The Personal Finance Society (PFS) has added a new guide on how firms can focus on delivering consumer outcomes in Financial Planning to its PFS Power website.

Timed to coincide with the PFS’s National Conference in Manchester this week, the 44-page guide includes recommended resources and was produced by the PFS Power panel.

The panel is made up of fourteen Financial Planners: Chair and PFS President Carla Brown; Sean Banks; Carrie Bendall; Hazel Bowen; Jay Dhaliwal; Kate Evans; Adam Field; Kate Gannon; Mike Hawthorn; Mark Hutchinson; Scott Millar; Sam Patterson; Ron Schwarz; and Megan Webb.

The guide identifies ‘clarity, connection, choice, control and confidence’ as five key consumer outcomes that advisers should work to achieve, and outlines the ‘human skills’ required to help clients to implement sensible decisions about their life and money.

The guide recommends that goal setting with clients will provide ‘clarity’, while understanding of resources will establish a realistic ‘connection’ with their current circumstances and future plans. Once established, ‘choice’ can be presented, improving chances of success, and enabling the consumer to feel in ‘control’.

Regularly revisiting the plan is suggested as an essential part of the Financial Planning process, with the guide saying “it is the long-term relationship that we build with our clients that gives them the ‘confidence’ that they are on track to achieve their goals.”

Carrie Bendall, head of PFS Power content, said: “Since I discovered the world of personal financial planning in 2008, I’ve had the privilege to meet hundreds of Financial Planners and to have hundreds of conversations with their clients. Conversations where clients have the freedom to think about what personal financial planning means to them. Many repeated the same words: clarity, connection, choice, control, confidence.”

The guide is available via the PFS Power website.

The PFS, the professional body which awards the Chartered Financial Planner qualification, has 40,000 members and its event is one of the biggest in the Financial Planning calendar.