A financial modeling tool that enables Waystone advisors to model a wide range of investments while providing clients with a clear, visual representation of their projected results over the next 50 years.
Replace a cumbersome, 40-column-wide spreadsheet with a visual retirement planner that allows advisors to save and rapidly iterate through financial scenarios.
A dynamic Laravel application (TALL stack) with a projection service was developed to model complex financial scenarios and integrate insurance and investment data into real-time, iterative views.
The simple, modern web application allows advisors to rapidly iterate on models, giving clients a clear, visual understanding of their path to financial freedom.
Mission Brief
The Waystone team sought a client retirement visualizer from Ravenna to replace their historical reliance on cumbersome, client-specific spreadsheets. These spreadsheets were often over 40 columns wide, presenting a "wall” of numbers that was difficult for both advisors and clients to parse.
This inefficient system also required advisors to maintain separate spreadsheets for each client, making it a huge challenge to test various financial modeling scenarios. Without a simple way to capture varying investment scenarios across projected timelines, advisors were forced to create entirely new sheets for each customer scenario, which quickly became difficult for advisors to manage and confusing for clients to follow.
Data Translation and Visualization:
Our primary challenge was to assess how to best translate the existing method of displaying 30–50 years of detailed data in the form of overwhelming Excel spreadsheets into a more visually-forward format that was informative, accurate, and easy for customers to process — eliminating the “wall of numbers” that frequently made clients' eyes glaze over.
Complex Financial Modeling:
Developing accurate methods to model complex financial scenarios was critical. Key scenarios included modeling the use of debt to purchase assets, paired with inputs such as interest rates, rates of return, and cash flows.
Scenario Management and Efficiency:
The inefficient historical system required separate spreadsheets for each client. Advisors struggled to test financial modeling scenarios because they could not capture multiple time points, which forced them to create entirely new sheets for each iteration they wished to share with their clients.
Why Ravenna
Ravenna has extensive experience in modeling investments with our experience with Space Angels, as well as a good understanding of the Waystone model.
To address the limitations of the historical spreadsheet-based system, our planning process prioritized creating a dynamic, user-centric environment that balances financial complexity with visual clarity. We focused on architecting a flexible projection service capable of handling intricate financial variables—such as debt-leveraged asset purchases, varied interest rates, and compounding cash flows—while abstracting that technical depth into an intuitive interface.
By designing a modular “building block” approach to account and scenario management, we aimed to empower Waystone advisors to construct, test, and iterate on complex models in real time, effectively transforming a rigid, static calculation tool into a responsive, strategic asset for client advisory.
Creating a modular building-block system to visually support the numbers.
Given the number of potential account types that might need to be displayed, we assigned a specific color to each account category. We then used color theory to assign the color that most likely would “feel” like the kind of account it was representing.…
Once we decided to move forward with this approach, we then needed to work on an expanded color palette. With Waystone’s brand palette limited to 5 colors, we explored several options to create a secondary palette that could represent and visually distinguish account types while also feeling in-brand and not going overly rainbow-like.
Exploration with Waystone >> through size/placement/ >> communicate what clients want to know the most / ask most frequently
The development effort centered on a Laravel application that leverages the TALL stack to make it dynamic and responsive. This core framework was instrumental in building a solution that parses insurance data and integrates it with investment returns.
Next, we created an easy-to-use admin interface that allows Waystone team members to create new client profiles and manage their investments efficiently.
Finally, the modeling view was the greatest effort. We created (built?) a projection service to enable a dynamic, updatable interface with real-time iteration. This service was designed to handle all complex financial modeling inputs, including leveraging debt to purchase assets, paired with various interest rates, rates of return, and cash flow. Crucially, it enabled advisors to create and duplicate models, allowing them to save and rapidly iterate through different scenarios without losing their progress, and to successfully translate 30– 50 years' worth of data from cumbersome spreadsheets into a functional, visual model.
The resulting web application is a simple, modern retirement-planning visualization tool built to meet the needs of Waystone and its clients. It fulfills the vision of providing an easy-to-understand visual representation of a client's retirement plan, leveraging Waystone’s advisor expertise. The tool allows advisors to create and duplicate models, enabling rapid iteration and real-time visibility into the results of changes. Critically, clients now have a clear, visual way to understand how and when they will reach their own version of financial freedom.
