The real cost of producing an SOA
Ask a practice principal what a Statement of Advice costs to produce and you'll usually get a confident number: a paraplanning fee, a few adviser hours, a rate card. Ask where the hours actually go and the confidence fades. The honest answer is usually "more than we'd like, and we're not sure why."
That gap between the number you quote and the hours you spend is where a practice's margin quietly leaks. It's also the first thing we look at in an Advice Tech Health Check, because it's the fastest way to see how well the technology behind your advice is really working.
The hours nobody counts
When we map the production of a typical SOA from fact find to signed document, the adviser and paraplanner time is rarely the problem. The problem is everything around it:
Rework. The document comes back from review with changes that should have been caught by the template: a section that didn't pull the right data, a calculation that had to be done by hand, a strategy paragraph that was rewritten for the third time this month. Each pass is small. Across a year of advice they add up to weeks.
Workarounds. Every practice has them. The spreadsheet that sits beside XPLAN because a report "never quite worked." The Word document of standard wording that someone copies from because the template is too risky to edit. The manual fee calculation because the data feed is unreliable. Workarounds are the system telling you it isn't configured for how you actually work.
Templates nobody dares touch. Over time, advice templates accumulate patches. The person who built them moves on. Now nobody wants to change a field in case something downstream breaks, so the practice adapts its process to the template rather than the other way round.
Data that isn't trusted. If advisers re-check client data before every document because they've been burned before, that checking is production time too. Data integrity is not an IT concern; it's an advice-production cost.
None of these items appears on an invoice. All of them are paid for.
Why the number matters
It matters because advice production is the largest controllable cost in a self-licensed practice, and it scales with growth.
600 hours a year A practice producing 200 SOAs a year that loses three hours per document to rework and workarounds is losing roughly a third of a full-time person to friction a well-configured advice framework removes.
It also matters because the alternative to fixing it is usually hiring. Practices add paraplanning capacity to cope with volume when the real constraint is that every document takes longer than it should. Fixing the system is cheaper than feeding it.
What "fixed" looks like
Across practices using our Blueprint advice framework, advice production timeframes fall by at least half compared with manual methods. That isn't because the advisers work faster. It's because the things above stop happening:
- Templates pull the right data the first time, so review is a review, not a rewrite.
- Standard strategy and educational content is maintained centrally and updated for regulatory change, so nobody copies from an old Word file.
- Defaults for practice and adviser settings take the double handling out of modelling and implementation steps.
- Advisers can edit their own templates without a technician, so the template serves the process, not the reverse.
The framework does the heavy lifting. The practice keeps its own advice style, its own brand and its own process.
How to find your own number
You don't need a consultant to start. Take your last ten SOAs and, for each one, write down three things: how many review passes it took, which steps were done outside XPLAN, and how long the adviser spent checking or correcting data. Patterns appear quickly. The step that shows up in eight of ten documents is where your hours are going.
If you'd rather have someone do that with you, and tell you plainly what we'd change, that's exactly what a free Advice Tech Health Check is. Thirty minutes, no obligation, and you leave with a number you can act on.