Derek Liu, CFP

Solo RIA advisor

Replaced three separate planning tools with Horizons Advisor, saving 6 hours per client onboarding.

The challenge

Derek runs a solo fee-only RIA serving 32 client households. Before Horizons he was stitching together MoneyGuidePro for planning, a separate Monte Carlo add-on, and a custom Excel model for Roth conversion analysis. Onboarding a new household took him ~8 hours and his quarterly reviews required rebuilding the same numbers across three tools.

How they used Horizons

1Migrated his full book to Horizons Advisor on the Growth tier ($199/advisor/mo, up to 50 households/seat).
2Used the client-facing invite flow to have clients populate their own balance sheets via Plaid.
3Built a firm template for his standard Roth conversion analysis so every new household gets it by default.
4Set up white-labeled DOCX report generation for quarterly reviews.

The outcome

New household onboarding dropped from ~8 hours to ~2 hours (most of that reduction came from Plaid auto-import).
Quarterly review prep fell from ~90 minutes per household to ~30 minutes.
Annual software spend dropped from $4,800 to $1,788 — and he consolidated his stack.
Two of his households brought in referrals after seeing the new quarterly reports.

“I was paying for three tools that did one job each. Horizons does the planning, the Monte Carlo, and the Roth conversion in one workspace, and the client-facing reports are genuinely better than what I was producing before.”
— Composite profile of Derek Liu, CFP, solo ria advisor

Features they relied on

Advisor portal (Growth tier — 50 households/seat)
Client Plaid onboarding
Roth conversion planner
Branded DOCX report generator
Compliance audit trail

Takeaway for readers with a similar situation

If you're a solo RIA running three separate tools, audit what each actually does before your next renewal. Most households only need one good Monte Carlo and one good tax-aware withdrawal model.

This is a composite profile built from real Horizons beta usage patterns, not a named individual. Numbers are representative of the stated situation but any one person's outcome will differ based on their own financial circumstances. See our disclaimer.

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