Your Bluestem Portal is a helpful tool that gives you a snapshot of your financial picture, as well as a spot to securely store and share important digital documents. If you haven’t explored how to make it work for you, here are a few highlights of how to make the most of this resource.
The menu on your home page
Your Vault
You will often hear us refer to “your Bluestem Vault” when requesting documents from you or letting you know that we have shared documents with you. On the home page of your Bluestem Portal, one of the menu options at the top will be Vault. Once you click on it, you will see at least two folders: Shared Documents and Private Documents. These are the folders that you can add documents to. We will be able to access whatever you put in Shared Documents, but only you can see what’s in the Private Documents folder.
Note: Once you share a document with us via the Shared Documents folder, we will add it to your client file and delete it from the folder. The exception is during tax season, when you are adding tax documents for preparation. Those will only be deleted once the team begins to prepare your return.
As we begin to add documents to your Vault (i.e. copies of your tax return or Net Worth reports), you will see other folders show up, such as Taxes or Reports. You can view and download the documents in these folders, but will not be able to add to them.
For further information on how to use your Vault, you can refer to this handout for Desktop, and this one for Mobile.
Balance Sheet
Once a year we do a Net Worth and Portfolio Review, but you can see your net worth and a breakdown of your assets and liabilities any time. Clicking the Reports option in the menu will take you to your balance sheet, where you’ll see a pie chart that reflects how your assets contribute to your overall net worth, as well as a list of your assets and liabilities and corresponding amounts.
Note: the accuracy of these will depend on how up to date your accounts are. For further information on linking your accounts or updating amounts manually, check out these handouts: Linking New Accounts, Link Existing Accounts, Update Manual Accounts. If you have specific questions regarding your portfolio, please reach out to your advisor.
Spending
In 2024, we published an overview of how you can utilize the Spending tab in the portal. Once you click on Spending, you can see:
Overview - A summary of your spending into the categories you choose.
Budgets - Choose your desired categories and set your spending goals for them.
Transactions - View all the transactions pulling in and edit how they are categorized. (For help on setting your categories, see the Spending Categories guide).
Check out the rest of the overview here.
If you ever have questions about your Bluestem Portal, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’re here to help!