Advice

What this screen is for

The advice workspace runs Aether’s strategy engine over one client’s facts and shows you the result as a decision record: recommendations to accept or decline, each with its reasoning and its working, and below them everything the engine considered and did not recommend, with the reason. Nothing here is a document yet. Accepting a recommendation is what lets it flow into an advice document and an implementation checklist.

The page has no tabs. From the top: a status line, the household and client selector, then the scope banner, the recommendation cards, the plan sections for everything not recommended, the adversarial review panel, and the audit trail.

In client meeting mode the page shows only the client’s accepted advice: each accepted recommendation with its impact, the consequence of not acting, why it was recommended, and how far its implementation has got. Pending and declined recommendations, rank, priority and the dollar chip, validity and scope badges, the working, implementation tips and step notes, the plan sections, the SMSF checklist, the adversarial review, the audit trail, the evidence bundle, the scope banners, the engine diagnosis and every adviser control are not on the page at all; only the household and client pickers and the open-and-close toggles remain. With nothing accepted yet it says “No accepted advice yet”. Turning meeting mode on reloads the page into the client view; turning it off loads the full page again.

Scope comes first

The engine only considers advice areas marked in scope on the Scoping screen. There are ten areas: superannuation, insurance, investments, debt management, estate planning, tax planning, cash flow, retirement planning, Centrelink, and business planning. An area marked Considered only or Excluded is excluded from the engine’s run, and a recommendation whose area is out of scope is never shown on this page.

The status line tells you where you stand. With no scope set it reads “Blocked · define the advice scope before deciding”. With some areas still unclassified it reads “Attention · complete the advice scope before documents”; the scope counts as complete once all ten areas have a classification. Then it counts recommendations awaiting a decision, and finally “Decision record current · accepted advice can progress”.

Accept is disabled on any card whose area is not in scope, and the card says so.

How the engine decides what to show

Each strategy in the registry is tested in a fixed order, and the first test it fails decides which section it lands in:

1. Strategies already handled by an older built-in rule are skipped.
2. Scope: an excluded area sends it to Outside Scope.
3. Entity type: a strategy that does not apply to individuals, or only to companies and trusts, is Not Recommended with the reason stated.
4. Required data: a strategy whose inputs are missing from the fact-find goes to Missing Data, grouped by the field that is missing.
5. Eligibility: the strategy’s conditions are evaluated one clause at a time, stopping at the first clause not met, and that clause’s own reason is the rejection you read under Not Recommended.

A strategy whose conditions could not be evaluated at all (a fact in an unexpected shape, or the year’s regulatory figures unavailable) goes to Needs Review rather than being silently dropped or silently recommended.

Eligibility conditions reference the regulatory pack (the dated set of official rates, caps and thresholds Aether keeps for each financial year), so a strategy can stop being eligible when a cap moves, without anyone editing it.

Rank, priority and the dollar chip

Recommendations are listed pending first, then accepted, then declined, and within each group by the engine’s order. Every visible recommendation also carries a rank across the whole plan, best priority first; a declined card keeps its rank.

The priority score is a weighted blend of four axes. Dollar impact carries 40%, actionability 25%, distinctness 20% and confidence 15%. The dollar axis is a benefit-only curve: $1,000 a year scores 50, $10,000 scores 67, $100,000 scores 83, and $1 million or more scores 100. A cost never scores; a negative figure scores zero. Distinctness is reduced for each other recommended strategy in the same area.

The chip on the card shows the estimated benefit as either a yearly figure or a one-off, and Score breakdown opens the four axes with their weights. A card from an older scoring version, or a strategy the registry no longer scores, shows rank and priority but no axes.

Why and Working

Why we recommend this opens the rationale, the strategy basis where it adds something, and the alternatives considered. Working opens the trace: every input read from the fact-find, every rate or cap read from the regulatory pack, every constant, and each step of the calculation, recorded at the moment the figures were computed. A card with no trace recorded says so.

The trace is the only place most of the engine’s intermediate figures appear. Concessional cap room, bring-forward room, after-tax surplus, debt-recycling interest, cover gaps and the rest are computed for every recommended strategy and stored, but the card shows only the headline benefit. Open Working when a number needs defending.

Accepting and declining

Accept and Decline record your decision on the recommendation and on the strategy, each as an audit row. Undo returns a card to pending. Removing a card deletes the recommendation and its strategy.

An accepted recommendation belongs to you, not the engine. Run rules refreshes pending recommendations in place, keeping their ids and your decisions, but an accepted row is left exactly as it was: figures, scores, trace and rationale.

An accepted strategy becomes an implementation checklist on the Tasks screen. The checklist is built from the strategy’s implementation steps by a sweep that runs across the firm, so it may not appear the instant you press Accept. A checklist idle for fourteen days raises one nudge task per household.

When an accepted recommendation goes stale

Every recommended strategy is issued with a validity record and re-examined nightly. Its status is fresh, stale (a condition it depended on no longer holds), outdated (the condition holds but a figure it was computed from has moved), or expired. Stale, outdated and expired all raise a task and show a badge on the card.

Because Run rules never touches an accepted row, a flagged acceptance needs Refresh and re-accept, which appears on the card only in that state. It recomputes the figures from today’s data and keeps the recommendation accepted, writing one audit row that records the re-acceptance. If the figures did not move, the row is marked as confirmed rather than refreshed. If the engine no longer recommends the strategy at all, the refresh is refused with the engine’s reason and you are asked to reset the decision instead.

Refresh and re-accept also accepts a second case: a recommendation whose validity still reads fresh, but whose stored wording quotes a client figure that has since moved. That happens because validity asks whether the advice still applies and tests only the facts its own condition names, while the wording can quote figures no condition mentions — a household expense change moves a surplus the prose quotes without unsettling the strategy that recommended it. In that state the button works rather than reporting that nothing needs refreshing.

A refresh re-renders any open implementation steps and letters. Steps already done keep the text that was issued, and published documents are never changed: the toast says that published documents are unchanged and to re-issue if the figures matter to the client.

What flows into documents

Generating a document checks that the advice going into it is still current, and refuses rather than compiling a document that quotes figures which have moved. The refusal names the client, the recommendation and the figure, and says whether to use Refresh and re-accept or to run the rules engine. The same check runs again when a final document is posted to the vault, because that is the point at which it is locked, published and its predecessor superseded — a document generated while everything was current can go stale in the hours before it is finalised. Recommendations you typed by hand are not figure-guarded: they quote no template tokens, so nothing records which figures their wording depends on, and the adviser who wrote the figure owns keeping it current.

Which strategies a document includes depends on its type and the section. A statement of advice includes proposed and accepted strategies. A record of advice’s chapters cover accepted strategies, and its summary of change also lists proposed ones. A review document’s chapters cover accepted strategies, and its overview and action items also list proposed ones. Up to three strategies can be featured in a document, and each must be proposed or accepted for this client.

Implementation tips and warnings

Each recommendation card lists the implementation tips that apply to its strategy, adviser warnings first. A tip is practical knowledge for whoever puts the advice in place: a platform that cannot transfer super assets out, a form that has to travel with another. Some come from Aether’s researched list, each with its sources and the date they were checked. Others are your firm’s own notes. Every tip says what it matched on, such as a platform recorded in the fact find, words in a provider name, or the strategy alone, so you can judge how far it applies to this client.

Kind	What it asks of you
Adviser warning	Read it and press Acknowledge on the card. It can change the advice, so a statement or record of advice is not generated until every warning on the strategies it prints is acknowledged. A record of advice prints the accepted strategies and, in its summary of change, the proposed ones too, so a warning on either holds it up. A declined recommendation’s warning never does.
Implementer tip	Nothing. It travels to whoever implements the advice.

Any adviser login can acknowledge a warning, and the card then shows who acknowledged it and when. An acknowledgement belongs to the wording you read: if the warning is later revised, the revision has to be acknowledged again, and pressing Acknowledge on a card that is out of date tells you the warning has changed and reloads the cards. If the warnings for a client cannot be loaded, the card says so and a statement or record of advice waits, because no warning can be shown as read. Other documents, such as a review, still generate.

Platform warnings are only as good as the platform data. Picking the platform for each investment in the fact find (the Platform list beside the provider) gives an exact match. Without it, Aether looks for platform names in the provider text and labels the match as inferred, and a strategy that moves assets with no platform recorded shows one prompt to check the source platform’s rules instead of every platform’s warning.

Tips are for you and your team. They never appear in the statement of advice or the client portal. When an accepted strategy becomes an implementation checklist, the tips that applied at that moment are copied onto it under the step each concerns, so a later edit to a note does not change a checklist already under way. If the tips cannot be loaded at that moment, the checklist carries a warning to check the platform rules by hand instead. A Product Hub assessment shows the tips for the recommendation it created, read only, with a link back here to acknowledge.

Your firm’s notes

Settings has an Implementation notes card where your firm keeps its own tips and warnings, next to Aether’s researched ones. Advisers, paraplanners and administrators can write them. Every adviser login can read them.

A note names the strategies it is for and can narrow itself to particular platforms (and whether assets leave, arrive on or are held there), a wrapper, the assets held, or facts such as the client having an SMSF. Every choice comes from a list, so a note can only target what Aether recognises. Choose Adviser warning when the note should hold up documents until acknowledged, or Implementer tip when it is for the people doing the paperwork.

Saving an edit makes a new version. If a colleague saved the same note while you had it open, Aether tells you and offers to load their version, rather than overwriting it. Archiving a note stops it showing on advice and Restore brings it back. A warning acknowledged under an earlier version needs acknowledging again once it is revised.

The adversarial review

The review panel is the one place Vesper acts on this page. It reads the plan and a fixed best-interests rubric and returns challenges only: what was not considered, which assumption is fragile, what a complaints panel would ask. It is instructed never to invent facts, figures or strategy codes and never to propose numbers, and the response is checked structurally: unknown categories are dropped, a challenge aimed at a strategy not in the plan is re-aimed at the plan as a whole, and at most three challenges per category are kept. You resolve, accept or dismiss each challenge; the engine’s figures are untouched.

The panel appears only once a plan has been run, and the review can be switched off for the whole installation, in which case the page reports it as unavailable.

When a regulatory pack changes

Budget night, at /pack-impact, re-runs the engine for every client in the practice under two named packs and lists whose advice changes, most material first. For each client it counts strategies that became or stopped being recommended, status flips, and the largest dollar movement on any recommended strategy. The materiality score is that largest movement plus $5,000 for each membership or status change.

A client is marked material when any recommendation was added, removed or changed status, or when the largest dollar movement is at least the practice’s threshold, which defaults to $500. Each material client gets one review task, linked from the row, and an existing open task is reused rather than duplicated. The run is scheduled in the background and the page polls for it; both packs must load before it starts.

The rows link to this page for the client, so the next step after Budget night is to open the client here and run rules.