February 2025 Product Update

We’re back with our monthly Product Update!

This month, we’re taking a deep dive into our Sidebar functionality. We also give a quick update to the member navigation bar on the Asset-Map Report and Financial page.

Full transcript:

Welcome back to Asset-Map Product Updates

A monthly series highlighting the latest innovations we’re releasing on our platform. I'm Lex Brooks, Director of Brand + Product Marketing, here to provide all the juicy details.

This month, we’re taking a deep-dive into our Sidebar functionality and giving you a quick update to the member navigation bar on the Asset-Map Report and Financials page.

Let’s jump in….

The new Sidebar navigation is now available to all users. To turn Sidebar on or off, simply right-click within the Asset-Map Report, hover over "Toggle Visibility" and check the "Sidebar" option. You'll notice a slim navigation bar with 5 icons appears on the right-hand side of the screen, and when you select one of the icons, the Sidebar expands to full functionality.

For you as the advisor, we built this experience with planning conversations in mind, to help reduce your stress and increase your speed to advice with a clean and clear design. Sidebar enables you to quickly view and add people, enter or edit financials, legal entities, or policy information on the go, and gather all the details together without switching between tabs or screens. Your clients can now easily follow along live with the information as you present, since they can see the reference points of the plan, and they'll feel more involved in the process resulting in deeper engagement.

To enhance your ability to contextualize that progress and identify opportunities for discussion, we've also added a "focus mode" to help prompt important conversations by highlighting the assets and financial information that is relevant to the specific item, goal, or household member that you're discussing. By clicking the eye icon under Signals or Target-Maps, you'll see the pertinent instruments remain highlighted in color, while all other instruments are greyed out to keep conversation focused.

For example, say you're having a Loss of Life conversation, you can quickly see life policies and salaries connected to that particular Signal and see the immediate impact that additions or changes can create to that Signal in real-time.

With a different client, it could help with visualizing a more complex Retirement Planning scenario using Target-Maps where you can connect how various IRAs, 401ks, and Social Security plans are interacting across multiple members of the family providing discussion points for shifts, consolidations, investments, or other strategies that could help fund the goal. By showing both the map and the directions on one concurrent screen, you can see the big picture and focus on the details all at once.

Within Sidebar for Target-Maps, all of our standard functionality is still available, allowing you to pin and select key Target-Map goals to dive into during your client presentation without changing a single screen. This provides a truly holistic view to understand what a client wants, what they have to fund their goals, and what it means in the long run.

If you decide you'd prefer to not use Sidebar at any point, simply close the whole right-hand navigation using the arrow and the functionality will return to using the modal pop-up in the middle of the screen.

We have plenty more planned for the Sidebar roadmap, so continue to check back here each month to see what the latest additions are. In the meantime, if you're looking for a more in-depth resource on how to use Sidebar for your practice, we encourage you to check out the replay of the latest Accelerate training webinar by Senior Training Manager, LiaJean McHenry.

Next up, we have a small but impactful update to our member navigation bar with the addition of an "all" button. So now instead of having to individually select each member or entity that you want to display on the Asset-Map, you can simply select 'All" to display everything together.

Additionally, the same member navigation bar has been added to the Financials page so that you can easily toggle between the financial lists of members and entities for quick reference.

Don't forget to like this video & subscribe to our YouTube channel for all the latest Asset-Map news.

That’s all for our February updates, we'll see you next time!