Moneytree Software, a Muncie, Ind.-based company owned by software developer Accutech Systems Corporation, has released new versions of its financial planning tools that are built on fresh architecture and workflows. The software also has a new look and feel.
Moneytree was initially launched in 1981, and had a couple of different owners before Accutech’s acquisition in 2019. Accutech has been around since 1987, with a focus on selling trust accounting wealth management software to banks and trust companies.
“What our owner thought was, financial planning is in and all around trust,” said Patrick Spencer, managing director at Moneytree. “And felt like that would be a great tool to not only integrate into the platform, but really take this company that he saw as a diamond in the rough and try to elevate it and build its presence back into the marketplace.”
“When we acquired it, it had a great calculation engine," Spencer said. "But it didn’t have the workflow, and it didn’t have the ability to really work with the advisor’s clients. So that’s what we wanted to lean into.”
Accutech brought Spencer on in 2020 to do just that. He started by rebuilding the tool’s architecture.
They moved from the older architecture to a Microsoft .NET platform, “modernizing the guts of the product,” Spencer said. They also moved the product out of local data centers and put it onto Amazon Web Services, a cloud-based computing service. The product also has secondary disaster recovery and third backup sites.
From there, Spencer and his team created new workflows.
“What we wanted to do is really lean into being a financial planning tool for the advisor,” Spencer said. “We know our competition does a lot of integrations; we wanted to focus on aggregation. We wanted to focus on how does that advisor actually engage with their client. But we also wanted to lean into how quickly can they get a plan completed.”
They created a system of drawers and fly-outs that allow advisors to bring client data in from their custodian, such as Schwab or Pershing, and CRM, including Wealthbox, Redtail and Salesforce.
When Accutech acquired it, Moneytree had just a few integrations; the new version has about a dozen, with plans to add more. The new version has upgraded API capabilities so users can pull and push data to and from Moneytree more efficiently. “That’s allowed us to onboard integrations much quicker than what we would have otherwise,” Spencer said.
Moneytree also now has a deep partnership with MX Technologies, an account aggregation tool. MX’s tech allows for the tokenized movement of secure data, and it had more OAuth connections than other account aggregation providers, like Plaid and ByAllAccounts, he said. (OAuth is a tech standard that allows you to authorize one app or service to sign into another without giving away private information.)
“There in-lies their ability to have fewer disconnections,” Spencer said.
The company also built out ‘planning pages,’ which make the process more interactive with the advisor. Rather than looking at a financial plan in spreadsheet format, these pages feature a series of graphs that show how the plan changes in real time as the data is entered.
The new software is currently available in the “Elite” package, which replaces Moneytree Plan, its goal-based and cash-flow-based tool. It costs $1,981 through the end of the year (in honor of Moneytree’s 1981 roots), and it goes up to $2,195 at the beginning of next year. The “Essentials” package replaces Moneytree Advise, its goals-based-only tool, and that will roll out in the first quarter 2025. Pricing for that package hasn’t been finalized. There’s no sunsetting on Plan or Advise.
Moneytree currently works with less than 3,000 advisors.
