Save Time & Money With These Top Financial Advisor Tools

Let’s talk about this elusive efficiency goal – achieving the best outcome while sacrificing the least resources. Well, not everything should be efficient. Hear me out.

As a discerning and gifted business builder, you should still decide what doesn’t need to be effortless. Maybe client time doesn’t need to come in tight, agenda-oriented, 30-minute sessions—maybe it does. For some, designing the perfect enterprise is the creative work they love. Others express themselves through content and brand crafting. Your creative passion isn’t where efficiency applies. Everything that distracts from it is. 

The Efficiency Hierarchy

Now, there is a hierarchy of efficiency. Ideally, you’re trying to solve for first maximizing your creative energy, then minimizing your time, and finally minimizing your expenses. But it often doesn’t start that way. In fact, when revenue and financial runway are tight, the order is often reversed – you solve for the lowest possible expenses, then try to save time where you can, and use what creative energy is left. Understand that if you’re in this phase, that’s okay, AND you should be working toward the former. 

• Money is very tight: Lean expenses, then time savings, then creativity
• Money is just sustainable: Save time, then expenses, carve out dedicated time weekly for creative work (your most valuable contribution, after survival)
• Money is comfortable: Maximize time on creative work, minimize time input elsewhere, all expenses must create an ROI of some kind (not always a strict financial ROI)

Remember, “creative work” is what you do that expresses your unique self and energizes you. It could be spreadsheet building if this is what you truly love and benefits the world, or it could be designing the most awe-inspiring client experience. Find your creative purpose and fill that in for “creative work” above. This is what makes your work unique, and building a unique value is what ultimately brings you success, as you define it. 

Note that time and creative energy above are distinct. Your creative energy is your power to bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. It’s precious and fleeting. Your time is also precious, but it’s a close second to your inspiration to create. You can put on some good tunes, power down your phone and other distractions, and knock out a rote task if you must. But creative inspiration comes on its own and needs to be nurtured and protected above all else. 

Your Efficiency Toolkit

Let’s explore another important concept before we jump into optimizing your output. This is the framework of “Eliminate, Automate, and Delegate” (E-A-D). The most efficient task is the one we simply don’t do because it doesn’t need to be done. 

• E: Eliminate unnecessary output first. Problem solved. 
• A: Next, we create a system that does the job repeatedly without any effort from us. We automate necessary tasks that don’t require human work. 
• D: What must be done that can’t be automated can often be delegated at a cost less than what our time (especially our creative time) is worth. 

This is a good time to identify a sacred cow. The value of your time is not your hourly rate. That’s a revenue-based value. But you’re not just building an income stream, you’re also building an asset in the value of your business, and dare I say, a life and legacy. You may not be thinking about the sale value of your practice when you get started, but the most disciplined advisors who know what they’re building toward often are. Others may be thinking of the value of their time away from work, or how much they value doing the creative work. These are all valid. I’m not suggesting you pay your contractors $600/hour – unless they’re transforming your business or life over a handful of hourly sessions. In that case, $600/hour is a steal. Just don’t consider your hourly rate the maximum value of an hour saved.

Jobs to Be Done

With that foundation, let’s get to work becoming more efficient. For this, we’ll use a powerful tool called the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) analysis. Then, we’ll run it through the E-A-D framework. Don’t worry; we’ll be getting to some advisor-tech recommendations soon. 

We sometimes say solo advisors aren’t just the CEO, CCO, COO, and CIO, they’re also the CJO (Chief Janitorial Officer). When you’re on your own, you have to do it all. Often enough to be annoying, we talk about “wearing a lot of hats.” But what is “it all”? What are these hats? Good questions. Let’s write them down. 

They differ based on your firm’s phase and what kind of service business you’re building. Usually, when you’re launching, these include things like: 

• Choose a business name
• Build a website
• Register your firm
• Secure a domain and hosting

Later, when you have a few clients, they become more repeatable. Your typical solo advisor’s JTBD includes broad categories like:

• Generate marketing activities
• Hold prospect calls
• Send agreements and ADVs
• Send data intake invites 
• Schedule initial planning meetings
• Enter data in financial planning software 
• Run quarterly reports
• Review RMDs annually

This is just a start, and these broad categories could be expanded into almost infinite subtasks. Don’t get lost in this step just yet. Get the big things down first and subdivide later as needed. We’re going to tackle these one at a time for efficiency gains. Ready to get started?

Tip: Later, if you’re struggling to identify your JTBD, track your time for 2 weeks and start to identify categories and trends.

Now, take your list of jobs to do, drop them in column A of a spreadsheet, and title the next 5 columns:

• Eliminate
• Automate
• Delegate
• Retain 
• Notes

If you truly care about becoming more efficient, this spreadsheet is the new (very rudimentary V1) master key to unlocking what you value. Again, start simple, make progress, and then iterate. 

Which of these tasks can you eliminate? In the first high-level review, the answer may be none. You have to send those ADVs to new clients. But be brutal in your quest to trim the fat. How many clients have told you they really love your quarterly performance reports? Are you spending a day generating and distributing them for your clients, or for yourself? No judgment, but ask yourself tough questions before moving on. Don’t gloss over this critical step.  As you become more specific with subtasks, you should find more and more unnecessary work to simply discard. 

Now, what’s left is your playground for automation. We’ll spend time later in this article on tactical tips and tools for automation. The software names will be less valuable than the concepts, so if you like this topic, summarize what you’ve read so far into some bullets (or let ChatGPT automatically do it for you) and block time to work on it weekly. Applying these concepts is where the treasure is hidden. 

Delegation can be hard for knowledge workers, especially those who care about their clients, their business, and love what they do. Is anyone going to care as much as you? Sometimes, yeah, and they might even be better at it if you’re honest and lucky. Sometimes, no, not really. Is that okay – can you live with it? Will your clients suffer? Are they better served by your creative work than by you doing your own financial bookkeeping? What about you doing every social security analysis? These are questions only you can answer. What I can tell you is that there is an army of niche experts who would love to take your chores and do them part-time, as needed. The gig economy is no longer in its infancy. 

The last option, Retain, we’ve touched on some above. Some things simply must be done by a skilled person for now, and you may not have someone with that skill to delegate to. Keep working on that and keep an open mind about what technology can do for you – it’s changing quickly. But what you really want to see in the Retain column is a list of tasks you love. What you value. We defined it above as “what you do that expresses your unique self and energizes you.” If your spreadsheet has only these jobs in the Retain column, you’re not only building a great business, but likely you’re building a really special organization that attracts talent, clients, COIs, and other valuable relationships easily. It’s lightning in a bottle, and everyone who comes into contact with it can feel it. 

Okay, that last column “Notes”… let’s start filling in some notes about why you can eliminate jobs, what tools you can use to automate those jobs that can and should be automated, who you want to delegate to and how, and why you’re retaining what you are. The writing exercise here can be illuminating. Below, we’ll hit on some high-value tech-enabled automation opportunities, but one more nudge – these are just a handful of tactics.  The frameworks and mindset are what count.

Client Relationship Management tools (CRM)

Your CRM is your practice in software. It holds the most information and functionality to create real opportunity for efficiency gain in today’s tech landscape. That could change as AI reimagines our relationship with software, but the CRM is your business engine for now, so let’s work on making sure the engine hums. Here are a few notes on using your CRM effectively:

• Data hub
  Your CRM lives off of data. Data integrity is probably more important than how extensive each client’s and prospect’s data profile is. That’s because no amount of data is useful if you can’t trust it, and manually double-checking data for accuracy isn’t very automated. Keep that data clean! Use integrations to pull in client data everywhere you can. Then you can operationalize it in 1,001 JTBD. 
• Email
  As advisors, we do a LOT of work by email. A lot of that email is repetitive. Repetitive emails like onboarding, scheduling, and data collection can be perfected once, templatized, and used again and again. Yes, you will refine them over time. But don’t ever find yourself writing a new client welcome email from scratch, besides the one you wrote to your very first client. Your template is a service to your client. It ensures you don’t forget anything. Then, of course, exercise your inner F. Scott Fitzgerald and add a lovely, personalized note.
• Tasks and Workflows
  Tasks and workflows are the actions and systems that make your business operate. A task is simply one discrete thing to get done, and a workflow is a group of tasks that complete a process. Many of those broad Jobs to Be Done are probably prime candidates for workflows. If you come back and break them down into their component parts, those are often tasks or groups of tasks. If you’re not using these, stop reading now and schedule a support call with your CRM provider to get started building them out. Populate these workflows with links to documents, resources, scheduling pages, etc. Don’t do an action over and over. Make it easy on yourself for next time, because there are going to be a lot of next times. 
• Pipelines
  When you’re getting started, it’s easy to think you don’t need a visual representation of what stage each prospect is in within your marketing and sales funnels – what step each client occupies in your onboarding and service process. Maybe you can count all prospects and clients on one or two hands. Embrace the discipline to define the steps now, and document where your folks are in the process. This is the practice of cultivating an immaculate client experience. Your CRM should support pipelines that not just show where your audience is in their journeys, but also automate what they get from you at each stage. This way, every contact gets the right touch point at the right time, and you can refine the process instead of recreating it each time. 

Suggested Tool:

• We like Wealthbox as your CRM. It’s clean, elegant, and incredibly feature-rich. If you think Wealthbox is a “basic CRM,” you probably haven’t seen it in a decade. With the Premium package, Wealthbox’s fastest growing client segment is enterprises – large growth-oriented RIAs. We recommend Pro as the place to start for even very new RIAs, because it unlocks the email features (and much more), but rest assured, you won’t outgrow Wealthbox and need to switch later. 

Note: XYPN Members receive Wealthbox Basic for free with membership, and deep subsidies and discounts on higher tiers. Members also get access to XYPN’s proprietary workflows, right out of the box. 

AI Notetakers – or simply Business Automation Tools?

Let’s address this one early. It’s all the rage and frankly, the hype is earned. This category is so new and dynamic (the first solutions hit the market quietly in late 2023), its typical handle of “AI Notetaker” is already outdated. These tools do so much more. 

Picture this scenario recently described to me by an advisor – a new father sleeping just a few hours each night: you’re going into surge-meeting season with 5-6 client meetings scheduled each day for 10 business days. You used to have a part-time virtual admin to help you prepare, but he’s recently taken a full-time gig. You don’t want to let your clients down. Is this going to be a train wreck? 

Not anymore. Your AI Advisor Assistant (“AAA” – you heard it here first) will, with a few button clicks:

• Mine your CRM, planning software, custodial connections, and Google Drive to generate a client summary and meeting prep. It reminds you of recent recommendations, upcoming life events, outstanding questions, key technical facts, and personal relationship-building information like the client’s dog’s birthday and the upcoming annual trip to the mountains.
• Attend your meeting to observe, record, summarize, and analyze your conversation from 100 different angles. A few minutes after the call, you’ll have an annotated client-facing meeting summary ready to email, an internal meeting summary, a list of actions and tasks, and an analysis of how the conversation went. 
• Send your internal notes and tasks to your CRM for compliance records and schedule your follow-up work. If you have a team, it will delegate work to the right folks on your behalf. 
• Email your client a professional follow-up in your voice according to your templatized preferences.
• Give you a second opinion on how the meeting went. As it turns out, you lectured your client a little about that trade they made in the self-directed brokerage account, and they expressed some concern about job security, which you might have glossed over. As usual, you did a great job giving equal attention and space to both spouses. Overall, well done! 
• Bonus: Your AAA is now analyzing your business across several important metrics to spot issues and opportunities for a thriving team and practice. 

Suggested Tools: 

• We don’t have one favorite in this category yet. If we did, it might be outdated next week. Still, don’t sit on the sidelines waiting for the perfect or best tool to emerge. Pick a solution and start using it right away. A few we like include Jump, FinMate AI, Zeplyn, and Zocks (in no particular order). More than anything, dive deep into their integrations and find the solution that talks to the systems you already use. 

Agreements and Payments

Onboarding new clients starts with getting agreements signed, providing your disclosure documents, and setting up a complaint payment method. We recommend finding an automated way to do all of these tasks in one clean onboarding flow. This is a repetitive operational necessity (perfect for automation!) and can feel like extra work for new clients if done in a disjointed way. Make the first impression easy for your new clients and easy on yourself as well. 

As noted above, as with most, if not all, the processes described here and below, these steps can and should be kicked off via a workflow in your CRM. Build the process once, then let your CRM tell you what you need to do, which email templates to use, and what documents and resources to link to or reference, so you don’t have to waste brain power and time trying to remember your own process. Once it’s full poof, any remaining manual work can then be delegated as well. Bonus!

Suggested Tool:

• AdvicePay is the only payment processing tool designed for advisors to help them stay compliant in all 50 states and with the SEC. Simply select the fee schedule from a menu of your templates and the documents you’d like to deliver in the onboarding process, then send the whole package off to your new clients for a smooth onboarding. Include acknowledgements of potential fee increases down the line, so you don’t have to have clients sign new documents to accept annual inflationary bumps. 

Note: XYPN Members receive AdvicePay’s flagship platform and functionality for free with membership.

Data Gathering

Frankly, gathering data is a headache for everyone. It’s time-intensive for you and a big homework assignment for your brand-new clients. There is considerable opportunity for automation here, so it’s a good place to roll up your sleeves and find efficiencies. Your financial planning tool likely has a client portal with a customizable onboarding workflow – this is a great place to start for basic financial information, document collection, and linking of accounts. 

You may also need some specific information to help you open new investment accounts for clients. Tech-forward custodians can make new account paperwork and data collection streamlined. Altruist is currently the leader here. If you’re working with a more traditional custodian, see what tools are available for pre-filling paperwork and combining account paperwork into one client request. Schwab’s Digital Onboarding can provide some efficiency and allows for prefilling of the 10 or so most common data points needed for account paperwork, if they’re available in your CRM. 

Suggested Tools:

• RightCapital’s client portal creates a nice initial onboarding experience for clients, including data collection. Let clients fill in the initial base facts, share source documents, and connect their accounts of all types for daily data feeds. Of course, be sure to review those docs and double-check your clients’ self-reported data. ;)
• eMoney has a similar client portal and onboarding process. For an extra monthly subscription, take a look at their new Premium Client Portal with advanced DIY-planning tools. 
• PreciseFP is the industry standard for client data collection, especially where data is needed that doesn’t fit into the planning tool's basic fact set (things like SSNs, addresses, goals, family tree, etc.). Build your ideal data gathering tool(s) and send them as easy-to-fill forms for your clients when appropriate. Then, link your other tools to PreciseFP to have that data automatically populate your other systems. 
• Dispatch is a new, next-gen data gathering tool. While they’re still new and building out their support structure and feature set, their eventual promise includes:
  • 2-way data sync across all systems so data changes in one of your systems flow to all others for cross-company data integrity.
  • Smart data gathering, so the fact-finders you send to your clients only include the information you don’t already have. Because Dispatch is connected to your other systems, it knows not to ask clients for information they’ve already provided you. 
  • Streamlined account opening promises to create a more intuitive account opening experience for you, then send a request to your client to fill in any gaps (and only the gaps, see above) in what your custodian needs for all account forms. 
• fpPathfinder is generally considered an internal planning guide library. It’s a resource to help planners remember key concepts and work through planning flowcharts and checklists to give consistent, great advice. But at the Premier tier, interactive checklists allow your clients to work through their own planning guides, providing you with valuable information along the way. Sync fpPathfinder with your CRM to capture valuable data automatically. 

Note: XYPN Members receive the Basic version of RightCapital included in membership with deep subsidies and discounts on the higher tiers. Substantial discounts are also available to Members for eMoney, PreciseFP, and fpPathfinder. 

Communication

Information is abundant, and your client portal is an asset, but clients consistently say what they value is their relationship with their advisor. Communication is what drives relationships. If you don’t have a plan for regular engagement, this is your PSA to get serious about client and prospect communications.

When you create a communication plan, aim to meet clients where they are. Sometimes it’s in their email, sure. But often it’s elsewhere. On their phone. On social media platforms. You’re not trying to overwhelm them, but be prepared to communicate how they want to be communicated with. Remember that a few good pipelines and data integrity in your CRM will help you see at a glance what you should be sending to whom, and when. 

Suggested Tools:

• For email comms, we come back to your CRM. Specifically, Wealthbox makes on-time individual and mass communications easy. Make sure you are maximizing your CRM’s abilities before employing a point solution like MailChimp, which can complicate your communication processes. You do need to invest in building out a plan. Create pipelines for your marketing and sales funnels such that, at each stage, appropriate drip campaigns speak to the prospective client based on their engagement level. For clients, build all-client and segmented communication plans for throughout the year. All clients might get your monthly newsletter and surge meeting invites. A segment of clients might receive your Roth IRA rollover reminders. Build these as recurring tasks or, where appropriate, workflows. Do this once, then sit back while your system executes consistently using email templates. 
• For text and phone, we increasingly like CurrentClient as a compliant, automated, and general-texting platform. Mass texts allow for scalable communications, while date-based scheduled text enables set-it-and-forget-it individualized communication plans like birthday messages. This platform is full of thoughtful efficiencies to make your life easy. Check it out.   

We could truly write a book on efficiency in the modern advisory practice, and the thousands of tools and integrations that support it, but we hope this gets you started. More important than the individual technologies you use, efficiency is a mindset. Learn to despise manual work. If you need a little inspiration, revisit this Kitces article on investing in time savings. 

Ultimately, we care about what we do and doing it right, and sometimes automation and delegation can feel like sacrificing quality to the caring perfectionist. Remember, this isn’t about minimizing your effort at your clients’ expense. It’s about building a consistent, well-oiled machine that serves your clients exquisitely and allows you to show up as your best self each day. 

Happy Planning!