The PensionSummary provided is great if you want to really analyze where pension splitting changes arise. However, most of my clients don’t care about the line-by-line differences. They are interested in how much each spouse’s balance owing or refund has changed.
The information on the existing PensionSummary page is printed in small font to fit all the information on one page. There is so much on the page that clients don’t read it. It’s also intuitively backwards because it shows tax increases as negative amounts and tax decreases as positive amounts. I would like to see a “lite” version of this summary with less information and larger print that can be included in the client’s copy or the copy I review with the clients.
The existing page is great for the preparer but is ignored by the average client.
The pension splitter that you wrote was the best @kevin !
It worked awesome, and clients loved the clean report showing how much money they saved.
It was cool to actually watch it doing its thing and working its magic.
I remember that Kevin’s spreadsheet was the actual impetus for Intuit to add that automation to ProFile – without it they never would have bothered. Even after they added it, I still used Kevin’s spreadsheet for several years to double-check ProFIle’s calcs – seems to me I had to crack the password on the spreadsheet file in order to update it though?
Actually, @Mike, ProFile had the pension optimization in their program first. I checked a few clients against the optimum pension split that Profile was coming up with and found differences. Some were small but many were hundreds or thousands of dollars different! Since Profile let you access their calculations in VBA, I set up a script to calculate the optimum split. It ended up doing better than Intuit’s calculations more often than not so I made it more of an app to streamline the process. There were about twenty of us who were using it with Profile. You even cracked my password, I believe!
