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Preparing your Insurance Statement of Advice

How to edit your SOA and make adjustments and refinements before presenting this to your client!

Angel Chessum avatar
Written by Angel Chessum
Updated over a week ago

With Trail's Statement of Advice Editor, you have the freedom to customize your advice document in order to present your Insurance Advice to your client! This can be done within any Personal Risk Insurance Advice Opportunity.

There is great flexibility in editing the SOA so you can produce one suits your advice and your business. This is through our SOA Editor, which allows you to create a document and then download it as a PDF, and then send it to your client! Learn more in this article 👍

You can also learn more about SOA document templating here!

In this article you will learn:

  • Where to edit your SOA

  • How to navigate the SOA Editor

  • Editing tools

  • Saving changes

  • Finishing Up - Download or Email your SOA


Where to Edit your SOA

When you have completed the previous sections of your Insurance Advice opportunity, including the Nature & Scope, the Fact Find and the Needs Analysis along with the other areas of Advice like Existing Cover, Provider Research and Recommended Cover -

Then you are ready to then edit your SOA document! 🎉 Once you arrive at the Statement of Advice section, first things to do:

  1. Apply your relevant / best suited SOA template from the "Select Template" dropdown

  2. Once you've applied the template, click 'View & Edit SOA'. This will open up the SOA Editor in another tab ready for you to get started on making changes.

If you are unsure how to get to this point, you can view our great training video which will help you produce a Statement of Advice.


How to navigate the SOA Editor

Within the SOA editor:

  • To the left is the outline of all the sections within your SOA. This is based on the SOA template you applied.

  • At the top is the formatting toolbar with the editing tools available. These allow you to undo previous changes, edit or highlight text, add tables, or even add page breaks to move content onto a new page.

  • In the centre is the editable SOA page

  • To the top right, you'll see the status of your changes.
    Important Note: Any changes you make will be saved automatically

  • To the top left, you can navigate "Back to Insurance Application" which is your Insurance Advice Opportunity.

The Outline

On the left-hand side of the editor you will see an outline of all the sections found in the SOA, basically a 'live' order of contents, which you can jump to pages easily to review and edit.

Note: Certain sections of the SOA can not be edited through the editor. These are the contents page (which changes dynamically) and any documents you have added to the SOA yourself.


Editing Tools

Much like a Word document or Google Document, there are several tools across the top of the document which will facilitate making any changes you need:

Undo/Redo: If you make an edit and then change your mind you can click this button or press control+z to undo those changes.

Text editing: You can change fonts, change the size, style, or colour as well as highlight key parts of the document.

Tables: You can add in additional tables of the same style as the default tables as well as edit existing tables by clicking on them using these functions. Hover over the table to additional editing options.

Image Uploads: Click on this and you’ll be presented with a box where you can drag and drop, or click, to upload an image of your liking.

Paragraph formatting: This can be used to adjust the layout of text whether it be indenting parts of the paragraph or creating lists.

Page breaks: This function will allow you to tell the software to stop putting content on that page and start a new one. This is really useful for ensuring each key section of the report can be shown on its own page.

You can do this almost anywhere in the editor, however, it will not let you page break within a table. As page breaking within a table will break your resultant Statement of Advice when you export it.

Shortcut Keys:


Saving changes

As you edit the SOA your changes will be saved as you go. This is confirmed by the top right corner where you will see this, when the changes are actively being saved:

In the event you lose/ drop-out of your internet connection, you will be notified by both a red dropdown banner and the bubble in the top right-hand corner that warns you that you're offline and therefore current changes will not save.

Any changes made will be saved once you re-connect to the internet, as long as you do not close the browser. You'll see the below banner to show that you're reconnects and can commence work on the SOA again!


Finishing up

Once you have made your changes you can then either:

Download

Download a copy of the SOA as a PDF file to your computer. Then choose how to use this or present this to your client

Email Client

And then/ or use Trail to email a copy to your client (as a PDF attachment). This will bring up an email template for you to edit the email wording, and the SOA pdf will be attached.

To choose one of these options, click 'Export Document' at the bottom left of your screen:

Note: If you have attached any files that are not PDFs or images they will not be merged into the final document but will be downloaded alongside the PDF.


And that’s how you use the Statement of Advice editor to your advantage!

What's Next?

Check out below for further information about SOAs, the Insurance Advice process and how to get to this point:


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