The three settings
Check which one you are on
A new firm starts on Flexible: the base template, and two of the three Client personas your firm arrives with. Only Retiree / Decumulator ships on Guided, so if plans keep arriving in a shape you did not ask for, look here first. Guided is where to move once you have a design you trust.Allow additions
Below the three settings sits a single switch, Allow additions, described on screen as Hazel adding sections or blocks you did not design. It starts on. Turn it off under Guided when you want your shape followed and nothing extra. Under Exact the switch turns off and grays out, whatever it was set to before. Move that design back to Guided or Flexible later and it is still off, so turn it back on if you want Hazel covering ground your design does not. There is no matching switch for leaving things out; that is each block’s own setting.Choosing
Exact checks the finished plan against your design and sends it back to be fixed, though now and then one still publishes with something not matching, so read the first few plans built on an Exact design before you present one. An Always block covering something a household’s facts cannot support gets produced thin rather than dropped.
Strictness and each block’s own setting
Strictness governs the whole design; each block also carries its own setting for whether it belongs in a plan. Select a chip on the Plan design card and the first field is When it appears.
The same control is labeled When it shows up in the layout editor. An older design may show a third choice, Suggested (legacy), which Hazel may skip freely. Open that block in the layout editor and the field says the setting is retiring and asks you to pick one of the two above. The third choice then disappears from both screens.
A block set to When it applies stays the household’s call under every setting, Exact included.
See Block settings.
Telling whether your strictness is right
Open a plan, look at Plan sections in the left nav, and compare it with the chips on your Plan design card. A section you designed that is not there, or a section you did not design that turned up, is Hazel’s read of that household. Check which design the plan was built on first: the Applied settings block in the plan’s Appendix names the persona Hazel matched, or reads None. A persona with its own design held that plan to that persona’s strictness, and otherwise your base template’s applied. Then act on what keeps repeating:- The same section keeps disappearing. Your design is asking for something your households cannot support. Move that block to When it applies, or take it out.
- Hazel keeps adding the same topic. Add it to your design so you control how it is written, or turn Allow additions off.
Where to go next
- Block settings: the per-block controls, including when a block appears.
- Plan design: the design that strictness applies to.
- Inheritance and re-syncing: changing strictness on a persona that follows the base template gives that persona its own copy.