David Drucker at Morningstar talks about the perpetual dream of all-in-one software. This theoretical software would do everything for an advisor—portfolio management, contact management, trading and financial planning. It’s an admirable goal but he hits the fundamental problem on the head: “jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none”. The article goes on to talk about the numerous integration options available between the current best-of-breed software packages.

I’m chuckling because Morningstar is attempting this themselves with Morningstar Advisor Workstation. They’ve been having the problems he describes. On the Financial Planning newsgroups, people have said the following:

“The software has many unsolvable problems apparently. We are currently paying $425 per month for something that doesn’t work. I feel like we are their troubleshooters.”

“The biggest issue for me is the data load, which seems unreasonably manual (and no direct feeds are available).”

“The portfolio accounting portion of this suite should be considered a beta version.”

Morningstar should be commended for having reporters independent enough to write critical articles. And I would further encourage them to keep making forward progress toward a one-platform solution for the industry. It’s a long hard road but, as Drucker correctly states, at the end of that road is the Holy Grail of advisor software.

Don’t give up!