Buy Now.Given my reputation as a technophile within the industry, I have had several advisors reach out to me asking how I am coping, and how they can better enable remote work for themselves and their co-workers. Get a comprehensive view of your holdings and investment portfolio - 401 (k)s, 403 (b)s, or IRAs. Connect to over 14,000 financial institutions to see where you stand with your various accounts. Planning for your financial future starts with taking stock of where you are today. Your retirement accounts all in one place.But what do you use?I get this question all the time when asked about what x type of software I use. Given the proliferation of cloud technologies, there is basically nothing you need to be on-premises for these days, making your location irrelevant.While most dealer-related software tends to be cloud-based, there is still a fair amount of technology that is left to the advisor to either figure out for themselves or discover how it could make their lives easier.The following is my survival guide for how to make your office little more than a place where people meet. In case you don’t believe me, take it from the inventors of the PC itself, IBM, who has professed that Macs are the better option.Frankly, your disaster recovery plan really should be that easy.This is a program, installed on all your devices and browsers, that generates and stores random passwords, synchronizes them across devices, and lets you share them with your co-workers when needed.If you have a password manager, instead of remembering many passwords, you only need to remember one (difficult) password, which gets you into the overall system. Do you or any of your co-workers:Require a password to log into your computer?Ensure your passwords are at least eight characters and include random sequences (like 3xe#WwI)?Maintain a clean desk with no passwords written down anywhere near your desk?If you answered no to even one of these questions, guess what, your security concerns don’t live in your tech they live in you and your peers.So how do you up your security practices? A combination of two solutions.The first is a password manager. Just consider the following questions. Security: Locking it all downThe elephant in the room with all of this is security, and it’s often people's biggest objection to moving forward with making an “online office.”However, this objection is actually backwards thinking: the weakest link in your business when it comes to security is not your technology, it’s the people. To that end, I will try to provide you with several options for each need, but just as in the Mac vs PC debate, sometimes my bias is too strong to not share.
Best Financial Planning Software Free App ThatYou can set up a custom VPN, or there are also some great, easy-to-use general services on the market such as Tunnell Bear, Express VPN, and Nord VPN starting for as low as $4/month. This is a system that encrypts your traffic and sends it to a secure server. If you’re on the road and using public wifi, you can be easily hacked by anyone else on that network – but there’s a simple way to keep yourself secure: a Virtual Private Network, or VPN. A Yubikey is the best option, and costs as little as $27.One last security consideration has to do with how you are getting on the internet. This is a physical USB key that needs to be plugged into your device in order for you to log in. Most sites support some sort of two-factor authentication – requiring not just your password to log in, but also a second code, most commonly sent via text message.If you’ve opted for the text message option, however, I highly recommend finding an alternate solution, as sim cards (used to identify and authenticate your mobile number) can be spoofed to intercept this code – even if you're the CEO of Twitter!Instead, you should either use a random code generator like Google Authenticator, a free app that will generate a random code every 30 seconds, or you can use the most secure option: A hardware key. Meanwhile, Canada has its own homegrown solution, Equisoft. The big US players are Redtail, Wealthbox, and Junxure. Alternatively, there are several modern financial-advisor-specific CRMs. In fact, many modern solutions are customizable and integrate with countless other programs, to enable you to store every form of client data in one place – what had better be in the cloud.The gold standard in the CRM space is Salesforce: highly customizable and integrates with everything, but can get a little pricey to develop. From note-taking to tracking and assigning tasks, it should be more than just a digital Rolodex. My office has been on G-Suite for over a decade and today, no one at my firm could imagine a reality where we didn’t have access to everything, from anywhere, at any time.Both systems handle all our essentials – email, calendar, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, document storage, internal website, and several other functions – and allow us to collaborate on the same files in real-time without worrying about who has the latest version of the file.Speaking of calendars, you can save hours of time going back and forth with clients trying to find a meeting time that works, by instead letting them book a time directly, using a client booking page. That includes storing all of your files in shared folders online, allowing you to access them anywhere in the world.Alternatively, consider my preferred solution, G-Suite which starts at $8/month/user. Office 365 has been enabling users to manage most, if not all, functions of the office in the cloud for over eight years and starts at $11/month/user. Productivity BoostBe honest: are you still using the desktop version of Outlook and Microsoft Office? If so, stop. The right provider will give you the option to use either office phones, your cell, or your computer to answer calls, and will integrate with your CRM. The current top player in this space is Zoom and it’s worth paying for even if you get the others for free (Zoom has a free tier, too).If you really want to liberate yourself from the office, consider moving your office phone system to the cloud as well. Both G-Suite and Office 365 come with their own solutions – in the form of Google Meet and Skype for Business – but frankly both leave a lot to be desired. From Skype to Facetime, videoconferencing has gone mainstream. CommunicationBy now, odds are you have used at least some form of videoconferencing solution. Airpcap downloadYes There is MoreNow I could go on and discuss vendors for everything from financial planning software to securities quotation, marketing, and countless other areas. Again, don’t take my word for it, IBM thinks so too. Microsoft bundles Teams with 365, and Salesforce has a solid offering with Quip (free), but the company that invented this space, still remains the best: Slack (free). And if it’s too late to get started for this crisis, start planning for the next one. For now, if you want more ideas, feel free to check out my podcast episode entitled “ Tools for an Efficient Advisor Office.”For now, these solutions are enough to get any advisor looking to make the shift started.
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