Software engineer trying to understand where TPA software falls short

I'm a software engineer with a compliance background, and I've spent the last few weeks reading this board and talking to a handful of TPA owners and administrators about the tools they run on. Nothing built yet, and I'm not selling anything.

The pattern I keep hearing: Relius is winding down, ftwilliam is solid but the compliance module is thin, and a lot of the real work - cross-tested allocations, combo plan testing, controlled group questions - still ends up in Excel.

Two questions for people who do this every day:

1. If one piece of your annual cycle could be automated properly, which one?
2. What's in your personal spreadsheets that the software should do?

Happy to share a summary of what I hear back with anyone who's interested. And if you'd rather talk than type, I'm at arnav@arnavt.com.

There needs to be an automated way to do cross testing. It is time consuming to do this in Excel or Relius. You have to keep making changes until it passes. There should be a way to give the owners the max and let the system give everyone else just enough to pass.

The trouble with not using Excel as I see it is:

1) Goal seek.  How much 401k can an HCE contribute without failing testing? Goal seek!  How much profit sharing does Suzie need to get an EBAR of 7.932? Goal Seek!

2) Also, instant result updating.  If I change profit sharing in Excel, the EBAR recalcs instantly and my pass/fail formula updates instantly.  In these software programs, you update profit sharing, you have to repost in one way or another, and then run compliance testing reports. Just a couple of minutes but if you're trying to hone in on that perfect scenario it can be maddening.

These larger systems do not lend themselves to either one of those tools.  Therefore, I use Excel to find my scenario, and then (in my case) use FT to verify my results are accurate.  I actually like FT a lot.  Aside from the fact that you cannot choose different interest rates for pre and post, their system does everything it needs to for Rate Group Testing.