Plan Analytics gives you useful information about your plan, so you can make decisions that help your employees get the most from their retirement plan. This video shows you a quick overview of the Plan Analytics tool. Once you launch the tool and it loads you’ll quickly see a lot of information.
To start, in the Report View area, you’ll see the overview, which includes several Report Views in a dashboard type layout. There are Participant Demographics, Asset Allocation Information, a Past Performance Chart and a Past Performance Table. This is just a quick overview of the plan.
Most of the navigation occurs in the left panel. These three lines on the left panel are your menu icon. When you hover over the menu icon, you see report groupings. There are report views within each grouping. The main grouping is by performance. So if you’re interested in doing analysis about rate of return, you would select Performance. You also have Participation, which shows the demographics of the participants. And then there’s Balance and Activity, which has the most report views, including Activity, Balance, and Transactions. The left panel shows you how many participants you are viewing and their cumulative balance. By default, the analysis period is year-to-date, but you can change it. For additional information, just hover over one of these information icons.
If you click this dropdown box, you can see the prefilled analysis periods, as well as a custom filter that allows you to set a date range. In this example, three years of data is selected. If you select 2015 from the dropdown box, you’ll have a full year of information to analyze. You can then choose to view the information by Position, Asset Class, or Contribution Type. You can filter by assets, use computed filters, such as balance and plan returns, and filter by participant demographics and activity.
If you only want to view active and eligible participants, expand the Employee Status Participant filter and select Active and Eligible. So now you are looking at only 3,364 participants out of the original 8,418. Also, the assets have changed. If you want to quickly see which filters you’ve applied, click the Applied Filters arrow. In this example, you’re only looking at active and eligible participants. If you want more detail on who these 3,364 participants are, you can expand this top area by clicking the arrow in the top-left corner. That gives you a participant grid showing all these participants. You can scroll down and scroll across for additional data points.
Each column allows you to sort highest to lowest. The grid is searchable. In this example, we’re going to search by participant name. To search for a specific participant, type their last name in the search field, and a list of participants with the name you typed will populate. For this example, we’ll select one of the participants below who are numbered in this test environment. To go back to an overview of the whole plan, click the X on the selected participant label in the Applied Filters area and it removes that person from your view. You can also download this entire set of participants into Excel if you want to further manipulate or explore the data.
To print this page only, go to the left panel. Under Create Report, select Only This Page. When you do that, you can choose to either print the page, or click Change and save it as a .pdf. The behavior is a little different depending on your web browser. Right now, I’m using Google Chrome.
You can also click Cancel and view the report online. This generates a popup window, where you can quickly see the analysis period, any filters you’ve applied, and how many participants you’re viewing. You get the visual and the table all on one page.
To mark this report view as a favorite, click the star in the top-right of the multi-view of participant data. Now go to the menu icon, and you’ll see a new grouping called Favorites. This allows you to find your favorite report views quickly.
That’s a brief introduction to Plan Analytics, with some of the basic interactivity and navigation to help you get started. We have three additional videos that cover some of the most frequently used functions of the Plan Analytics tool. Contact your Schwab Retirement Plan Services representative to learn how you can use Plan Analytics to refine your plan.