How to Check Facts and Troubleshoot with Reports

eMoney reports enable you to present retirement, insurance, or estate planning solutions to your clients. But before jumping into these conversations, it’s essential to ensure you’ve entered the clients’ data accurately in Facts and that the outputs are as you anticipated.

Today, we’ll look at how you can use reports, precisely Cash Flow, Income Tax, and Ledger, to fact check, troubleshoot errors, and help answer your clients’ questions.

*Pro-tip: For quick access to these reports, we recommend adding them to Favorite Reports. Click the star next to the report name within each client’s Reports section.

Cash Flow

Once you’ve filled out a client’s Facts, navigate to the Cash Flow report. Reading from left to right, Cash Flow calculates a client’s total inflows, total outflows, net cash flow, and total portfolio assets for their lifetime. With this report, you can confirm all income sources and expenses are accounted for, and investigate any numbers that look incorrect or that drastically change in a given year.

To view more detailed information on inflows and outflows, click into the column headers. Here, you can see how we calculate the total amount using the data entered in Facts.

You can also check out the Cash Flow Breakdown to see the specific categories that make up each column. Using this guide as a reference, you’ll quickly know which column to use to verify that a client’s RMDs are paying out in the correct year or if their HSA contributions are being included in their cash flow.

Income Tax

While in the Total Outflows column of Cash Flow, you’ll see a Taxes Paid column. If you or your client is concerned with the number, or would like to see how we calculated the total amount for each year, you’ll move to our second troubleshooting report, Income Tax.

In Income Tax, you can click Regular Federal Income Tax to see a client’s 1040 tax calculation from total income to total federal tax. Again, you can drill-down into columns to see more detailed information such as exemptions, below-line deductions, and more.

Ledger

The last troubleshooting report we’ll look at is the Ledger. This is where you’ll go to see activity within a specific asset for a given year. With the Ledger, you can confirm transfer flows, contributions, account growth, and account liquidation activity.

Here, you can also access the Tax Event and Gift Tax Event sub-reports to see events, such as Investment Income, used to calculate your income and gift taxes in a given year.

Interested in learning more? Check out Best Practices for Ensuring Accurate Taxes, Check Your Work with the Ledger, and the interactive Reports user guide in the Help section of your advisor site.