Host Jason Pereira talks to Kevin Lozer - Co-Founder of Holistiplan; it is a financial planning software that focuses specifically on tax planning. It generates a PDF version of your tax return and extracts all the verifiable information and actual data.
Episode Highlights:
- 0.52: Kevin explains about Holistiplan – it is tax planning software for advisors built by advisors. It allows an advisor to upload a PDF tax return and get a client deliverable prepopulated scenario and then screen and identify some planning opportunities all again with just uploading a previous year’s tax returns.
- 1.12: What Holistiplan really does is automate a tax return review. Then all of the work that succeeds that tax return review that advisors do, typically requires a whole lot of data entry. Historically, the company has taken that data entry out of the picture, and now advisors can just spend the time focusing on conversing with the client about their tax situation.
- 1.19: Kevin says the idea to launch the Holistiplan started to percolate years ago. Roger Pine and Kevin had really put pen to paper and came up with the idea of uploading documents, providing an expert system, providing opportunities, and providing observations that many advisors across the country traditionally make.
- 04.43: Jason curiously inquired about the feedback Holistiplan gets from advisors who implemented this type of software, like where they find the most significant benefit.
- 04.52: Kevin shares when it comes to receiving feedback, it really breaks down into two different types of advisors. “One is advisors or firms that haven’t been doing tax planning. Secondly, we see clients wanting more out of the fees they’re paying advisors than investment advice. They are looking for a more robust, comprehensive relationship from advisors.”
- 05.51: Kevin explains the simple process of Holistiplan, clients can upload their financial data, and within a minute, the software digests all that pulled data, summarizing it in a client deliverable. Tons of firms are using it just for this feature. Upload or return get a client summary that the clients can understand that advisors can review with the clients. The report also provides planning opportunities that the software identified from that tax return.
- 06.55: Kevin says, “There is a whole other subset of advisors out there that actually do the quantification of planning opportunities like Roth conversion strategies, donor-advised funds, all kinds of different tax planning opportunities that we look at from a planning perspective.
- 07.05: Holistiplan also provides a forecasting tool - a scenario analysis prepopulated with the previous year’s data. So instead of spending the first 20 to 30 minutes entering data from the tax return into a calculator or tax software, now one can just copy it over from the prior year. Clients can make some edits to the fields and start doing complex strategies like Roth conversions or qualified charitable distributions, all kinds of tens and hundreds of different things that you can do from a tax planning perspective.
- 10.31: Jason is really impressed with the features of Holistiplan. He says to Kevin that “You are providing information on tax brackets where they are in terms of relative to phaseouts, right? So, because of that, the tools make it so much easier to understand tax planning.”
- 11.11: Kevin says there are 75 to 100 different planning opportunities in the software, and they keep updating the algorithms.
- 11.45: Holistiplan shares a visual report with 8 or 10 or 12 bullet point items based on that specific tax return. With this tool now clients can read through the 100-page document all by themselves
- 12.15: Jason inquires, “What effort did Kevin and Roger put in to launch Holistiplan?”
- 12.30: Kevin explains how friends and advisors in the financial industry helped them with their valuable feedback and improved the end result of the software.
- 13.04: Kevin says, “Our initial prototype was to upload or return and just get the bullet point observations, but all those like visualization things that we talked about earlier, the emoji phaseout and whether they’re over-under or in those phaseouts, all that stuff was from other advisors as we started to roll this out.”
- 13.41: While explaining their roll-out strategy, Kevin says, “We rolled out a product that wasn’t 100% complete; this was intentional. We wanted to get feedback and crowdsource some of the ideas, and now that we’ve got thousands and thousands of advisors using it, the feedback comes in fast and furious.”
- 15.00: One thing that Holistiplan launched early this year was the tax-prepped letter, which is closing the communication loop between advisor, CPA, and client. Kevin shares “Advisors who are doing tax planning with or without holistic plan come up with some good pretty good observations and opportunities and then execute those and get all that work done before December 31st so that it all counts for this tax year it’s called Roth conversion or qualified charitable distributions.
- 18.05: Jason affirms that when launching Holistiplan, Kevin picked a vertical of the financial planning world that has a lot of depth.
- 20.38: Talking about the unique work that Kevin and his company are doing, Jason remarks, “Taxation is a one-foot-wide spectrum of the entire financial planning spectrum, but you’re going in mile deep on that.”
- 22.00: Kevin shares his vision to reach out to a lot more consumers. He says that it was part of what got him excited about Holistiplan and the software in general.
- 24.40: Kevin says scaling the company has been the biggest challenge that they have faced so far. A year ago, we were 3 people, and now we are 15 people, and all of this during a pandemic.
3 Key Points:
- Kevin shares interesting insights on the history of Holistiplan. Where did this come about? What was the opportunity to sell?
- Kevin explains how Holistiplan advisors won’t need a checklist anymore with hundreds of different things to look for in the tax return.
- Jason inquires, “How much of your road map can you share with me at this point?” Kevin says, “We are staying at the tax planning world for the foreseeable future.”
Tweetable Quotes:
- “Holistiplan has taken data entry out of the picture, and now advisors can really just spend the time focusing on conversing with the client about their tax situation.” - Kevin Lozer
- “When it comes to tax planning visuals are far more effective than communicating in words.”- Jason Pereira
- “Not only do people not want to code things twice, but advisors also don’t want to enter the same data two or three or four different times into their various software programs either, so removing the extra data entry part was Holistiplan’s initial work.” - Kevin Lozer
Resources Mentioned:
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