Evaluating a change
An Australian alternative to Xplan, described honestly
Most practices evaluating Souffle already run Xplan or one of its challengers. This page sets out what Souffle does, what it does not do that Xplan does, and how a move actually works.
Who this page is for
A practice whose Xplan contract is coming up for renewal and wants to test the market with a real workflow rather than a feature list.
A new or newly self-licensed practice choosing its first system that wants client, entity, fact find, workflow and portal in one place and will produce its advice documents another way.
A practice that runs several tools already and is weighing a lighter client and workflow system against the suite it uses a fraction of.
What Xplan is, in Iress’s words
Read this before the rest of the page. If a practice needs the whole of it inside one system, Souffle is not a replacement today, and the table further down says exactly where.
A modular, fully hosted platform that Iress describes as running a practice's front, middle and back office on one system, for practices from the smallest to the largest networks.
Source: Iress: Xplan
Client Focus holds personal, identification and financial data, file notes and documents; Xtools and Xtools+ provide calculators and cash-flow modelling with legislative updates maintained by Iress; Xmerge merges client data into Word or PDF documents from templates; WealthSolver compares superannuation, pension and investment products.
Source: Iress: Xplan platform fact sheet
Xplan Portfolio takes automated data feeds from fund managers, brokers and platforms, and CommPay handles revenue and remuneration.
A branded client portal with document sharing and e-signature integrations, and an integrations ecosystem Iress relaunched in Australia in August 2026.
Source: Australian FinTech, August 2026
On Netwealth's AdviceTech research as reported by Money Management, about 62 per cent of Australian practices use Xplan for planning software and 51 per cent use it as their CRM.
Source: Money Management, 2024
What Souffle has
Six things a practice gets from Souffle
Each of these is described in full, from the codebase, on its own feature page.
Entities as records, not notes
SMSFs, trusts, companies and partnerships each have their own record, financial position and corporate trustee or director details, linked back to the individual client. Each imports in bulk from CSV.
Read the detailThe fact find, before and after the meeting
A branded pre-meeting form with a completion percentage on the lead, six financial position dashboards with reports, and a portal where clients add their own entries between reviews.
Read the detailA questionnaire builder with a conversation attached
Questionnaire templates with tags, issued to a client or a lead, holding the adviser's comments and the client's side by side.
Read the detailWorkflow the whole team can see
Tasks with reminders, recurrence and time logged; kanban boards from reusable workflow templates; a time report across tasks and workflows.
Read the detailModelling on your own assumptions
Superannuation and investment projections on AWOTE, CPI, interest rate and retirement age settings, investor profiles with franking, and fifteen calculators including stamp duty, land tax and income tax.
Read the detailA portal in your brand, hosted in Sydney
The client portal and onboarding form carry your company name, logo, colours and AFSL details; services run on AWS in the ap-southeast-2 region.
Read the detailStated plainly
What Souffle does not have that Xplan does
The left column is what Iress publishes; the right is what Souffle has, or does not, in the same area. If one of these is a condition of your licence or your workflow, say so at the demo and we will give you a straight answer about fit.
| Area | Xplan, per Iress | Souffle |
|---|---|---|
| Advice documents | Xmerge merges client data into Word or PDF advice documents from templates. | Records the last SoA or RoA date; a digital document builder and Word and PDF templates. No merge of client data into an advice document, so the SoA is produced outside Souffle. |
| Platform data feeds | Xplan Portfolio takes automated feeds from platforms, brokers and fund managers. | None. Holdings and balances are what the practice or the client has recorded. |
| Product and insurance research | WealthSolver compares superannuation, pension and investment products; Risk Researcher covers insurance. | None. Fifteen calculators and ASX and exchange-rate market data pages, but no product comparison. |
| Revenue and commissions | CommPay reconciles revenue and remuneration. | Fee basis, trail commission and insurance remuneration fields on each client and policy, and payment history. No reconciliation module. |
| Integrations | An integrations ecosystem and third-party data providers. | CSV import for every record type. No third-party financial integrations, calendar or mailbox sync. |
| E-signature | DocuSign and Annature integrations. | A drawn signature captured on screen. No certified e-signature service. |
| Cash-flow modelling | Xtools+ cash-flow and net-position modelling. | Superannuation and investment projections on practice-level assumptions. No household cash-flow projection. |
How a move from Xplan works
Migration runs on CSV. There is no connector to Xplan, so what you can bring across is bounded by what Iress will export.
1. Ask Iress for the export first
What you can bring across is bounded by what Iress will hand back, not by Souffle's import. Ask, in writing and before you give notice, for the export formats covering client records, file notes, documents and historical advice records.
2. Map the export to Souffle's CSV imports
Clients, leads, individuals, companies, trusts, partnerships and SMSFs each import in bulk from CSV. Entities keep their own financial position and link back to the client, so a household with a fund and a trust comes across as three connected records.
3. Import a sample and check it
Bring across a handful of representative clients — a couple, a client with an SMSF, a lead mid-pipeline — and have the administrator who knows them confirm each record before the full run.
4. Run both for a period
Nothing in Souffle prevents an overlap. Documents are attached to records individually, so keep the historical archive in a form you can search, and let your contract's notice terms decide how long the overlap runs.
Two pages to take into the evaluation
The switching page covers the questions to settle before any move, and the software evaluation checklist gives eight areas to test in every vendor’s demo, including ours.
Questions practices moving from Xplan ask
Is Souffle cheaper than Xplan?
We cannot say, and neither can anyone else from public information: Iress does not publish Xplan pricing and Souffle does not publish its own. Souffle is quoted per practice after a demo. Get both quotes itemised in writing — per user, per module, implementation and data feeds — and compare them against what each system would actually do in your practice.
Can I import my Xplan data into Souffle?
There is no direct connector. Clients, leads, companies, trusts, partnerships and SMSFs import in bulk from CSV, so a migration runs on the export Iress provides. What that export contains, and on what terms, is between your practice and Iress.
Does Souffle have cash-flow modelling like Xtools+?
No. Souffle generates superannuation and investment projections on practice-level assumptions, and offers fifteen calculators including stamp duty, land tax, income tax and debt recycling. It does not model a household's cash flow to and through retirement.
Could we keep Xplan for advice documents and use Souffle for clients and workflow?
Nothing prevents it, but there is no synchronisation between the two, so any record held in both would be entered twice. Practices that take this path usually keep the advice production in one system and everything client-facing in the other, and decide which record is the source of truth for each field.
What else should be on the shortlist?
Midwinter AdviceOS, Morningstar AdviserLogic and Plutosoft are the other full suites on the Australian survey figures, with intelliflo office and Fin365 behind them. The guide to financial planning software in Australia sets out each category, with every product described from its own vendor's website.
For the wider market — the other suites, the practice CRMs, the paraplanning and AI tools — see the guide to financial planning software in Australia.
Get started
Bring your Xplan setup to the demo
Tell us which modules you use, what your export looks like and which workflows have to survive the move. We will walk through the ones that matter and be straight about the ones we cannot cover.