A plan your clients can follow: a blueprint for Financial Planning

You meet a new household and ask the questions you have asked for fifteen years. What do you own. What do you owe. When do you want to stop working. You gather their statements, their tax return, their policies and the will they have not updated since the first child. You build the plan. Cash flow, net worth, a retirement projection with three scenarios, tax, insurance, estate, and an investment policy statement. A year later you sit down with them again and work through the annual review agenda. The method lives in your head, in a questionnaire you wrote in Word, and in a planning software template nobody else in the firm can run without you.

This page is a blueprint for a Flow Playbook that carries that method. It is not built. AI Consulting is a Playbook that exists today, and its launch story is the walkthrough for every step below. This blueprint is yours to take. Build it from your own know-how, put your name on it, and launch it as your Playbook. If you do, I would like to hear about it.

The opportunity

The advice business keeps growing and stays small. The Investment Adviser Association counts 16,544 advisers managing $176.8 trillion for 73.7 million clients, and 92.8 percent of those firms have 100 or fewer people. CFP Board reports a record 107,529 CFP professionals, with 6,709 new ones in a single year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects about 17,100 openings a year for personal financial advisors through 2035, many of them in firms where the method is one person’s.

AI is already in the office. Schwab found 63 percent of independent RIAs use AI tools, more than double the share in 2023, mostly for meeting notes and email. The Financial Planning Standards Board asked 8,095 planners and found 83 percent expect AI to help them serve clients better, up from 78 percent a year earlier. The tools take notes. What most firms do not have is the method written down where the tools can read it and a client can read it too.

The method also has to outlive the planner. Cerulli expects more than 100,000 advisors to retire within ten years, with 41.4 percent of the assets. A quarter of them are unsure of their succession plan. The rules keep moving under the plan, too. The SEC updated its marketing rule FAQ on March 19, 2025, on when a gross figure may be shown. The IRS set the 2026 401(k) limit at $24,500, and every plan’s numbers change again next November. And the custom GPT some planners used to hold their method retires on December 11, 2026. A Playbook is plain files in your own GitHub. Nobody can retire it.

The signals

Each figure measures something narrower than it sounds. Surveys count who answered. Vendor research counts a vendor’s view. A market estimate is a model. Read them as a direction, not a forecast.

What your Playbook holds

The figure at the top of this page is the folder as it could sit on GitHub. Six Markdown files. Here is what each one does.

The README is the front page. It says who the Playbook is for, what a reader will have at the end, and the order to read the documents in. A stepped figure shows a household’s answers becoming a plan. An isometric figure maps the path.

Planning Process Method is the backbone. The seven steps of the financial planning process as your firm runs them, who owns each, and what must be true before a plan is presented. A Workflow Path draws it. The plan delivery checklist is an Approval Card, so the record of who checked what stays with the plan.

Discovery Questionnaire is the first two meetings. The questions you ask a household, in the order you ask them, and the documents you collect alongside. The questionnaire is a Form, so a household can answer it in the Reader. A Guided Exercise walks a couple through ranking their goals before they ever see a projection.

Plan Structure and Review Agenda is the plan itself. The sections in order, from cash flow and net worth to the retirement projection, tax, insurance, estate, and the investment policy statement. A Table holds the plan outline and the target mix. A Scenario Model Skill draws retire-at-62, 65 and 67 from the projection. A Chart shows the projection. The document ends with the annual review agenda, so the review starts from the plan it checks.

Client Education and Compliance Standard is how a one-page explainer on Roth conversions or Social Security timing gets written, sourced and dated. Every claim links to its source. What you have not confirmed is marked, and Flow counts the marks until you answer them. A Register Skill keeps the checks each piece must pass before it goes out.

Worked Example is a full plan and a first annual review for a made-up household, filled in end to end, with the choices explained. A new planner learns more from one finished plan than from ten rules.

What Flow does for this work

Chat answers from the folder. The README names up to six questions a reader will ask. An associate planner opens Chat with no document open and sees those questions as buttons. Each answer links to the page it came from. When the folder does not say, Chat says so, instead of guessing at a tax rule.

A Skill draws the retirement scenarios. Select the projection table in a client’s plan and run Scenario Model. It draws the cases the text names, retiring at 62, 65 or 67, and names what is missing instead of inventing a return. The figure waits in Review Changes until you keep it. A Workflow Path does the same for the seven steps in the Method.

A Form takes the discovery answers. The Discovery Questionnaire is a Form with text, numbers, dates and choices. A household fills it in the Reader and presses Submit, and every entry is recorded beside the document. The plan delivery checklist is an Approval Card. You tick the items, type your name and press Sign off. One signed record stays with the plan.

A Job keeps the limits table current. Bring the IRS limits page in with New from Web Page and choose Follow the source. A Job then keeps the contribution limits table in the Review Agenda current from that page. On a night when nothing changed it skips without calling a model. Every November the new numbers arrive as a change you review.

A client’s Excel comes in with a checklist. A household’s budget spreadsheet or a PDF statement comes in as a document, tables still tables. A short list in Sources says what to check before you rely on it. On the finished plan, Sources shows what it was made from, and Change Summary shows what changed this week and who changed it.

A door for your own agents. With Flow Pro, Settings opens a door for the Claude Code or Codex you run in Terminal. The agent can read the Playbook’s reading order, search its documents, and propose a draft that arrives in Review Changes under its name. Flow itself sends nothing anywhere.

How you build it in Flow

The AI Consulting story walks every one of these steps on a real screen. Follow it with your own material.

1. Add an empty folder and choose it. Chat answers from the folder before any document exists. The walkthrough shows it at an empty folder, and Chat already in it.
2. Ask Chat for the README. Describe who the Playbook is for and what you want a reader to have at the end. Chat writes it in your voice and marks every claim it cannot stand behind. See a front page, in the author’s voice.
3. Bring in what you already have. The discovery questionnaire from Word, a past plan with the household’s details removed, and the IRS limits page you cite every year. New from Web Page turns a page or a shared AI chat into a document with its links kept. See an old AI chat became a reference.
4. Let Ideas pick a Skill. Press Suggest on your Method document. Ideas reads the sections and names a Skill for each, a Workflow Path for the seven steps, a Register for the compliance checks. A figure or a form waits in Review Changes until you keep it.

5. Ask Chat for the next document with your own pages as sources. The Plan Structure can be written from your Method and the old plan you brought in. Repeat until the path is done. See the next document, from his own pages.
6. Review every change. When you merge two discovery questions or rename a document, every page that pointed at it follows. See Review changed the plan, and the source followed.

Apply it to a client job

A Playbook is for using, not only reading. Take the Maplewood household, a made-up couple in their late fifties. Start a folder for them and bring in their discovery answers and last year’s return. Ask Chat to draft the cash flow and retirement sections from the Plan Structure, and to mark every line it is unsure about. Run Scenario Model for three retirement ages. The Method’s delivery checklist tells you what to confirm before the plan goes out, and you sign it.

A year later the review starts from the Review Agenda in the same folder. When the Maplewoods ask about a Roth conversion, the explainer comes from the Client Education Standard, with its sources and its marks. The question goes into the Register, and the lesson goes back into the Standard. A new associate can read the Method and the Questionnaire on their first day and run a first meeting the way you would.

Maplewood discovery questionnaire.mdMaplewood financial plan.mdMaplewood financial plan.mdMaplewood financial plan.mdPlan delivery checklist.mdPlan Structure and Review Agenda.md Submitted2 claims to check1 change to review4 edits keptSigned, 1 recordUpdate available

The Maplewood household

Maplewood discovery questionnaire

Proposed

Form · Submit

Submit

Submitted

The Maplewood household

Maplewood financial plan

Proposed

Chart · Line

2 claims to check

The Maplewood household

Maplewood financial plan

Proposed

Scenario Model

1 change to review

The Maplewood household

Maplewood financial plan

Proposed

Diff

4 edits kept

The Maplewood household

Plan delivery checklist

Proposed

Approval Card · Sign off

Sign off

Signed, 1 record

The Maplewood household

Plan Structure and Review Agenda

Update · 1 document

planning-method · 1 document

README.mdPlanning Process Method.mdDiscovery Questionnaire.mdPlan Structure and Review Agenda.md

Update SelectedNot Now

Update available

01Start the household folder02Ask for the plan draft03Draw the retirement scenarios04Review what changed05Sign off the delivery checklist06The client's update arrives

Publish it, and keep it current

When the folder is ready, choose Publish and then GitHub Repository. Flow sends the files and nothing else. A reader brings the Playbook in with File, then New from GitHub, and the folder’s address. Check the repository’s visibility first. Your method can be public while every household’s statements, returns and plan stay in their own folder on your Mac.

When a rule changes and you publish again, every reader’s copy shows the update as a change they review. They keep their own edits. Nothing is replaced behind their back.

The same source can also become a GitHub Pages site, a PDF, an EPUB, or Word and Excel files for a client’s team. Chat on the Playbook, and the figures a reader steps through, stay in Flow.

What it costs

Bringing any Playbook into Flow is free on Base. Writing with Chat, and Chat on a Playbook, need Flow Pro at $10 a month. Publishing to GitHub needs the Publish add-on too, another $10 a month. There is no fee per Playbook, so publish one or twenty for the same price. Any AI you connect follows the terms of that service. Publishing does not bring clients on its own. It gives the clients you earn a living copy of your method.

Start here

Read the walkthrough once, end to end. Then add an empty folder in Flow, name it, and describe your planning process to Chat in three sentences. The README it writes is the first document of your Playbook. If you want to talk it through first, the Playbooks page has one email address and four questions.