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Release Notes for Version 5.18 released Nov 26, 2003
The focus in this release is to make it easier to convey to clients the results of the financial analysis.
All Editions that Include the Advisor module.
1. Summary client reports. This edition of Family Law Software includes a new set of reports that, taken together, provide a brief but fairly complete summary of the financial situation for the client. The reports include:
- After-tax cash. This report shows, for year 1, the after-tax cash of each party. It also shows the marital and separate property division. And it shows key items like filing status and the alimony and child support as percent of the payer's income.
- Property division. This report shows, line by line, the disposition of each item of property. The totals on this report match the property totals shown on the "After-tax cash" report.
- Tax calculation. This report shows, line by line, the income tax calculation for the first year, for each party. The totals on this report tie to the taxes lines on the "After-tax cash" report. (You may see the tax calculation for any future year by going to the Graphs topic, clicking "Graph Annual Taxes," then clicking on the bar for the year whose taxes you want to see.)
- Five year projection. This report shows Gross Income, Expenses, Taxes, Net Income, and Year-End Net Worth for the first five years. It also has a graph of net income for the full 30 years. This lets you see, in a nutshell, the future impact of the financial plan. To see years beyond the first five, simply click on the "Totals" button at the top of the screen and scroll to future years.
Each of these reports is one or two pages. Taken together, they give a succinct overview of the current and projected financial situations.
2. What-If Report. We have created a new "What If" report, which shows, on one page, the distinguishing facts of each scenario, and the results. Thus, you would see, for example, the four different alimony or child support levels, then the after-tax cash and property, in the first year, for each.
This report lets you show your client, typically on one page, up to four scenarios, and the effect of each on the bottom line.
To view this report, go to the "What If" topic, create the scenarios, then click the link labeled "Click here for a detailed report for year one."
To print this report, view it, then click the "Print" button at the top of the screen.
3. Data checker. We are introducing a new feature with this release, called the Data Checker, which is available in the Analytics topic.
The ultimate goal of the data checker is to simulate a review by a person familiar with the software, to help you assure that you have not missed any required entries, and that the entries are consistent with one another.
In this release of the Data Checker, we are only checking for a few things, including whether birth dates have been entered for parties and their children. (Birth dates are important for determining retirement payments for parties and future exemption status for children.)
One way to see the Data Checker in action is to start a new file, then, without entering any data, going to the Data Checker.
We are hopeful that future releases will perform more complete and more sophisticated reviews of your data entries.
4. Explaining Updates. We are regularly enhancing our software. From time to time, those enhancements change the way data is entered. We have a new feature that automatically checks each file as it is loaded and writes explanations of any actions you need to take. If there is anything you need to do, a box will pop up when you load the file telling you where to look for the explanations. The explanations appear under the Clients tab at the topic "Upgrade notes."
Bugs Fixed
1. Sale of business. In the previous release, when a party sold a business to an outside party, we were not correctly taking account of the tax effects of such a sale. Also, we were leaving the sale proceeds in the "Business" column, which was confusing.
Now, sale proceeds move into income, and from there into accumulated income. Also, we ask for the tax basis of the business and correctly record the sale as a capital gain.
2. What If. If there were a large number of entries, the What-If was not calculating correctly. That has now been fixed.
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