HD Vest Improves Tax Tool for Advisors

There are now 27 options for such educational pieces with the enhanced 1040 Analyst, he adds. Other topics focus on issues like Roth IRAs and minimum distributions.

A third advantage to the updates of the tool, the executive says, "is that the advisors say it is so easy to use, which is exciting."

The tool has a sorting and filtering function, so for any number of clients, an advisor can filter information around multiple datapoints.

"If you are looking for a certain type of client to reach out to in June or July, say around dividends, interest income of passive activity losses, you can use the tool to do the work for you," Rawlins said.

A typical advisor uses the tool to work with about 120 clients. But some are now using it to work with 600 investors.

Across the broker-dealer, about 1,100 advisors are working with 1040 Analyst. Financial professionals have to get clients to sign a consent form or disclosure associated with the information sharing it entails.

But advisors and clients have the motivation to get this step taken care of, he explains.

"In the past, advisors would have to pore over data manually and scrutinize returns vs. taking just a couple minutes to enter the data and generate [the client] opportunity set," Rawlins explained.

For clients, these opportunities for action on vulnerabilities in their financial plans are not something they typically want to postpone.

Such issues "are immediately generated as a talking point, and then the client wants to take care of it them," he said. 

Jerry Style, principal of Freedom Financial Services, of Holbrook, New York, agrees. "This year, we are going to use it with virtually every client," he said in a statement. "Even a young person with only one or two W-2s has financial issues that they need to pay attention to."