Five signs your advice technology is holding your practice back
Advice technology almost never fails in a way that gets noticed. XPLAN doesn't stop working. Data feeds don't all break on the same day. Instead, the system drifts a little further from how the practice actually works each year, and the practice adapts around it. The cost is paid in hours, in workarounds and in decisions made on numbers nobody quite trusts.
We've been helping self-licensed practices with this for more than a decade. These are the five symptoms we see most often, and what each one usually turns out to mean.
XPLAN is paid for, but only a fraction of it is used
Most practices use XPLAN for client records and document production and leave the rest untouched: workflow, threads, tasks, client portal, portfolio reporting, automation. The licence fee is the same either way.
What it usually means: IRESS release capabilities in XPLAN all the time. If you are not following their change program you will not learn about its new features. Another issue could be that the site was set up for a previous version of the practice (or by a previous licensee) and has never been re-configured for how you work now. In each case, the capability is there. The configuration isn't.
The in-house expert left, and the knowledge left with them
Every practice has had "the XPLAN person." When they move on, templates become untouchable, small problems become tickets, and the practice stops changing anything for fear of breaking something.
What it usually means: the practice's advice framework lives in one person's head rather than in a maintained, documented system. The risk isn't the person leaving. It's that nothing was built to survive it.
There's a spreadsheet next to every important report
Fee reconciliation in Excel. Revenue by adviser in Excel. The FUM figure for the board pack, assembled by hand each quarter from three exports. If the number that matters most to the business takes a weekend to produce, the system isn't producing it.
What it usually means: the data exists (in XPLAN, in the platform, in the brokerage system) but nothing brings it together. This is the most common reason practices can't answer simple questions about their own business, and it's the problem we built Coremetryx to solve.
Advisers re-check data before every document
Watch an adviser prepare for a client meeting. If they open the client record and start verifying (is this balance current, is this contact detail right, did the feed update?) then somewhere along the line the data stopped being trusted. That checking is production time, and it happens on every document.
What it usually means: data-feed health and data-integrity routines aren't in place. They're unglamorous. They're also the difference between a system you rely on and one you work around.
Growth means hiring, not scaling
The clearest sign of all. When advice volume rises, does the practice get more efficient or does it need more people? If every new adviser needs a new paraplanner and every extra 50 clients need another admin hire, the technology isn't scaling. The headcount is.
What it usually means: advice production is manual at the points where it should be automatic. Practices using a proven advice framework produce advice in at least half the time of manual methods. That difference is the gap between hiring to cope and growing on the system you already pay for.
What to do with this list
Count the signs. One is normal. Three or more means the technology has drifted far enough from the practice that it's costing real money, and that the fix is usually configuration and framework, not a new platform.
If you want a second opinion, a free Advice Tech Health Check is thirty minutes with a senior consultant who has seen all five of these many times. We'll tell you which ones apply to you and what we'd do about them, whether or not that involves us.