Fact Find

What this screen is for

The fact-find is where client facts are entered once, so that projections, advice, insurance, documents and the client portal all read the same figures rather than each holding a copy. Every save rewrites the shared tables those screens read. That is why a blank or malformed field here shows up as a missing number somewhere else, and why this guide spends most of its length on what a save does.

The page has sixteen sections in three groups. Clients: personal details, family, goals and objectives, employment and income, superannuation, estate planning. Financial: assets, liabilities, entities and structures, business interests, tax strategy, life insurance, cash flow and budget. Admin: required documents, review and completion, adviser notes.

Saving

Edits save themselves two seconds after you stop typing. The indicator beside the household name reads “Unsaved changes”, then “Saving…”, then “Saved”. Save all in the top bar saves immediately.

Each save carries the time the fact-find was loaded, and the server refuses a save that does not agree with it. There are two ways that happens and the page tells you which. If someone else has saved the same household since you loaded it, the indicator reads “Changed elsewhere — not saved”. If your browser sent no such time at all — an old copy of the page, usually after a release — it reads “Save could not be checked — not saved”; nobody else has edited anything in that case, so there is no colleague to go and find. Either way the page stops autosaving, offers a Reload latest button, and your unsaved edits are not written. Reload, then re-enter what was lost.

One thing to know about the confirmation toast. “Fact find saved” appears after the request is sent; if the server rejected the save for a reason other than a conflict, the indicator reads “Save failed” but the toast still says saved, so trust the indicator over the toast.

Every save also writes an audit line for each field that changed, which you can open with Audit log in the top bar.

What a save writes to the rest of Aether

On every save the income, super account, asset, liability and expense records for the household are deleted and rebuilt from what is on the form. Fact-find goals are rebuilt the same way. Insurance policies, business entities, dependants and estate documents are updated in place instead.

Three consequences follow from rebuild-on-save.

• A blank money field means no record, not zero. An income row with no amount is not written at all, so the projection and advice screens see no income for that client. A typed “0” is written as zero.
• An amount the form cannot read is treated as not recorded. “TBC”, “$12,000” and “12,000” with a comma are all unreadable; the row is kept but its figure is blank rather than silently zero, so type plain digits.
• A negative amount is stored as typed. Nothing stops “-500” reaching a sum insured or a balance, and the number will render as a negative. Use the liability fields for what is owed.

Marital status and employment status are matched against a fixed vocabulary; a value outside it is dropped from the shared record rather than written. Marital status matters more than it looks: without it, projections model no Age Pension and no seniors tax offset.

Ownership

Each asset and liability carries an owners list with a percentage per owner. A missing percentage is read as 100; an explicit 0 stays 0. Where an item still uses the older “Individual / Joint” choice, Individual means the primary client at 100% and Joint splits at the recorded joint split, defaulting to 50/50. A household with no partner collapses a Joint item onto the primary client at 100%.

An owner that cannot be matched to a client or entity is dropped with nothing substituted, and if no owner survives the item is written with no owner at all. The page does not warn you; the symptom is an asset that vanishes from one person’s projection view and from ownership-based splits. Re-select the owner and save again.

Figures the fact-find derives for you

Frequencies are annualised as weekly times 52, fortnightly times 26, monthly times 12. A frequency the form does not recognise is treated as annual.

Two kinds of row are derived from assets and never typed:

• Rental and investment income. A property’s gross rental, annualised, becomes a rental income row for each client owner at their percentage. An investment or cash asset with a stated dividend amount, or a value and a yield, becomes an investment income row the same way.
• Property expenses and loan interest. Property expenses are split by owner. For a liability linked to an asset, annual interest is the balance times the interest rate where a rate is recorded, otherwise the annualised repayment.

Both are skipped for a client whose income or expenses carry an override on the cash flow section, which is how you replace a derived figure with a typed one.

The summary figures the page and other screens quote: net surplus is combined net income less cash flow expenses, liability repayments and insurance premiums; net worth is the clients’ own holdings less their share of liabilities, with entity-held holdings shown separately rather than added in. Salary income excludes salary sacrifice.

Age is whole years from the date of birth on the day the page is read.

Readiness

The strip at the top and the topic list beside it are not a percentage of fields filled. They measure, per advice topic, whether the evidence that topic needs is present. There are ten topics: superannuation, insurance, investments, debt management, estate planning, tax planning, cash flow and budgeting, retirement planning, Centrelink, and business planning. Each has a short list of requirements, and each requirement is met either by evidence on file (a date of birth, a super account, a policy in force) or by a yes/no declaration you answer on the strip.

Only topics marked in scope on the Scoping screen count. Until scope is set, the status reads “scope not set” rather than zero. The four statuses are scope not set, not started, in progress and complete.

The rules that decide a requirement:

• A requirement that depends on a declaration is not applicable, and not counted, while that declaration is “no” or unanswered. Answering “Any dependants?” with No removes “Dependant details” from the count.
• A declaration answered “no” while evidence exists is counted as satisfied but flagged as a conflict, and the strip says “Recorded evidence conflicts with an earlier answer”.
• Requirements marked optional (rollover history, risk profile) never count.
• The percentage per topic is satisfied over applicable, with no weighting.

The dots beside the section names are a rougher, local measure: a section shows as done when at least 40% of its fields hold a value. They are a navigation aid, not the readiness verdict.

Conflicts the page reports

Two self-contradictions are checked on every save and shown on the Assets section. More than one property typed as the home, or a “Homeowner: yes” answer with no property typed Home. Either one stops the Age Pension assets test in projections from telling which property is exempt, so those figures are suppressed until it is fixed. A blank property type counts as Home.

Goals

A goal on the Goals section reaches the rest of Aether only once its status is submitted and it has a description. Each carries a stable id, and the projections goal coverage strip and the goal tracker match on that id rather than on the name, so renaming a goal keeps its history. A goal deleted here is removed from the shared record on the next save. The retirement plan on the same section is written as one goal with a fixed id.

Insurance entered here

Policies recorded on the Life insurance section are written one per cover type per client, with sum insured and premium left blank when nothing readable was typed. Premium frequency is always recorded as annual. Removing a cover soft-deletes its policy; adding it back revives the same record. Policies the advice engine produces are kept apart from these and neither side overwrites the other.

Details submitted by the client

A client can complete “Before we meet” in the portal. Nothing they enter is written to the fact-find. On submit, their answers arrive as a proposal on this page, in a drawer at the top, with a message in the household conversation: “Your client submitted before-meeting details for your review.” You confirm or discard each proposal; only a confirmation writes to the fact-find.

A submission is refused while the household has no adviser assigned, and the client is told their draft is still saved.

Balances from linked accounts

Where an account is linked to a bank or platform feed, the current balance arrives as an observation and appears as a ribbon on the account with Accept into fact find. If the practice has turned on automatic acceptance with a drift limit, an observed balance within that limit is written into the fact-find for you, without refreshing the fact-find date. Outside the limit it waits for you.

Statement extraction

Extract statement reads an uploaded statement with Vesper. The page says what happens next: a statement for an account you already hold is recorded as a balance to review against the current figure, and anything else becomes a proposal for you to confirm. Nothing is written to the fact-find by the extraction itself.