As some of you may know, in addition to being a director of myprosperity, I’ve also been a passionate user of the software since 2015 when my adviser/accountant first introduced me to the platform. My enthusiasm for the potential of myprosperity, and its ability to help advisers work more effectively with their clients, is what drove me to contact the founder, Peter McCarthy. And I guess as they say in the classics, the rest is history.

So as an informed and regular user of the software I take notice of the improvements that have been made over time to the client portal. Last Sunday, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon updating everything in my portal to ensure my adviser had all the latest information on my financial position. Going through this exercise prompted me to note down some of the cool feature improvements that have been made by the development team over recent months. It also made me wonder whether many of our partners and their clients have also noticed the same improvements that I have.

So I thought I would highlight my top 6 most improved features in the software. Here they are…

1. Ability to record more detail on Wealth items
The ability to track information on wealth items has been improved and expanded. For items such as property, vehicles and shares, myprosperity has always used automated data feeds (as part of the Pro subscription) to track and record the latest value of these items. This is awesome as the system does all the work for you in keeping track of your financial position and in calculating your net worth. However for other investments that require manual tracking, such as private equity or a business entity, the information you could capture was generally quite limited. Basically the system only allowed you to enter an overall valuation of an investment without allowing a whole lot of other detail to be recorded. Well all that’s changed. As an example, with Private Equity investments, you can now enter a cost history for that investment and record specific valuation dates, which is ideal if you want to track the performance of such investments over time.

2. Historical valuation tracking
So that’s all fine moving forward, but what about retrospectively getting a better historical view on these types of investments? No problem. Myprosperty now gives you the option of uploading a CSV file with customisable historical performance data. There is a prefilled template that you can modify and upload against a particular item to show how that asset has performed over a specified period of time. Previously you were stuck with whatever information had been initially entered into the system and at times this might be incorrect and you had no way to fix it. I know that this has been a bug bear with some advisers where downward spikes in a clients wealth history might be erroneously and permanently recorded in the platform. Now you can make sure the system provides a truly accurate reflection of investment performance and showing the right trajectory, and that’s hopefully upwards.

3. Cash Flow and tax tagging
Whilst I’m not one of those clients that meticulously tracks every dollar spent to a strict budget, I do like to keep an eye on where my money is going and identifying where I can save a few dollars. The great thing about myprosperity’s “Cashflow” feature is that transactions from ALL your bank accounts are automatically loaded into the platform. In my situation, and demonstrate how powerful this can be, I’ll pinpoint one example. My family is a big user of Uber. We have 2 Uber accounts across 2 credit cards as well as being occasional customers of Uber Eats. Without myprosperity, if I wanted to work out how much I spend on Uber, that exercise would be bordering on a low level forensic accounting exercise. With myprosperity, by searching on the term “Uber” and interrogating all transactions, regardless of card or account, within seconds I was able to determine that this tax year alone we’ve spent $2,712 on that service. Note to self… this needs to change next FY!!!

On the issue of tagging transactions to an expense “category”, you may recall that the move to a new Yodlee (bank feed) API back in 2018 proved a challenging exercise but it seems all that pain was worth it. The accuracy of tagging to categories in myprosperity from what I can see is way more accurate, and the process of tagging vastly quicker. As an example I went through over 170 transactions in one particular expense category in just a few minutes. I actually timed it over that entire category and it consistently takes just 3 seconds to load 10 transactions so I was easily able to review and change over 100 transactions in a couple of minutes. I think it took me just under 2 hours to go through an entire financial year of transactions, including tagging to a category and mapping to specific tax tags that I had customised in the system. If you want your clients to find transactions for tax purposes that they would otherwise have to search receipts or banks statements for, this feature makes that task way easier.

4. Mobile app
I know this is not a new thing, but if you haven’t checked out the myprosperity mobile app for a while, you really should. Previous versions were busy and not representative of the type of leading mobile app design that you or your clients may be accustomed to with other leading tech brands. Last year, and I’ve forgotten the exact timing, but myprosperity launched a new look mobile app and it is a massive improvement. Screen layouts, font, icons, charts and the entire look and feel of the app is clean, crisp and frankly, beautiful. If you are on the road a lot, as most of us are, this myprosperity app is ideal for your clients to have their financial world at their fingertips. It’s even better for the adviser if you are signed up on the Mobile First agreement and have the app branded with your logo and colours. Again, worth checking out if you haven’t seen the app recently.

5. Comprehensive Cashflow Report
One of the advantages for advisers in using myprosperity is the ability to generate great financial reports for clients using up to date information directly from the myprosperity client portal. One of the reports that was added some time back was the Comprehensive Cashflow Report. The name actually doesn’t do justice to just how awesome this report is. It basically pulls together goals, cumulative expenditure, net (asset/liability) position, current year cash flow, budget Vs expenditure all into one report. My version of this report is actually 15 pages long and generated automatically from the system in a beautiful layout, branded with my advisers logo, and all done within seconds. Before myprosperity a report like this would take an adviser hours and hours to prepare and would simply not be worth the time and effort based on the return. This is such an incredibly valuable resource and I wonder how many advisers are actually using this with their clients.

6. Document storage
My final most improved feature is simply the document repository under “Docs”. The structure of this portal means you can access documents logically from the various folders. The “All Files” section is where all documents that you have uploaded into the portal can be accessed and where you can search for a specific document. By the way, this works great on the mobile app and is a real lifesaver if you are on the fly and need to get access to any document from the portal.

You have 4 master folders of “My Uploads”, “My Tax”, “My Advice” and “Other Docs” where specific documents can be stored against each of those categories. This is great for an adviser to proactively load tax documents from prior years so clients can simply go to the portal rather than hassling their adviser for a tax return lodged 3 years ago. It’s all there.

What I love is the ability to set up customised subfolders under “Other Docs” so it is easy to find stuff related to specific categories. I noted on Sunday that I now have just over 100 documents in the portal so if anything was to happen to me it’s all in one place, right down to source documentation and correspondence that might be vitally important in understanding the state of my finances. Best of all for advisers is that the Docs feature is available for Starter accounts, so that’s a free service to offer all clients.

So there you have it. My top 6 most improved features in myprosperity, and I haven’t even mentioned digital doc signing and form fill. Hopefully you are reading this and saying, “yeah, none of that is new… I knew about all that”. But, if you are reading this and not aware of some of the improvements I’ve highlighted in this blog then it’s probably time to go back and take a closer look at the platform and get your clients on board. They’ll thank you for it.