How to Automate ftwilliam.com

The plan document and the Form 5500 come out of the same record

ftwilliam.com is the software a third-party administrator runs a whole book of retirement plans on. It began as an independent product and has been a Wolters Kluwer one since 2010, which is why the domain now lands on Wolters Kluwer's own site. TPAs, recordkeepers and the ERISA practices working alongside them are who is signed into it.

What lives in it is a plan, from the day it is drafted. The adoption agreement and the basic plan document. The amendments and the restatement cycle. The annual census and the tests it feeds. The Form 5500 and its schedules, the 8955-SSA, the 1099-R for every distribution paid out of the trust. Welfare and non-qualified documents, for the firms that write those too.

One plan is a modest amount of work. A few hundred plans, each on its own calendar with its own sponsor and its own missing piece, is a business.

Testing season is spent waiting for other people's spreadsheets

Very little of the year goes on the arithmetic. It goes on getting hold of the inputs.

The census request goes out in January. By March some of it is back, and some of that is in the format asked for. Somebody emails a sponsor about the hours column, waits a fortnight, emails again, and ends up calling the payroll clerk who actually has the file. A restatement deadline needs a signed adoption agreement, which is another round of asking. A distribution is held up on a consent that has not come back. A plan changed recordkeepers in June and nobody mentioned it, so the trust statements for the second half sit on a portal the firm has not been given a login to yet.

Then the filing window opens and every one of those loose ends turns urgent on the same week, across every plan at once.

ftwilliam.com

Census that chases itself Who has uploaded, who has not, and how long they have had the request, with a reminder drafted per firm instead of per plan.

Deadlines matched to signatures Restatement and amendment dates checked against whether the signed document actually came back, so the list is of what is outstanding.

Balances read off the recordkeeper Trust figures pulled from each recordkeeper portal and compared with the valuation, so a difference is a question in April.

ftwPortal Pro reaches the sponsor, and stops there

A real part of this is already automated, and the modules are genuinely joined up: data entered in one is shared with the others rather than rekeyed into each.

ftwPortal Pro gives the sponsor a secure two-way portal to view, print, save and e-sign documents, and lets the firm batch prepare notices and amendments and post them there for review. The Distribution Tracking Software covers the steps around processing a distribution, with notifications and alerts, loan tracking, portal data collection and an audit trail of every email, e-signature and file delivered. The 5500 module batch prints Summary Annual Reports, Annual Funding Notices and 8955-SSAs. ftwLink is the API, for firms with a vendor or a developer building against it.

The line all of that stops at is the firm's own door. Every one of those features works on a plan record ftwilliam.com holds, or reaches a sponsor through a portal ftwilliam.com runs. The recordkeeper's website is neither. Nor is the custodian's statement, the payroll provider's deposit history, or the government site that acknowledges a filing. Each of those is a login an administrator already has, opened by hand and read by eye.

A plan year can be watched instead of remembered

The year stops depending on whose calendar it sits in once those sites get opened on a schedule rather than on a memory.

The plan list read every week for restatement and amendment dates coming up, each one matched against whether the signed document has actually come back, so what you get is a list of what is outstanding rather than a list of what is due. Census requests tracked the same way: who uploaded, who has not, and how long they have had it.

Each recordkeeper portal opened per plan and the trust balance read off it, set against the figure in the valuation, so a gap becomes a question in April instead of a surprise in September. Deposit dates read from the payroll provider's own site against the pay dates, so a late deferral shows up in the quarter it happened. Filing acknowledgements checked back after submission, so nothing sits unaccepted while everyone assumes it went through.

The line here is the one the firm already works to. Reading, matching and listing can run unattended. Anything that changes a plan record, files a form or lands in a sponsor's inbox waits for the credentialed person whose name goes on it.

The chasing is clerical, the filing is not

A coverage test needs somebody who understands it. Working out which sponsor has not sent their file needs somebody who will open eleven sites in the same order every Monday and write down what each one says.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your firm is. It opens ftwilliam.com, the recordkeeper portals and the payroll sites, reads what is there, and leaves the week's outstanding list where your administrators already look.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it. Nothing is filed and no sponsor is contacted without a person saying yes.

Each workflow below names the sites it opens and what it brings back.