Most software evaluations go the same way. You book three demos, watch three polished presentations, compare three feature lists, and pick the one that felt best in the room. Six months later you discover the thing that actually matters to your practice was never on the list.
The problem is that feature lists are written by vendors, and every vendor's list is designed to make their product look complete. A more useful approach is to bring your own criteria, drawn from the work you actually do, and test each platform against them.
Here is a protocol that surfaces the differences that matter to a Canadian book.
Start With Your Three Hardest Files
Before you look at any software, pull the three client files you find most difficult to model. Not your average client. The ones where you have been forced into a spreadsheet because the tool could not follow the situation.
For most Canadian advisors, that list includes an incorporated business owner with a holding company, a client with assets in more than one province, and a couple with mismatched retirement dates and a pension on one side. Bring those three to every demo and ask the vendor to model them live.
A demo that only works on a clean, hypothetical client tells you nothing about your Tuesday afternoon.
Test Accuracy at the Provincial Level, Not the Federal Level
Federal rules are the easy part. Every platform sold in Canada handles RRSP contribution room and federal marginal rates. The differences show up one level down.
Probate is the clearest test. Probate is provincial, the rates and structures differ significantly between provinces, and some provinces do not levy it in the same form at all. Ask the platform to show an estate projection for a client in Ontario, then the same client in Alberta, then in Quebec. If the number does not move, or the tool asks you to enter the probate cost manually, you have learned something important about how deep the Canadian modelling goes.
Apply the same test to provincial tax brackets, provincial credits, and the treatment of a client who moves provinces partway through a projection.
Ask What Happens to an Incorporated Client
The incorporated business owner is where Canadian planning gets genuinely hard, and where the gap between platforms is widest.
Ask specifically: can it model salary and dividend mix, the small business deduction, corporate investment income and the associated refundable tax pools, a holding company alongside the operating company, and the eventual wind-down or sale? Can it show the difference between paying a dividend now and deferring it?
Many platforms will model a business owner as a person with a higher income. That is not the same thing, and clients in this segment usually know the difference.
Trace a Single Number End to End
This is the test most advisors skip, and it is the one that protects you in a compliance review.
Pick any figure in the output, ideally something far downstream like after tax income in year 18, and ask the vendor to show you where it came from. Follow it back through the assumptions that produced it. Can you see the marginal rate applied that year? The indexation assumption? The withdrawal order?
You are checking two things. First, whether the platform can explain itself at all. Second, whether the explanation is consistent, meaning the same client data produces the same figure in the projection, the on-screen chart, and the printed report. A number that changes depending on where you look is a number you cannot defend in front of a client or a regulator.
Look at What the Client Actually Receives
Advisors evaluate software by looking at the advisor screen. Clients never see that screen. They see the report.
Read the output the way a client would. Is it comprehensible to someone without a planning background? Does it explain the recommendation, or just present the arithmetic? How long does it take to produce, and how much manual cleanup does it need before you would send it?
If you serve francophone clients, this is also where you find out whether French is real or cosmetic. Producing the plan in French is not the same as producing the interface in French. Check that the client-facing document uses correct fr-CA conventions throughout, including number and currency formatting, which differ from the English convention. A report that writes amounts in the English style signals to a francophone client that the French version is a translation layer rather than a first-class output.
Understand the Pricing Model, Not Just the Price
Two platforms at the same monthly rate can produce very different annual bills, and more importantly, very different behaviour.
Ask whether you are billed per seat or per plan, whether plan revisions cost extra, whether there are charges for additional scenarios, and what happens when you add an advisor or an assistant. Ask what the renewal looks like and whether the rate is guaranteed.
The behavioural point matters more than the arithmetic. If each plan or revision carries an incremental cost, you will unconsciously ration them. Advisors on per-plan billing tend to update plans less often, run fewer scenarios, and hesitate before reworking a projection after a client's circumstances change. That is a real cost to your advice quality, and it never appears on the invoice.
Test the Exit Before You Commit
Ask two questions that vendors are rarely asked in a first meeting.
How does my existing client data get in? And if I leave in three years, what do I take with me?
Import capability determines whether the platform is usable in month one or month six. Export capability determines whether you are a customer or a hostage. Ask for the export format specifically, and ask whether it includes the underlying assumptions or only the finished output.
A Practical Trial Protocol
If the platform offers a trial, use it deliberately rather than browsing it.
Model your three hard files. Produce a full client-ready report for one of them and read it end to end. Trace one downstream number back to its assumptions. If you serve francophone clients, produce the same report in French and read that too. Add a second user if your firm has one. Then export everything.
Two focused hours structured this way will tell you more than four demos.
The Underlying Question
Every one of these tests is really asking the same thing: does this platform understand the country you practise in, and can it show its work?
Canadian planning is not American planning with different acronyms. The provinces differ from each other in ways that change client outcomes materially, roughly a quarter of the country receives advice in French, and the incorporated business owner is a mainstream client here rather than an edge case. A platform that treats any of those as an afterthought will eventually push you back into a spreadsheet.
Bring your own criteria. Test against your own book. Ask to see the work.
PlanBase is built for Canadian practice, with province-level modelling, client reports in English and French from the same plan, and every figure traceable to the engine that produced it.