How to customise how the regulatory documents are referenced in your suitability reports

Kate Wells

Within Genovo, the Regulatory Dates step is automatically included within the Introduction section of a suitability report as standard. It provides the option for you to record the date the client was provided with their Client Agreement and the Key Facts About Our Services and Costs as shown in the screenshot below.

How to customise the names of the regulatory documents in your suitability reports

It seems from my experiences that everyone has a slightly different approach to these regulatory documents, with different companies referring to them by different names. For example, I’ve heard the second document referred to as the ‘Service proposition and engagement’ or ‘Important information about our services.’ Whilst others seem to include everything in one Client Agreement.

Whichever approach you adopt, it is easy enough to customise Genovo to reflect your own way of doing things; and the following instructions explain how Account Owners and Account Admins can easily edit their report template to reflect their required wording.

1. From your dashboard go to customisation > report content manager.
2. Select the Introduction section from the dropdown menu.
3. Click the corresponding edit icon for the snippet entitled Title & Opening for the suitability report and / or review report.

You will then be directed to the Snippet Detail page, which may look something like this:



4 . Click create custom snippet. This will create a clone of the Genovo snippet, and direct you to the Snippet Editor where you can edit the names of the documents as shown in the screenshot below.



If you only use one document, you can delete the wording and date tag associated with the second document as shown below.



5. Once you have made your edits, click save.

You will be taken back to the Snippet Detail page and your custom version will be automatically selected as active. Your custom version will now be used instead of the Genovo version in your reports.

It is worth noting that the changes you make in the Report Content Manager will only affect the report template. The documents will still be referred to as the Client Agreement and Key Facts About Our Services and Costs in the Regulatory Dates step of the Introduction section. Moreover if you have removed the wording and tag associated with the Key Facts About Our Services and Costs document from the template, the corresponding field in the step will no longer do anything.

How to remove any reference to the regulatory documents from your suitability reports

There is a school of thought that suggests there is actually no need to include any reference to these documents in your suitability reports at all.

Rory Percival, former FCA Technical Specialist, has previously said, 

‘….If the initial disclosure document is agreed with the client, then there is no need to mention the Client Agreement in the suitability report.’

If you are in agreement, then it is easy enough to customise Genovo to reflect this approach by editing the Title & Opening snippet in the Introduction section using the Report Content Manager as previously instructed.

However, instead of just editing the document names, this time you will need to delete all of the text relating to the regulatory documents as shown in the screenshot below.



Once you have made your edits, click save.

It is worth noting that despite making the above changes to the template text, you will still be prompted to confirm the dates of the documents in the Regulatory Dates step of the Introduction section. Clearly this step will now be surplus to requirements, so just leave the date fields blank and move on to the next step.

However, it is also worth noting that if you are signed up to a Company Plan Midi (or above), we can remove this step from the Introduction section workflow so it does not cause any possible confusion for you or your users. If you would like us to action this for you just drop me a quick email.

Further Reading

You’ll find lots of useful information about how to customise your reports in our Knowledge Base or by clicking on the links below.

How to edit your report template

Rory Percival: What you should and shouldn’t be including in your suitability reports

Video tutorial – How to customise your report template using the Report Content Manager

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