Name: How to Create an FIR Report
Uploaded: 2026-10-27T19:01:43.926Z
Duration: 27 min 8 s
Description: How to Create an FIR Report

Transcript for "How to Create an FIR Report": Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's session, how to create an FIR report. The session came directly from our member feedback, and we are so excited to share that it is now part of our new monthly series. It's it's more of a workshop series on what we are launching to help our new members stay informed, engaged, and getting the most out of your RPAG platform membership. So please expect to see more of these coming your way monthly. Before we dive in, a quick note on the format. This session is really just meant to be casual and conversational in nature, so please feel free to drop any questions, for this team in the q and a tab at the top right of your screen throughout the session, and we will do our best to get to all of them at the end of the session. And the fiduciary investment review is RPAG's most utilized report and for very good reason. It gives advisers a structured and repeatable way to evaluate a plan's fund lineup, document their process, and walk into every meeting, with a clean and defensible record of their due diligence work. Today, you'll walk away knowing exactly how to build an FIR from start to finish inside the RPG platform so you can start putting it to work in your practice right away. So flip to the next slide. Perfect. These are some upcoming RPAG events, so be sure to save your seat. You can register for these in the docs tab. So we have an event actually coming up in two days in Boston at Fidelity. We have an event on November 17 in Chicago where you can connect with your peers in person with BlackRock and Goldman Sachs as well. And then we have another event on December 9 in Irvine, California, at Capital Group. And then finally, we have a holiday dinner coming up on December 16 in Boston at Del Frisco, so that'll be a great event. Perfect. My name is TJ Givens, and I'm the head of customer engagement here at Great Greg Group. As an RPG member, you have exclusive access to all of these invite only events that we mentioned at some of the most recognized financial institutions in the country. So just be sure to register for those events before all the spots are sold out. I'm joined today by two of my colleagues, Justin and Brooke. Justin started his career here at RPAG as an adviser service associate and now serves as one of our quality assurance testers. Having worked directly with the platform from multiple angles, Justin is very well versed in how it works and how advisers use the platform day in and day out. He'll give you a full walk through of the FIR process from start to finish so you can leave feeling confident and ready to run your first report. We will also be joined, which I'm sure all of you know, Brooke. She is here during our q and a portion of today's session. Brooke is a solutions engineer here at RPAG who knows the platform inside and out and brings a consultative approach to every adviser conversation, making her the perfect person to help answer your questions at the end of today's session. So I'll flip to the next slide. Here's everything that we have planned for today. Justin will lead you through the live demo inside of the RPAG platform covering all of these different approaches to the FIR, how to review your plan assets, how to select a mapping strategy, how to work through your considerations page, etcetera. And then when Justin wraps the demo, as I mentioned, Brooke will join us for the q and a session. Please feel free again to put any of your questions in the q and a tab throughout the session. Anything that's not working in the FIR is expected or things that you love about the FIR report, feedback as well is always welcomed. And so with that, I'll hand it over to Justin to get started. Thanks, Justin. Thank you, TJ. Oops. Alright. Perfect. So first thing we're gonna wanna do, obviously, is log in to the RPAG portal. From here, as CJ mentioned, the FIR is one of the most utilized resources in reports that we use, for members. You want to find the client that you're going to run the FIR for, and you can do that one of two places. You can either come to the menu and you can do it for a client or a prospect, or you can also come to this client prospects tab on the right hand side and utilize that to access the reports or the, client page. Within your client page, you'll just scroll down, and you'll find the plan that you wanna run the review for. You can either utilize this hot button here, investment review, or you can click into the plan and utilize that first. Do anything you may need to do, prior to starting. And then the same thing, you'll just scroll down a little bit and find the fiduciary investment review. Once you click in, you'll see any previous reviews you've done for that client, or you can start a new one. In this particular case, I'll show you what that looks like. So just type anything in. If you do have a service plan, you can associate that through this meeting date. If not, you can just click start. You really don't have to do that. It's gonna have you confirm that you're aware that that's what you're doing. So one, you're not associating it to a meeting. And two, even more important is it's letting you know it's locking in this quarter scores. So for this particular quarter or in quarter three, we'll confirm that we are okay with that data, and that will bring us to step one. It does give us a quick glance of our assets or the amount and the date that that was most recently updated. We can click review in order to kind of look through all of the different funds that we have in our lineup, Make sure everything is according to what you need in order to do this report. And then once you've confirmed everything, you just scroll back up to the top and click confirm. You'll click confirm one more time, and that will bring us to the considerations page. There is a way to change... Do we do we answer the questions right now, Helen, that we're popping up in the QA, or we wanna do that at the end? Just see a couple popping through. Questions at the end. Perfect. Alright. We'll save that for the end then. So we'll click the make considerations button since we're on step two. The mapping strategies, we have four different options, and we do have little question mark icons that you can hover over to see what each one indicates. Long story short, the CITs can be mapped specifically, or we can utilize a customized fund menu or what's most frequently utilized, the provider product. So we'll go ahead and click that since that's going to show us the provider product that we utilize for this specific client. And it takes just a moment to generate all of our considerations for the funds based on the scorecard methodology. You'll notice you can use these drop downs to select any option you want. If for any reason you have eliminate and map, it's just gonna show you the highest score of the same asset class. That by no means is a recommendation, just an option for you. As you go through, you can click add funds to map anything else that you would like to map, and you can utilize the ticker search here. Or you can click the filter icon, and that will open up a couple different options for you to look through, whether that be different asset classes, specific scores that you're looking for, or any of these other options on this board. Once you've made those selections, you can click search. Or if you've decided maybe you set something that you wanna switch, you can just clear the filter and it will reset it. So, that's just a quick overview of how to utilize the fund lookup tool within the fiduciary investment review in order to set up your considerations. Once you've confirmed everything, if there's anything you want to add rather than replace, you can do that at the very bottom here where it says add to lineup, and you would just use the fund lookup tool the same way to add, a fund to the existing line up. Once you've finalized all of these details, you will click that you accept responsibility to verify the availability and pricing, and then you will save those considerations. And that's gonna bring you to step three, which is building the report itself. You'll notice there are a couple different templates you can choose from in the RPG templates section. Within that, you also have, my template section. So anything that you've personally created or anything your company has created will fall into this section. And then the third option is to start from scratch and build a custom template, which you would have all of your options here to drag and drop or click the little plus icons, from within the tabs. So a lot of flexibility, a lot of control, that that gives you as the adviser. In this particular case, I'm gonna go ahead and find a template that I've built. We'll go ahead and confirm that we are ready to move forward with that. And this is kind of what a general layout will look like. So we've got a cover page, title page, table of contents. Just a quick point... Thing to point out, is the table of contents is gonna show you anything that's bolded. So in this particular case, your table of contents would be scorecard and methodology, asset class review, and summary. Anything you see that's red is gonna be an item that you have to action before you'll be able to save and generate your report. So in this particular case, the asset class review, we would click into, and then you'll select your funds. So, again, you have the flexibility to do what you wish here. You can select all and have, a giant report that goes over everything in detail. If there are specific ones you wanna leave out, you can click those again and they will turn white, meaning they are no longer going to be in the report. Or what I personally like to do is just find anything, that's watch listed, which is the yellow flag icon, or anything you've opted to remove and add. So in this particular case, I would select those three. I would click done, and then I would click save. And that will update it from the red color we saw before to now it's blue or when highlighted white. Now you'll see there's a save and a save and preview option. So, obviously, you would have the option to click save and preview, and it just takes a moment to kinda generate what that would look like. A benefit to that is if maybe there's a couple different variations of check boxes and you're not sure exactly which one you wanna utilize for your report, you'd be able to make a couple different changes, preview them, see what works best for you, and then make any additional adjustments before generating that report. So all in all, that's gonna be what creates your entire report. Each individual item does generally have check boxes to give you, again, control over what you're going to be doing, what you're presenting to your clients. And then, again, if you do start with a report that has a specific, template, you still are able to add additional items into that. So if you like the layout of a specific template first, and then can click in and add anything that will allow you to then drag and drop and place it wherever you may wish to put it into the report. And that, all in all, is how you build the FIR. From there, once you've got everything finalized, you'll go ahead and click done. That will bring you to the generate report section. If you want to publish it to your fiduciary briefcase, you'll wanna go ahead and select that checkbox so that you can do that. And then once you've, again, finalized your checkbox options, you'll go ahead and click generate on the report. You can select where you wanna save it within your fiduciary briefcase, and then you'll click save and close. Once that's done, it'll save it into the section provided, and then it'll also generate a PDF. So once that generates, it'll look something like this. You'll scroll through. As we mentioned, you'll see your table of contents, scorecard and methodology, asset class review and summary as we mentioned before. And then it's just a lot of great details going over the methodology, a lot of different graphs and details. So, I highly recommend going through. There's a lot of different options, just kind of clicking through, learning what each section entails. And that way you can build the template and report that best suits you and your clients. And with that, we'll go ahead and pull Brooke in for the q and a. Are we there yet? TJ. I'm at... there. Perfect. Perfect. Let me pull Brooke on stage, the real star of our show. Okay. Perfect. So we've gotten some q and a questions, and feel free, Brooke, if you need to to share your screen, of course, to answer these. I think first, we'll start with, how do I update my firm's logo on the cover page of a template which came from Christine? Certainly. I think this would definitely be easier to talk about with a screen share. So give me just a moment, and we'll take a look at this together. All right. Within the portal, we can see that there's two main places for logos. One would be your client logo, which you can add in from client details using, an an edit button or clicking on the logo area, make sure to allow logo use. For your company logo, you'll go into your company page, click on your firm's name, and then here there'll be a box for you to edit in your logo. You'll click edit company and you can update it here. One thing to note is that you do need to have company admin, user role in order to do this. So if that's not you, you can go down and view who in your company is listed as an admin and ask them to update. Perfect. Thank you so much, Brooke. Next. Let's see. Also from Christine. I've had funds with scores of seven to 10, which are flagged as replaced. Why is that? Yeah, great question. So, within RPG, you might see funds that are still high scoring that are flagged for either Watchlist or Removal. Ultimately, this comes down to our scoring methodology and IPS that's built into the system. You can find our IPS in the Resource Center, or by searching investment policy statement and view it here. But I'll give you a summary. So, for funds that are watchlist or flagged, in order to remove the flag, the Fund has to score a seven or higher for four consecutive quarters or five out of the last eight before the flag is dropped. This is because we want to make sure that this improvement in score is in fact due to manager skill and not just a lucky quarter. So, we're looking for continued and stabled outperformance before we remove this flag. That's why you might see higher scoring funds with that watchlist or with that up for remove. But, like Justin showed us in our investment review in that step two, you always have the last say. So, if you do have a 10, fund that's scoring a 10, maybe this is the third score, third quarter, it's starting to outperform, you can always remove the watch list flag to no action and then nothing will appear next to that fund in your final report. You can view score history by using a score history, reporting module that you can access from both the investment review or from your fund lookup tool here. If we were to type in a funds ticker my computer would let me. Okay. This is also not a promotion. I just only know one ticker by heart. But you'll see we can select this and then choose different, options, including our score history. So this is a great way to double check if you're not sure why a fund might be flagged. You can also try clicking on the score, and you'll get a preview of, past quarters. Great. Thank you. Another question. Is there anything that shows the style box by investments in the plan? Definitely. So, within our investment review, we do have two versions of the style box, and a few other areas that kind of make up this as well. So, if we go into our investment review, Here, we'll just jump into our third step three. I would like to caution that in my sample plan, I am not a fiduciary, so my style box is a little limited. But I do want to highlight to you, there is a short version. I believe this is what is included in Justin's. You can include scores, considerations, and percentages. But, if we click on this investment tab, we'll see that there is also a standard option and one for underlying funds if you are looking to do that for your target date funds. The standard option has a more, detailed breakdown of asset classes, so if you want to see that you can always select that here. And then if we click Save and Preview, we can see a quick screen of this. Another option for this kind of breakdown could be something like your asset allocation. pie chart or grid that can show a bit more related to your plan, in terms of percentage breakdown. Thanks, Brooke. Service plans are set on a annual. calendar year. Understand that. Even though I have FIR scheduled annually, quarterly, etcetera for my clients, they don't show up on the service plan in future years. Is there a workaround for this? So, right now service plans are set on that kind of annual cadence. There is a copy button for future years that should keep your months the same when it copies over. So, in that sense, you would be able to then add in that date. But you're right, they are independent of each other so that kind of schedule out will not necessarily appear. But if we want to see what I'm talking about, when we go into our service plan, we'll see there is a copy previous and this is going to retain the same months. So you'll still have the same months selected, but you won't have those dates. Unfortunately, that does not pull through. It's definitely something that Justin and I can bring to our product team as an enhancement to our service plans. Thanks, Brooke. David asked, is the service plan always needed? Nope. Service plans are optional. I think they're great tools to keep on track. They're also something that can be shared with your plan sponsor as a module or in their fiduciary briefcase to highlight what you're bringing to the table with your, with your firm and your actions. So, it's always a nice touch, but it is not required. So, you can bypass that step when you're starting your investment review. Great. Thank you. What prompts the status to change from watch list to under review? Great question. So, similar to a fund removing a flag, a fund will get demoted from watchlist to up for review if it remains on the watchlist for four consecutive quarters or five out of the last eight. So, the same kind of timing applies if the fund stays on the watchlist for too long, it will get demoted. But again, you can always override that in the system if you're not ready to replace it. Like Justin showed, there's great options for additional due diligence reporting, like your returns analysis, your peer group analysis, fund fact sheets that can help explain a bit more about that fund's performance if it is maybe still watch listed but not ready for removal. Great. We're getting some more questions around the custom template feature. And is there a way to change the color scheme on the report? So maybe just run through that one more. time if you could. So, again, you can update your report themes to match your firm's hex codes. So if this is not your favorite shade of navy, you can update it using this Manage Report Themes. I will again caution that you do need a company admin role to make this change. So, I would either reach out to your company admin so they can make the change or they can grant you a company admin role as well. But you would come right here into report themes and you'll create a new report using this plus button. You can give it a name and then set in right here. So your marketing team can give you your HEX codes and update them accordingly And this will apply to your reports, like your investment review, your meeting minutes, your provider analysis, all of those bigger reports that you can run-in the portal. Yes. This can also. be set as a default, so that it'll default to your firm colors. Thanks, Brooke. Paul asked, do custom exhibits created outside of RPG and imported need to be in a specific format? We do have documentation on the aspect ratio of the slides that are generated from the portal that we're happy to send over. Generally, I would recommend keeping a larger footer. The system will stamp the footer onto those documents you include. So, that will be the end title of the report and the page number. So, I would just check that the document you are adding doesn't have a large footer or a footer very low so that it is not overlapped. But, other than that, most PDFs are totally fine. I would say the ones that I see tripped the system are ones with DocuSign. So if you do have a DocuSign envelope on it, the system might not let you upload it. All you would need to do is save it off as a fresh copy and then upload it again. Great. Thank you. John asked, where is the batch reporting tab? Definitely. Batch reporting can be found in the main menu right here under scorecard system on the right hand side. Third, from the, top. So batch reporting comes in here. And you can give it a name, choose to include or exclude considerations so that's step two you can bypass altogether when running your batch. And then it's just a few steps to select your clients, create or choose your template, and then schedule the batch to run. We generally recommend running batches overnight. For batches, I would say smaller batches, you might get them same day. When your batch is done, either way, you will receive an email notification letting you know. You'll come back into your batch report, so from the same area that we just accessed it. And step three will be ready for you with all your generated reports. Great. Does anyone else have any last minute questions, comments on the FIR? It's been a really engaged group, so thank you so much for your engagement. One last. place I. would like. to point out sorry, TJ. Nope. One last place I would like to point out is that you can, of course, give our service team a call. They are stateside, and they work through, 06:30AM Pacific to 04:30PM Pacific. But if you have a quicker question, maybe you're stuck somewhere, you can always try asking Otto. Otto is our AI chatbot, and Otto is very good at FAQs and cannot answer investment, or give legal or give legal advice. But if you get stuck in a report or you have a question on where to find something, this is a great place to start too. But you can give us a call if you'd rather talk to a real person. Thanks, Brooke. One last question here. I have the hypothetical plan performance in my template, but if I run the FIR for an individual plan, the benchmark return is explained via footnote. But then when I run FIRs and batch reporting, the description is omitted. Is there a workaround for that or or just some feedback to take back for our team? That's some feedback our team will take to our product team to make sure that that's operating as expected. If not, we will get our tech team to update it. Great. Thank you so much. This has been super helpful. There has been a survey launched in your, portal, so be sure to take this survey on your thoughts and opinions on the first, in this series for, office hour sessions with our newer members. So thank you so much for attending. I think we have one final slide. Helen, if you wanna pull that one up. Great. Thank you. This is, again, a part of our new monthly portal workshop series here at RPAG. If there are any topics that you would like to have included in future sessions or things that you're confused about in the portal, we would really love to answer all of your questions because I'm sure another member has the exact same question as you. So feel free to put it in the chat if you have those ideas, and, again, answer our survey. We ask you for future topics as well, so be sure to give your feedback there. Again, thank you so much for joining us today on how to create an FIR report. We hope you're leaving with the confidence needed and the tools to start putting the FIR, to work in your practice right away. So thank you so much, and looking forward to next month's session. And see you at a future in person RPAG event. Thanks.