FreeERISA.com has introduced an economical new service, Premium ERISA, that can create a prospecting edge for any financial advisor working in the retirement plan market. For an introductory cost of $30 for a six-month subscription or $49 for a 12-month subscription, you can use the Fund Finder Database of Premium ERISA to quickly identify plans in your market that offer specific mutual funds. In this article, I'll offer several ideas for how to use Fund Finder.

The best way to understand the database is to conduct a quick search of a familiar fund group. Let's use Putnam in an example. For the search criteria, you will type in "Putnam" and specify whether your search "starts with" or "contains" the name entered. In either case, the search will return Putnam Fiduciary Trust Company, the entity in which Putnam holds retirement plan assets. You will see that the database currently contains 1,361 "customers" of Putnam. Each customer is a retirement plan that holds at least one Putnam-managed fund.

In total, Fund Finder includes more than 200 fund managers, over 1,000 individual mutual funds, and more than 150,000 plans. It's by far the largest online database ever developed for searching plans by investment offerings.