A Guide is the main deliverable you build and share with clients in Kerdora. It's a customizable, client-facing page where you pull together everything that matters for a client — their financial snapshot, planning insights, and action items — into one place they can actually read and understand.
You'll find Guides under Guides in the client sidebar. That's where you build them, customize them, and control what clients see. (The client portal calls their view of the deliverable "Overview.")
What Guides Are For
Most advisors use Guides as the thing they deliver after a planning engagement or annual review. Instead of handing a client a 40-page PDF they'll never read, you build a Guide that gives them the context to understand their financial life and tells them what to do next.
A Guide can include:
A summary of their goals and whether they're on track
Their investment portfolio breakdown
Insurance coverage gaps
Changes to be made (action items)
Custom text, notes, and context you write yourself
Guides are designed to be shared — they're what clients see when they log into the Client Portal. You decide which Guides are visible to the client and which ones stay internal.
Where Guides Live
Inside any client, click Guides in the sidebar. The Guides page has two views at the top:
Guides — where you create and manage the client's Guides
Visualize — advisor-only prebuilt charts for slicing the plan different ways. See the Visualize article for details.
Each Guide is its own page. You can create multiple Guides per client — for example, one for an initial plan and another for an annual review. (Your action items now live under Planning > Changes, and you can embed them inside a Guide.)
Two Kinds of Guides
The guide dropdown at the top of the Guides page can show two groups:
Templates — your firm's guide templates, rendered live with this client's data. Edit the template (on the Templates page) and every client who can see it gets the update.
Created for client — guides that belong to this client only. These show up when you save a one-off copy for the client (Save for this client only in the editor) or when Dora builds a guide for them. They're independent: template edits don't touch them, and editing them doesn't touch your templates.
Most of the time you'll work from templates. Client guides are for one-off layouts and Dora-built deliverables.
How You Build a Guide
Guides are built using the Guide editor. When you open a Guide, you'll see a page where you can drag and drop embeddable components — pre-built blocks that pull live data from the client's plan.
There are 48 embeddable components available, grouped into Summary & Planning, Goals, Action Items, Metrics, Account Views, Balance Sheet, Investments, Cash Flow, Protection, Taxes, Estate Planning, and Layout. Examples:
Goal summaries — retirement, education, liquidity, and debt payoff results
Account and investment tables — holdings, asset allocation, expense ratios
Insurance calculators — life, disability, homeowners, liability coverage gaps
Changes to be made — action items organized by category
Cash flow and spending breakdowns
Tax visuals — a tax snapshot, how taxes are calculated, where tax dollars go, the bracket ladder, payment check, room before thresholds, and planning opportunities, each driven by a tax scenario you choose
Estate planning checklists
Note — embed a client-visible note written on an account, goal, income, or insurance record directly into the Guide
Custom text and custom image blocks, wired to reusable template fields when you want them in sync across templates
You pick the components that matter for each client, arrange them how you want, and add your own commentary. Every Guide can be different.
You can also ask Dora (the client's AI assistant in the sidebar) to build a guide for you — "build a retirement-readiness guide for this client." Dora assembles one from the same components and it lands in the dropdown under Created for client, ready to edit.
When to Use a Guide
Here are the most common scenarios:
Initial financial plan — After onboarding a client and running through the planning modules, build a Guide that summarizes their current situation and recommended next steps.
Annual review — Create a new Guide (or update an existing one) to show what's changed and what still needs attention.
Focused topic — Build a Guide around a specific area like insurance coverage or retirement readiness for a targeted conversation.
Guides and the Client Portal
When a client logs into the Client Portal, Guides are the primary thing they see. You control visibility — you can have a Guide fully built out on your end without the client seeing it until you're ready.
If a client has more than one visible Guide, you can pick which one they land on. In the Guides view, select the guide you want and click the Set as default star (it reads Client default once it's set). Clients open straight to that default guide and can switch between the other Guides you've made visible on their own.
This makes Guides the center of your client communication in Kerdora. It's where planning turns into something the client can actually use.
If you're just getting started, try building a Guide for the Sample Client first to see how the components work before creating one for a real client.