Plan analytics field guide
PlanOptica turns every retirement and welfare filing the Department of Labor publishes into a peer-ranked, decade-deep search. These pages walk through the search rail, the plan profile pages, and the prospect flags, in the order you encounter them.
Four pages cover the app
Pick the page that matches what you came to do. Each is single-scroll, advisor-first, and links back into the product.
Searching plans
Search bar, filter rail, sort, saved-search URLs. Same chrome on /retirement and /welfare; the facets differ.
Reading a retirement plan page
Every section on /retirement/[slug]: header, contacts, summary tiles, peer benchmarks, ten-year trajectory, providers, actuary, fiduciary transactions, top hat, features, flags.
Reading a welfare plan page
Every section on /welfare/[slug]: funding type, premiums, carriers, brokers, TPAs, coverage breadth, opportunity flags.
Glossary and flags
ERISA vocabulary, every metric the app surfaces, and all 29 prospect flags - 17 retirement, 12 welfare - with the conditions that trip them.
What is in the dataset
The Form 5500 is the annual financial and demographic report every ERISA retirement or welfare plan files with the Department of Labor. It is public record and the DOL publishes a fresh cut every business day.
We pull every filing the day it lands and shape them into one searchable view: every plan year from 2015 through 2026, every 401(k), 403(b), defined-benefit, profit-sharing, and ESOP retirement plan, and every group health, life, dental, vision, disability, and stop-loss welfare plan on /welfare.
Every plan year is a single filing snapshot. When you land on a plan profile you are reading the latest filed yearby default; the year selector at the top pins any prior year in the plan's history.
Numbers come straight from the filed Form 5500 and its schedules: H and I for retirement assets and expenses, SB and MB for defined-benefit actuarial, G for fiduciary transactions, A and Part 1 for welfare premiums and brokers, C for service-provider compensation. Every figure on a plan page links back to the schedule and line.
Who this is for
Conventions used across the app
- Sourced to the line. Every figure on a plan page links back to the schedule and line on the filing. Hover the view 5500 PDFlink in the header to open the DOL's archived PDF for that year.
- Color tone is meaningful. Amber means a soft watch-list signal; red means a hard compliance or loss event; green means healthy or in the top of the peer cohort.
- Percentiles are 0 to 100, higher is better. A 90th-percentile participation rate means the plan outranks 90% of its peer cohort. Fees and cash drag are inverted before ranking so the same rule holds.
- The URL is the saved search. Every filter and every pinned year lives in the address bar; share a link to share a result set.
- Nulls are shown, not hidden. A dash or a dimmed tile means the underlying field was blank on the filing - often Schedule H asset detail on a small plan that filed Schedule I only.