saver.  We have many more platforms lined up and will keep you informed as they become available.