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You want every plan your firm delivers to carry your firm’s shape, not a default. Plan design sets that shape once, and Hazel fills it with each household’s analysis.
Nothing here touches a plan you have already delivered. A design shapes the plans Hazel builds from now on, and an existing plan stays until someone rebuilds it.
Find it in Settings → Planning, on the Base template every plan the firm builds starts from, and on each persona under Client persona. Planning settings belong to the firm owner, so ask whoever owns your firm’s Hazel account if you cannot see the section.

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Reading the blueprint

The card headed Plan layout draws your whole design at once. A chip carrying a module shows the module’s name, sometimes with a badge: “2 levers” for the what-if controls that piece offers, or one starting with “Calc” for the calculation behind its figures. A section holding no pieces reads “Hazel composes this section freely”. Under the drawing, Hazel counts your sections, the planning modules in play, and the pieces set to Always. See what’s left out opens the module library on the rest.

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Strictness, and whose design this is

Strictness, in the card’s header, sets how closely Hazel follows the blueprint: Exact, Guided or Flexible, and new firms start on Flexible. The same panel holds one switch, Allow additions (“Hazel may add sections or blocks you didn’t design”), which Exact locks off. Strictness covers what each mode does and how it plays against each piece’s own setting. Before anyone changes it, the base template wears a Hazel default badge. A persona nobody has changed wears Follows base, faded, tracking the base template live. Your first edit gives that persona a copy of its own, and Re-sync from base hands it back whenever you want. Every chip can be moved, removed or reworded, including the ones Hazel put there. A design keeps at least one section, and removing a section or tab takes everything inside it.

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The two ways to change it

Select a chip

A panel opens with three settings for that chip: When it appears, Instructions to Hazel, and Leave out when, the one condition it may be dropped. Press Done when finished. Use it to shape how a piece is written, without leaving the settings page.

Select Design layout

Opens the full editor, for changing what is there: add and remove modules, reorder blocks, restructure sections and tabs, pin exact headings, and preview the shape filled in with a made-up household.
Planning settings have no Save button. What you type saves a moment after you click away, and a quiet Saved appears at the top of the page. The full editor is the exception: changes there wait for its own save button.

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Design, instructions and assumptions

  • Plan design: what a plan contains, and where. Binds as tightly as your strictness setting.
  • Instructions: how it is written, and what to emphasize. Guidance Hazel weighs.
  • Assumptions: the numbers behind every figure. Used as given, and a persona can override a firm value while one plan can override both.
Making a topic appear in every plan takes two settings: the piece on Always, and strictness on Guided or Exact. A module you add starts on When it applies unless you use the add option that always includes it.

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Where the default shape comes from

Out of the box a plan navigates Summary (its own heading reads “Executive summary”), Today, Goals, Getting there and Decisions. Getting there opens on Your priorities, then three tabs your modules put there: Cash flow, Retirement and Insurance. Investments and Estate plan wait in the module library. That shape comes from eight modules: Net worth & balance sheet, Emergency fund, Goal funding, Insurance, Cash flow, Debt paydown, Retirement, and Monte Carlo success.

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Where to go next