Paraplanning within Monahans
Laura’s role within the company is influenced by its structure. Monahans was one of the first in the country to achieve chartered status, in 2007, and has five offices in the South West – Trowbridge, Bath and Swindon, which have in situ advisers, and Chippenham and Glastonbury which are accountancy offices and are served by the advisers as and when needed. There are now five paraplanners, four advisers, two Finance staff and seven administrative staff. Three of the paraplanners work out of the Trowbridge office, one in Swindon and Laura is based in Bath, where she works directly for the managing director Simon Ewings.
Although working in different offices, the paraplanners work as a pool, sharing knowledge and technical information. “Paraplanners in general recognise that we are a community and we can learn from each other. So I’ll try to go to the Trowbridge office at least once a month so we can bounce ideas off one another.”
What Laura likes about Monahans as a company, is the level of support it is willing to provide, encouraging staff to attend courses and gain relevant qualifications as well as trusting its staff to get on with the job. “The paraplanners here are very pro-active. When we know there is a project coming up, such as the rebalancing of portfolios, we’ll decide ourselves on a course of action and we’ll speak to Simon and he will usually agree. I’ll also be asked to get involved in a range of projects from being on the investment committee, through conducting due diligence to setting up systems and researching the software we use. That’s the way the whole company works. It gives us a sense of achievement, power and involvement.”
Cashflow forecasting
One of the major projects that Laura undertook for the company was into cashflow forecasting. It has become “one of my favourite areas”, she says. “I don’t want to be writing just standard reports; I understand it is part of the job but there is so much you can tell a client when using cashflow software.”
Traditionally, Monahans hadn’t used cashflow forecasting but it was an area that Laura could see would fit well with Paraplanning and the ethos of the company. So Laura came up with a proposition – “I carried out research on the various different types of software, demoing a lot of different products, and we finally decided to use ‘MoneyScope’. It’s one of the simpler pieces of software but it works for us,” she says.
From MoneyScope the paraplanner will produce a report to give to the client, and if more complex projections are needed this will be supplemented by an Excel-based template.
“I’ve created a Fact Find for advisers so they know what I need specifically for cashflow modeling. I’ve written procedures on how to use the cashflow modeling tools and we have a template report that I would write for someone for whom we’d used cashflow modeling.
This is a side of the business we are growing,” she says.
