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Decide once how your firm builds plans, so no advisor rebuilds the same choices household by household. Settings → Planning sets what a plan contains, in what order, in your words, and against which numbers.
Only firm owners can open this tab. An advisor still has room on one household, adjusting most numbers in that plan’s own Plan settings panel in the chat view, within the ranges you set. See Access and availability.

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The four panes

The left rail groups them under Plan templates, Client persona, and Assumptions.

Base template

Your firm’s default plan. Every Client persona is built on it.

Client personas

Your client archetypes. Your firm has three, installed the first time anyone opens Planning settings. Hazel matches each household to the closest one.

Solver assumptions

The planning inputs behind every figure, in three cards: Probability & simulation, Fees & taxes, and Decumulation strategy.

Market assumptions

The figures every plan is built against, under Returns, Volatility, Inflation and Taxes.
Two more settings sit on the Base template pane, below the instructions list. Guardrails. The rules your firm will not break, however a request is phrased. A persona can add one, never remove one. See Guardrails. Client disclaimer. The footer on every plan, on your screen and in the PDF you hand over. The card opens with wording Hazel has drafted, which is not in force until you edit and save it, so save it once or your plans publish with no footer. Restore Hazel default brings the drafted wording back.

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Which layer wins

A plan tags every planning value with the layer that set it, and Hazel ships a default for every value, so anything you have not changed reads as Firm. The tags are in the plan’s Appendix, in its Applied settings block. A per-plan adjustment belongs to that plan alone, so a second plan for the same household still inherits your firm and persona values. Solver assumptions covers the panel and the few values it leaves out. Numbers merge one value at a time, but shape and wording replace: a persona with its own plan design stops following the base design, and its instruction list stands in for the base list rather than adding to it. See Inheritance and re-syncing. A number beats a sentence. Where an instruction and an assumption disagree about a figure, the value set in Solver assumptions or Market assumptions wins.

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Where to change what

If you ask Hazel for the same change on every plan, that change belongs in settings.

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How saving works

There is no Save button on these panes. An edit saves when you leave the field, so click or tab out of a box before closing the tab, and watch for “Saving…” then “Saved” beside the Plan templates heading. Two exceptions: the New persona dialog writes nothing until you select Create, and the layout designer, which opens from Design layout, has its own Save changes button and asks before you leave with work unsaved. If your planning settings changed somewhere else since your screen loaded, in another tab, in the designer, or by a colleague, Hazel stops saving and shows a red notice asking you to reload. What you typed after that is discarded, so note it down first.

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When a change takes effect

A settings change shapes the next plan Hazel builds, and the next change to a plan that already exists; plans you have already delivered stay as they are. To move an existing household onto a new shape, open that household’s Financial Planning tab and select Regenerate. That adds a version rather than replacing what your client has seen. See Versions and regenerating. The Client disclaimer is the exception. Hazel reads it fresh each time a plan is opened, so editing it also changes the footer on plans you published earlier.

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Where to go next

Start with the base template, then Client personas and Plan design in full.