Part three of a six-part guide to setting up, monitoring and troubleshooting datafeeds in Xplan.
Article 3: Monitoring - keeping your datafeeds healthy
The best time to find a datafeed issue is before it affects a client review, a portfolio report or an advice document. And definitely before a client notices it in their client portal! That is why monitoring matters. A short, consistent daily check can reveal whether data arrived, whether it was imported successfully and whether anything needs investigation.
Start with notifications
Xplan User Notifications can provide a summary of data imported for an adviser and highlight items that need review. These may include new clients or accounts waiting to be mapped, invalid or expired credentials, newly created securities, or holdings that are out of balance.
For a minimum level of visibility, advisers should generally receive notifications for their own clients. A broader All visible clients setting can be useful where support staff or administrators need to monitor everything they can access. Selecting Other Data also helps surface non-client-specific events, such as a new security being created because it is not available through Iress Market Data.
Use Configuring User Notifications for Datafeeds to set these options for yourself or for other users.
Notifications are useful, but they are not the whole monitoring process. They tell you that something happened; the reports help you understand what happened.
Use the right report for the question
The Datafeed Reporting tools provide several views, each answering a different question.
- Platform Summary: Is the provider broadly healthy? This high-level view shows positions, balanced holdings, balance percentages and the last update time.
- Adviser Summary: Is one adviser or Adviser ID affected? This provides similar information with the ability to drill down to a specific adviser.
- Import Summary: When was a particular data type last imported? Depending on the feed, this may include trades, income, asset data, insurance, liabilities, security prices or allocations.
- Reconciliation Summary: Which individual accounts or holdings need investigation?
When reviewing an adviser, remember that the figures may be based on entities linked to that adviser by the datafeed, rather than every entity assigned to the adviser in the wider Xplan site.
Investigate reconciliation issues
The Data Reconciliation process compares information supplied by the platform with what Xplan has calculated from underlying transactions. You can filter by client, account, asset, provider, adviser and reconciliation status.
Selecting Quantity Reconciled = No, Cost Reconciled = No or Market Value Reconciled = No quickly narrows the list to holdings that need review.
It is important to understand what is being compared. For portfolio holdings, Xplan primarily reconciles units or shares - not the dollar values. A dollar difference does not always mean the unit balance is wrong: Xplan and the provider may be using different unit prices, particularly where live or delayed pricing is involved.
When reviewing an out-of-balance holding, compare the provider’s transaction listing with the transactions in Xplan. Check whether transactions are missing, duplicated or manually entered. Look at the External ID column: a value generally indicates that the transaction came through the datafeed, while a blank value suggests it was entered manually.
Build a daily routine
A sensible daily routine is simple:
- Check notifications and resolve urgent items.
- Review the Platform or Adviser Summary for unusual changes.
- Check the Import Summary when data appears to be missing.
- Filter the Reconciliation Summary for out-of-balance holdings.
- Review unmapped clients and accounts.
- Record recurring issues and escalate with supporting evidence.
Aim to clear your unmapped accounts every day. If you’ve received an account via a datafeed, then it is linked to an adviser in your practice - map it to the correct entity. Or else set it to Do Not Import - this clears it from the unmapped screen but it remains easily retrievable if the data is needed in the future.
Monitoring does not mean chasing every small variation immediately. It means knowing what changed, understanding why it changed and having enough information to decide whether action is needed. The aim is not a perfectly silent system; it is a system where exceptions are visible, explainable and managed.
💡 Pro Tip: Compare your site’s quality percentage with the vendor’s quality percentage. A gap may point to local mapping, transaction or configuration issues rather than a provider-wide problem.
How’s your data looking?
Jump into Mappings > Client Focus Accounts and Mappings > IPS External Accounts, set Listing Option to List Unmapped. How many records are unmapped?
Then open the Platform Summary: does the percentage of balanced holdings look consistent with what you expected?
If you have not reviewed those figures recently, capture today’s numbers as your baseline. Revisit them after your next cleanup or configuration review.
