eMoney Tip of the Week: Client Portal Budgeting Basics

The Spending tab on the Client Portal allows your clients’ to create monthly budgets that accurately track their spending through aggregated accounts. Spending is automatically hidden from advisors, so it is important to familiarize yourself with this feature before your client has any questions about creating a budget of their own.

How Does it Work?

After a client connection is established transactional data will begin to be pulled into the Spending tab. Clients can view this information under the Transactions section.

In the Budgets section, clients are able to create a budget for each spending category. While the Overview displays  Spending by Category for a specific date range. Clients can drill-down into each piece of the pie chart to see expense details and related transactions.

Budgets

Clients can build budgets to help them manage their spending. The budgets can be custom for each category or estimated from the spending transactional data. We average the spending based off the last six months captured from the connection. The Spending tab tracks how much is spent in each category and if the client is over or under their budget.

Transactions

The transactions that are loaded from your client’s personal accounts can be filtered by Date Range, Account, and Category this gives the client a full look at their actual spending.

Every transaction will be categorized and count towards an overall and category budget. Clients can change the category if the default isn’t a close match. Categories can be edited by clicking on an individual transaction. By clicking Details, rules can be created to re-categorize future transactions the same way.

Best Practices

• This feature is automatically hidden from you as the advisor so if you help clients with their budgets, your client can grant you access in their Settings tab
• Clients will need to aggregate their personal accounts to be able to analyze their spending data. Client Connections can be set up in the Accounts section of the Organizer.
• The clients can access their spending information from anywhere with the use of our mobile site
• Provide your clients with the client-facing user guide titled Spending & Budgeting Tool so they can refer to it when they have questions
• Create a website for yourself and utilize the Spending tab to familiarize yourself with its features
• Before creating a budget, use the Transactions section to confirm that categories are correct and add rules if needed to ensure that future transactions will be categorized correctly.
• Create an Auto Budget – If the spending transactions are categorized accurately, the auto budget is the quickest and easiest way to build a client’s current spending illustration

 – Marah Hoffman, Client Success Coach