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Set the base template once, so every plan Hazel builds already carries your firm’s shape, voice, numbers and rules. The Base template is your firm’s default plan: what a household’s plan looks like when all you know is that they are your client. It lives in Settings, under Planning, first under Plan templates. Everything here applies firm-wide, and every Client persona is built on it, so a persona carries only what differs.

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What the base template holds

Plan design

The blueprint: sections, tabs, modules, and what each block is told to do.

Hazel instructions

Your house guidance in plain English, as a numbered list. It ships empty. Select Add instruction to start.

Planning assumptions

Label and value rows for firm-specific figures the Solver and Market panels do not model.

Guardrails

The never-do rules, firm-wide. A persona can add its own, and no persona, plan, or request can remove one.
Two more boxes sit below those four:
  • Client disclaimer: the footer clients read under a plan and in the exported PDF (Sharing and delivering). It opens on Hazel’s plain default wording, and nothing reaches a plan until you edit the box.
  • Used by: the personas still following this design, so a change here reaches all of them. A persona with its own plan design drops off it.
Every edit saves itself, with “Saving…” then “Saved” beside the heading. Changes shape the plans Hazel builds from now on; plans you have already delivered stay as they are.
Instructions are the one part a persona does not add to: once Hazel matches a household to a persona, Hazel follows that persona’s list, not the base list. Plan design, planning assumptions and the assumption numbers carry through until a persona changes them; guardrails carry through and stay. See Inheritance.

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Plan design

The upper card carries the Strictness dial, plus a Hazel default badge while you are still on the shipped design, which places eight of Hazel’s nineteen planning modules with strictness Flexible. See Strictness. Plan layout below it draws your blueprint: sections as bands, tabs as indented sub-bands, blocks as labeled chips. A line under it counts your sections, the modules in play and the always-on blocks, then ends in a See what’s left out link into the layout designer’s Modules panel. Two ways to work with it:
  • Select any chip to edit it in place: When it appears, Instructions to Hazel, Leave out when, then Done. No layout designer needed.
  • Select Design layout for the layout designer, where you add, remove, and reorder modules and blocks. See Using the editor.

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Planning assumptions

For example: Select Add planning assumption, give the row a Label and a Value, and it joins every plan built on this template. The value is free text: a number, a percentage, or a phrase such as “Stop under the first IRMAA tier”. These rows are firm-wide, with no per-row override on a persona. When one kind of client needs a different figure, write it as an instruction on that persona in the same label and value shape, for example “Education inflation: 6%”. For a single plan, ask Hazel in that plan’s chat.
“Longevity age: 95” belongs in assumptions; “Frame longevity as a spending question, not a portfolio question.” belongs in instructions. Where the two disagree on a number the assumption wins, unless the instruction uses the label-and-value shape above.

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The order to set it up

1

Build a plan on the shipped default

Your base template arrives with a plan design and the firm-wide solver and market numbers set, but no instructions. Build a plan for a household you know well, from that household’s Financial Planning tab or the Financial Planning page, and read it as a client would. See Getting started.
2

Check which template the plan came from

Hazel matches each household to the closest of the three Client personas your firm already has. The plan’s Appendix, under Applied settings, names the persona it was built from, or none if the base template alone was used, so you edit the screen that shaped what you read.
3

Fix the shape first

Anything structurally missing or unwanted goes in Plan design.
4

Then the voice

Add instructions for what you would have written differently. See Instructions.
5

Then the numbers

Set Solver assumptions and Market assumptions, then add any firm-specific planning assumptions the panels do not model.
6

Then the guardrails

Write down the rules your firm would never break, however a request is phrased.
7

Only then build personas

Create a persona only where a kind of client needs a different shape or different numbers. See Creating a persona.
Test a change by building a plan. The sample plan reads the same whatever you change here. If the household already has a plan, Regenerate in the top bar of its Financial Planning tab rebuilds it on your current settings.

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Where to go next