New turnkey tax management overlay announced by Envestnet

Portfolio Management Consultants, the investment management arm of Envestnet Asset Management Inc. of Chicago this week released a new tax overlay service for its popular managed account offerings that should allow advisers to improve their clients’ absolute returns by reducing the impact of tax liabilities.

The PMC Tax Management Service, which was unveiled Thursday, is intended to help investors with separate managed accounts who are in need of ongoing tax management, as well as for clients transitioning between platforms or managers who are trying to minimize the effect of significant gains.

This service was created in collaboration with Metamorphosis Money Management (M3), of Denver. M3’s trade optimization technology underlies the overlay system and works by tracking an investor’s portfolio along with daily stock market returns to find ways to lower capital gains or harvest losses.

“An often overlooked value of stock losses is that they carry forward forever,” John Phoenix, president of M3, said in a statement. “That means losses taken today can be applied to gains in 2010, 2011, or even 2020. The ability to stockpile losses is particularly useful in the current market environment, since most investors have losses to harvest.”

For more information visit the PMC Tax Management Service and M3 online.

Document management software gets a significant update

Cabinet NG Inc., a document management software company in Madison Ala., this week announced the release of CNG Shared Access Filing Environment version 6.2. The release marks the second significant update of the system since the release of version 6.0 in February of 2008. The product is intended for firms with anywhere from two to 200 users. Indeed, many of its collaborative and work flow features would be useless to a sole-proprietor shop.

Among the new items in the system are integrated messaging features that should help firms meet compliance obligations by providing a secure way to both communicate and track internal communications. A new “message mailbox center” categorizes message types as “internal,” “external” or “bulletin board.” Internal messages go to another user, or to a group of users; while the external message feature documents telephone calls or other messages that come from outside the company and can be sent to any user or group. Bulletin board messages are distributed to all users.

Messages can be managed by dragging and dropping between the “in,” “work,” “hold,” “sent,” or “deleted” mailboxes. Users can append messages and have their entries automatically dated and time-stamped. The messages may also be automatically printed or filed directly into the CNG-SAFE file structure.

Another new feature is the “folder note alert” system, which provides users with the ability to append a pop-up note if there is something special about a folder. When others view this folder late, they get an instant alert via the pop-up, for example if a particular client signature or form is needed.

There is also a new “quick search” feature that automatically searches all indexes when a user is attempting to locate a folder or document. This capability is in addition to the structural search, metadata search and full-text search modes that were already available.

The base price for a typical small-office adviser system is $2,500, which includes one server license, two user licenses, a license for CNG-Books (a co-branded QuickBooks interface often used as a back-office tool) and four hours of help with installation, configuration and training.

Also included is one year of maintenance upgrades and phone, e-mail and web-based tech support. Advisers interested in checking out comparable products should check out the Avante or Intuition Pro systems from Laserfiche of Long Beach, Calif.

For more information visit Cabinet NG online.

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