Just my luck! I spend 20 years to build a business that winds up attracting professional penny pinchers! Advisor Products is seeing a surge in sign-ups by CPA financial planners.

Of course, I’m kidding — mostly. While CPA planners are frugal, I ‘m proud to serve them because they are real financial professionals. I worked at AICPA from 1983 to 1986, ghost-writing a newspaper column called, Money Management, that was published in a couple thousand newspapers across the country.

I had been a police beat reporter at the Clearwater Sun in Florida before moving to The Trenton Times, where I was fired after three months, shortly after refusing to write a story about the funeral of the father of a 400-pound rapist of a 13-year-old girl, who unsuccessfully had argued his imprisonment would be a death sentence because he was so fat and, thus cruel and unusual punishment. But that’s another story.

Before I left AICPA to cover Wall Street for The New York Daily News, I spent a lot of time around CPAs and was there to see the PFS designation and Personal Financial Planning practice section get started. So I have a long history with CPA planners.

Since we started making websites 20 years ago, Advisor Products has worked with CPA planners. The AICPA has ignored what we are doing.  But I stayed true to my values of working with real financial professionals. So CPA planners are showing up anyway, and these advisors have great practices. They broadly diversify a core portfolio in low-cost product, and offer financial planning to add value.  They love Fritz Meyer’s fundamental economic analysis, Craig Israelsen’s low-cost models, and Bob Keebler, CPA/PFS’s financial and tax planning strategies.    

If you are a CPA financial planner, see our 25-minute demo on YouTube or click on the chat box below and request a free trial.

To grow your practice, it’s smart to allow clients and prospects to book a meeting with you from your email newsletter.

Integrating advisor calendars with advisor websites and email newsletters is an important business building feature of Build Advisor Websites (BAW), our content management system for financial planners and RIAs. 

Investment fiduciaries, by definition, lag the S&P 500 index in a bull market. That’s a problem for independent professionals. Advisor Products solves it.

Redtail CRM, one of the most popular CRM systems financial advisors, was released recently on advisor websites that use the AdvisorVault Client Portal.

Integration of Redtail into advisor client portals increases an advisor’s efficiency enormously. It opens a new channel of communication from your CRM to your clients where none existed before.

Shrill headlines scream fear for roboadvisors, but independent financial professionals must embrace the Web.

We, the people of Advisor Products Inc., are launching a solution automating ongoing financial planning advice supervised by financial professionals — CFPs, CPAs, CIMAs, CPWAs, CFAs, ChFCs, CLUs, and EAs.

Since January, we have been developing a new client portal for advisors.

The new client portal is built into AdvisorVault, which is used by hundreds of RIAs. AdvisorVault is a highly customized version of Microsoft SharePoint explicitly designed to meet the needs of financial advice professionals.

The vast majority of advisor websites are developed with little forethought and rarely vital to the business of a professional. But advisor websites can and should be the most important app in your practice! It is your interface with the outside world!

Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I cover a mix of news for independent advisors—technology, compliance, marketing and a wide range of other topics. I also write about what's new at my company, Advisor Products, which makes websites, newsletters, and brochures for about 1,800 advisory firms.



Apropos of my schizophrenic role as reporter and service provider to advisors, I am splitting this blog in two.



This blog will now only cover what's new at Advisor Products. Articles I write about industry issues will now be posted in my blog at advisorsforadvisors.



advisorsforadvisors is a new practice management website. It's in beta, but you can sign up now for a 30-day free trial. (Advisor Products clients will receive an email next week about how to sign up for a free one-year subscription.)



Two veteran financial journalists have teamed up with me to create advisorsforadvisors. Mary Rowland is a former columnist at The New York Times who now writes a monthly column for Financial Advisor, and Bob Casey started up and ran Bloomberg Wealth Manager and is now a managing director of the Family Wealth Alliance.



advisorsforadvisors has strong social networking and provides crucial information to run an advisory business, including:

· Links to all important market and economic news stories by 8:30 a.m. EDT every business day

· A way to objectively compare advisor software applications feature-by-feature, side-by-side

· Social networking features that connect advisors who practice the same way as each other

· Advisor reviews of software applications

· User groups for software applications

· Daily analysis of industry and financial news by veteran reporters and industry experts

· Free access to weekly webinars with CE credit for many sessions and replays of all webinars 24/7

Schwab PortfollioCenter, a leading portfolio accounting and reporting application used by about 3,500 independent advisory firms, has posted its specifications to the Advisor Software Database at advisorsforadvisors (A4A).



A4A is a new practice management portal for independent advisors. A4A features an Advisor Software Database that allows advisors to compare the most popular professional software applications side-by-side and feature-by-feature. Just about all of the major software vendors in the industry are now participating in the Advisor Software Database by posting detailed specifications of their products. Advisors can write reviews and rate all of the software packages.



I’ve wanted to create the Advisor Software Database for about 10 years. It’s a totally unique tool that is not available anywhere else. It summarizes in minutes everything you need to know about different practice management applications. Basically, If you like my magazine column or this blog, you’ll find A4A helpful.



PortfolioCenter, a desktop application, owns a major share of the portfolio management software market among advisors serving high-net-worth individuals. According to the specifications Schwab filled in the Advisor Software Database, PortfolioCenter has 70 reports, including 10 graphical reports. You can run a report showing a client’s current asset allocation versus the target allocation, and you can report on Treasurys, corporates, zeroes, and mortgage-backs but not TIPS.



Schwab executives are going to be showing enhanced client reporting tools at the upcoming Schwab conference. We’ll keep you updated on details.



If you click on the screen shots in this post you’ll see an enlarged view of the Advisor Software Database showing you a comparison of PortfolioCenter, InterActive Advisory Software, and Portfolio Director. A4A is still in beta and we’re giving advisors a 30-day free trial right now.

The first time I saw a ticket kiosk at the airport, I was indignant. “How dare they make me ticket myself,” I thought. “Next thing you know, they’ll ask me to fly the damn plane!"

Soon enough, however, I tried the self-service ticketing machine. And guess what? I loved it! Now, when I walk into an airport without a self-service kiosk, I’m indignant. How dare they make me wait on a long line just to be ticketed!