05/31/2017
Announcement about new client portal
Sechrest & Bloom, LLC is pleased to announce our new client portal system for our wealth management clients. We think you're going to find this portal much more intuitive to use than our previous one. Our previous system is through our tax software provider and is geared toward our CPA tax business. This new system is designed for our wealth management practice to provide you with a comprehensive overview of your financial life.
We're still using our previous portal system for your tax returns only. Ideally we'd only have 1 portal system. However, our previous system seamlessly integrates with our tax software and all of your prior (and future) tax returns are on this system. It doesn't make sense to move all of your tax returns over to this new portal; if we tried doing this, it would take a really long time and create the potential for missing a tax return document here or there. There are now 2 portal login boxes on our website (www.sechrestcpa.com):
1. CPA Clients / Tax Returns - our previous portal system login; you'll use this to access your tax returns using your current username and password you have.
2. Wealth Management Clients - our new portal system, as described below. We will be separately be sending you an e-mail invitation to login to this new portal and set up your credentials. (If we haven't done so already.)
HIGHLIGHTS ABOUT OUR NEW PORTAL SYSTEM
1. It's through a subsidiary of Fidelity called eMoney.
2. It's integrated with your Fidelity accounts. So you can access monthly statements, trade confirmations, and annual tax documents from your portal. (You still have access to Fidelity.com if you want. This is not changing your ability to access Fidelity.com.)
3. It's smartphone-enabled. You can easily access your portal on your iPhone or Android phone. (See below for instructions on how to do this.)
4. After logging in, the portal offers to walk you through an Onboarding process that shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We recommend going through Onboarding, although you have the option to skip it. We've pre-populated some information in your portal already (such as names/DOBs of children, and so on). You can edit this informaiton and provide as little or as much information as you'd like for using this system.
5. We've pre-loaded important documents (other than tax returns) to the 'Vault' section of the portal. You can also upload documents to this 'Vault' section for us to then classify in the appropriate folder of your Vault (such as "estate planning", "life insurance", and so on).
6. There's a 'Tasks' section in this portal. We've pre-populated this section with Open Items from our past discussions about your planning. Some tasks will be time-sensitive and have an appropriate due date assigned to them. We think this will be a useful feature to help us/you keep on task with your planning.
7. We suggest you add financial accounts to this portal that you have on-line credentials for. This would include bank accounts, credit cards, mortgages, employer retirement accounts (401k and 403b) and so on. The portal makes it easy to do this; we're happy to go over this process with you and explain how to do this.
a. You may have already linked 'held-away' investment accounts we're not the investment manager on (such as a 401k or 403b) to our portfolio management system. Unfortunately we can't get that data to automatically populate into your portal so you may need to re-enter this in the portal. We apologize for any inconvenience in doing this, but we think you're going to appreciate having all of your accounts summarized and updated in this portal.
GETTING STARTED
We look forward to reviewing your portal with you in our future meetings. For now, we wanted to get started with the following information:
1. We will separately e-mail you an invitation to set up your login credentials to your portal. (If we haven't done so already.) Please keep an eye out for this invitation.
2. Here's an overview of what your portal will look like and some of its functionality - Portal Overview.
3. Here are the instructions for setting up portal access on your smartphone:
a. For an iPhone
b. For an Android phone
We antiicipate beginning to deliver your monthly portfolio reports via your new portal starting in June. If you have any questions about using your portal, please let us know.
As always, thank you for having us be your CPA and financial advisor!