THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. WSicom October 22, 2014, 5:30 AM ET THE PRACTICE: Software helps firms monitor advice on planning. Firms have long been able to monitor how advisers invest client money. But technology now enables the higher-ups to much better track adviser performance in other areas, such as financial planning, Bob Veres says. Writing in Advisor Perspectives, he looks at how one firm, Mercer Global Advisors, uses a software called InStream to see how diligent its advisers are in drawing up plans for clients, and to track those clients' savings and spending rates, among other things. And here is the entire article referenced above. This article is from "Advisor Perspectives" an industry publication... The Tool that Will Transform Firmwide Financial Planning October 21, 2014 by Bob Veres Alex Murguia, founder and CEO of InStream Solutions, may be the most creative visionary in today's advisor software ecosystem. And like all people who think outside the box, sometimes he discovers that his best ideas have far better uses than he intended. InStream is best described as a financial planning tool. It performs the usual retirement-sufficiency calculations and Monte Carlo projections. It offers such creative add-ons as Social Security planning, automatic creation of mindmaps that organize a client's entire financial situation in graphical format, and, more recently, incorporation of Dr. Wade Pfau's "safe-savings rate" calculations, which make planning advice more relevant to Gen X/Y clients in their early accumulation years. There are customizable alerts that proactively warn an advisor if a client's situation is breaching any of a variety of thresholds, such as retirement sufficiency outside the safe zone, moving below the safe-savings rate or having a mortgage which, at current rates (automatically pulled down from the Internet EFTA01203882