Everything you need to set up and use Clarity.
Clarity is billed through Stripe. Your subscription is what reserves your seat, and it's the first step rather than the last.
Subscribe with the same email address you use for Google Sheets. Your access and your licence are both matched to your Google account by email address, so paying with a different one will leave you locked out even though you've paid. If you're not sure which address that is, open Google Sheets and check the account in the top right.
Once you've paid, we add your email address to Clarity's access list by hand and send you the install link. This happens within one business day — you don't need to do anything in the meantime, and there's nothing to install yet.
The install link only works for addresses we've added, so please use the one that arrives in your email rather than searching the Google Workspace Marketplace.
Open the install link from your email and click Install, then approve the permissions when prompted. Read the next two boxes before you start — one of the screens looks alarming and shouldn't.
That screen appears because Clarity's review by Google is still in progress. Two of the permissions it needs — showing the dashboard inside Sheets, and checking your subscription with our licence server — are ones Google classes as sensitive, so an app requesting them shows this warning until review completes. It is a statement about our review status, not about anything found wrong with the app.
Open a new Google Sheet — go to sheets.google.com and choose Blank, or simply type sheets.new in your browser's address bar. Then click Extensions → Clarity Dashboard → Load Template.
Google will ask "Copy document?" — click Make a copy, and your own copy of the template opens in your Drive. It starts on a START HERE tab that walks you through everything, and all tabs come pre-named and pre-formatted. Rename the file to your client's name whenever you like.
Start with the ADMIN tab (client profile, retirement inputs, optional coverage goals, monthly expenses), then INSURANCE and CPF, CASH & OTHERS — one row per policy or asset, starting at row 5.
Click Extensions → Clarity Dashboard → Open Dashboard. The dashboard reads your sheet automatically. Use Export PDF (top right) to produce a polished review for your client.
Quick-reference instructions live right inside the sheet. The golden rules: don't rename tabs, don't change header rows or columns, and don't type over grey cells (they contain formulas).
Client profile in column B (name, date of birth — must be a Date-formatted cell — advisor name, team). Goals in columns G–H: retirement age, monthly income goal and horizon age drive the projections; the five coverage goals below them (Death Benefit, TPD, Early Critical Illness, Critical Illness, Accidental Death) are optional. Expenses in columns J–K: monthly amounts, add rows as needed. Exchange rates in columns M–N update automatically from Google Finance.
The client name and date of birth at the top pull from ADMIN automatically — don't type over them. Headers in row 4, one policy per row starting at row 5. Use the dropdowns for Plan Type and Payment Frequency, and leave blank whatever doesn't apply.
One row per asset starting at row 5. Categories: CPF, Cash, or Stock (use the dropdown). The Currency column offers SGD, USD, GBP, HKD, CNY and EUR — Clarity converts everything to SGD using the ADMIN exchange rates. Other currencies work too: add the rate in the ADMIN Exchange Rate section first, then type the 3-letter code.
Both tabs come with 40 rows. If a client needs more, don't insert a blank row — copy a row you've already filled in, paste it into the new row, then edit the details. That carries the formulas, dropdowns and number formatting with it in one go.
A row inserted on its own has empty grey cells (Premiums to Date and Delta won't calculate) and no dropdowns, which means a Plan Type typed by hand can be one the dashboard doesn't recognise. The Sum row looks after itself either way — it always covers every row above it.
Portfolio at a glance (net wealth, total benefits, cash value, retirement readiness), total insurance benefits per category — with a shortfall or goal-met line under each when you've set coverage goals in ADMIN — per-policy detail, and an interactive retirement projection where you can test different retirement ages and income goals on the spot, with your expected monthly expenses shown alongside the income goal for reference.
Where an Investment policy has a Review Date and at least a year of history, its card shows the annualised return it has actually achieved, coloured against the Assumed Return you set for that policy.
This is a money-weighted return — an IRR — not the total gain divided by the number of years. The difference matters for regular-premium policies: a premium paid last month has had almost no time to grow, and a simple average treats it as though it had been invested from the start. That understates a healthy policy, often by around half. It is measured from the Policy Date up to the Review Date, so it describes the same moment as the value you entered.
Two things worth knowing when you read it. The figure is net of policy charges while an assumed return is usually quoted gross, so a sound policy can still sit below its assumption in the early years — Clarity flags anything under three years old as such. And where it can't be worked out honestly, it isn't guessed: policies under a year old, policies with no Review Date, and paid-up policies with no premium end date show a prompt instead of a number.
Click Export PDF in the top right of the dashboard. Your browser's print dialog will open — select "Save as PDF" as the destination. The dashboard prints all sections across multiple pages automatically.
Founding 100 members get a migration draft. We build you a script that converts one standard layout of yours into the Clarity format, as accurately as it can manage. You run it yourself in your own Google account, so your client data never passes through our hands.
It is a head start, not a finished migration. The script ports what it can recognise and leaves the rest for you — expect to fill gaps and correct judgement calls it got wrong.
To find out whether your layout is one we can script, send a blank copy of your existing sheet or a screenshot of its structure — no client data, please — to hey@sheilamelbye.com.
Whatever the script produces is a draft. Verify every policy against your records before using the dashboard with a client. Accuracy remains your responsibility.
=GOOGLEFINANCE("CURRENCY:USDSGD") formula next to it. To add another currency, add a row below the last rate in the same format (e.g. JPY/SGD rate), then use that 3-letter code in the Currency column.