Looking at CashCalc alternatives? Judge any cashflow tool by the review meeting it creates

Advisers comparing cashflow planning tools such as CashCalc and Voyant mostly meet feature tables, and mature tools look alike on paper. Anthony Marris argues the better test is the review meeting where a client switches on income: whether the client can follow the stress scenarios, whether the adviser can change an assumption live, and whether the tool reuses data the firm already holds. He suggests running one anonymised transition meeting with each shortlisted vendor on the firm's own data.

Same risk score. Opposite exposure.

That's how Matthew Hull summed up the problem in his piece on switching on income, published here on 6 October. His example comes from our CRP and decumulation guide: a 63 year old with a £640,000 pension who wants £36,000 a year from her SIPP to bridge the gap until her state pension and defined benefit income start. A standard questionnaire puts her in the same risk band as a 45 year old who's still saving. One of them is buying units every month. The other is selling them.

His argument is about the proposition. The move into drawdown should be a documented event, with the client re-segmented and a withdrawal approach chosen and written down. But one line in his list of what the file should record is really about software. He wants the file to show the cash flow modelling run at the start, including the stress scenarios, and the withdrawal rate the client chose having seen them.

Having seen them. That's the phrase I keep coming back to, because it puts the client in the room with the model.

What a feature table won't tell you

If you've searched for CashCalc alternatives, or typed Voyant vs CashCalc into a search bar, you'll have found plenty of feature tables. They're useful up to a point. Both tools are established, and both do a lot.

FE CashCalc's own page describes a visual timeline for life events and goals, net and gross cashflow plans, deterministic and stochastic stress testing, a presentation mode, and side-by-side comparisons of current and proposed plans. It now carries mortgage and protection inside the same plan. Voyant's site lists goal-based planning, a timeline, plan comparison and withdrawal strategies, and describes using its stress tests to "lead the conversation".

Those are real strengths. And because the feature lists of mature tools tend to look alike, I'd judge a cashflow tool somewhere else: in the review meeting, at the moment a client decides how much to take.

Judge it by the conversation it creates

Start with whether the client can follow it. A 63 year old about to start drawdown needs to see what happens to her money if markets fall in year two rather than year twelve, because that's the order-of-returns risk Hull describes, and it's the one her risk score can't see. If the stress scenario needs a glossary before it makes sense across the table, she'll nod and sign. The note in her file will say she saw the scenarios. Whether she understood them is another matter.

Then ask whether you can change an assumption while she's watching. The questions clients ask at this point are rarely technical. What if I took a bit less? What if I waited a couple of years? If the honest answer is that you'll rerun it and send it over, the moment has gone, and so has most of the value of having the meeting at all. The withdrawal rate she chooses should come out of her watching the numbers move, with you beside her, in that room.

The last test happens before anyone sits down. Most firms already hold the fact-find, the valuations, the risk profile and the plan details somewhere, usually in the back office. A modeller that needs all of it keyed in again costs paraplanner time and invites small mismatches between what the file says and what the chart shows. The client feels it too, when they're asked for the same figures they gave you last year. FE CashCalc's site carries a guide on reducing manual keying of client information, which tells you vendors know this matters. So ask how it works with your own back office, on your own data, rather than in a demo account.

Why the bar rises once income starts

Hull's piece makes two further points that change how often this conversation happens.

The guide notes that six monthly reviews in the early drawdown years are increasingly seen as the supervisory expectation, with annual reviews once circumstances settle. And it cites ONS data showing a 65 year old man has roughly a one in four chance of reaching 95, and a 65 year old woman roughly one in three. A longer horizon and a tighter cadence mean the cashflow plan comes out on the table more often, for more years.

So a tool that's slightly awkward once a year becomes awkward twice a year, for a client who may be drawing income for three decades. Every one of those meetings is a chance to rebuild her confidence after a bad market, or to lose it.

A test you can run on your shortlist

Pick one real client who started taking income in the last year and anonymise the file. Ask each vendor on your list, Wealth Analytica's Cashflow Forecaster included, to run that transition meeting with you. Load the data you already hold rather than retyping it. Show the stress scenarios. Then change the withdrawal rate live and see how quickly the picture updates.

Watch the screen through a client's eyes, or better, sit a colleague who doesn't do cashflow planning next to you and see whether they can follow it. Afterwards, check what lands in the file. Does it show the scenarios and the rate the client chose, in a form a reviewer could pick up in a year's time?

That's the evidence Hull's trigger asks for. It's also what the client remembers about the meeting.

When your last client picked a withdrawal rate, what had they actually seen on the screen first?

Every Wealth Analytica article is fact-checked against primary sources where applicable. Read our editorial policy for our sourcing and review standards.