Anybody using FT William for plan administration?

[M Norton]

We are considering switching from Relius to ftwilliam for plan administration. Does anyone have any information on how the two products compare?

Thanks!

[Chippy]

We use FT William for plan administration. It has a lot of good things, but there is also a bunch of stuff it cannot do. Their customer service is unbeatable, they get back to you in less than an hour. You can't beat the price. If you have basic plans, it's great. It's the plans that are "out of the box" that don't work so well.

[12AX7]

Ask a lot of questions before making any decision to switch admin systems. Relius is a well-deveolped system. FT William needs to get up to speed, and has a different approach compared to other existing admin systems.

[austin3515]

I don;t love Relius, but I do love that you can create custom reports in Crystal which we rely on heavily. Frankly without them I wouldn't like Relius much at all (or any other platform for that matter). But regardless, the idea of converting to another system makes me shudder at a) all the work and b) all the time mastering a new system. I barely have time to time to tie my shoes

[12AX7]

That's why I wear bunny slippers to work . But seriously for a moment, you cannot create custom reports in the FT William admin system which is a big negative. You can create .csv exports of data and create custom reports outside of the system, but I ain't that smart.

[pmacduff]

I have to concur with what Chippy said re: the excellent customer service and working well on "basic" plans.

also what Austin said about changing systems ("shudder to think"!).

We were going to make the switch to ft and then found out that there were quite a few different/various things that we needed the system to do that it could not do at that time.

Relius has more capabilities for our needs right now.

[Guest A_Dude]

P.S. Please early Ft William Admin users work out all the quirks, and help them by reccomending all the additional bells and whistles we need!

I have used FT Williams Docs & 5500 in the past, but right now we use Relius. And the Relius/Corbel doc system is just not as easy to use....plus the doc & admin programs don't interoperate I do expect great thing as this Admin software develops though!

[M Norton]

Relius docs are a lot more expensive than ftwilliam docs and with restatements coming we were looking at their docs package. While we were looking we thought we would check out their other software.

pmacduff, you said there were quite a few things that the ftw system wouldn't do. That's what concerns me, that we might switch and then realize we were losing some capability. Can you elaborate on what those things were?

A_Dude, so you used the ftw 5500 and then went back to Relius? Why did you leave ftw?

Thanks to all for your replies!

[pmacduff]

We process per payroll investment splits for some of our "old fashioned" balance forward plans. The investment elections are loaded into Relius and all we do is import or enter the 401(k) deferrals and/or match for the weekly contributions and the system splits into the funds. ft wm didn't have that capablility and we would have had to go back to splitting them in Excel or some spreadsheet program and then importing to ft. (extra steps)

Compensation is another issue. We have many quarterly and semi-annual plans for which we enter the period compensation and produce period valuations. At the end of the year Relius totals that for the annual compensation. On ft wm we would have to import the total annual compensation. A few of my large companies provide compensation on a monthly basis so that could get cumbersome.

We have some plans with lots of divisions and multiple employer plans that require testing (i.e. ADP/ACP, top heavy, coverage, etc.) on the individual divisions. They were working on that and it may already be available.

We test many of our "cross-tested" plans by breaking them into component plans to pass non discrim. testing and at the time we were looking ft wm wasn't able to do that.

These are a few of the features we need and use frequently. ft. wm may have added some of these things, it was almost a year ago we were looking at them for admin software.

Hope this is helpful. I would like to reiterate again that their customer service was awesome and response time was great!

[Guest A_Dude]

I changed jobs. I would gladly have my current employer switch to ftw! But, I don't get to make those decisions...(and yes I showed my boss the cost savings).

[M Norton]

Thanks so much for the response! We were concerned about processing divisions and also about component testing - big drawback not to have that capability.