Why we built Coremetryx, and what happened to Blueprint Analytics
For most of our 25 years, the problem we solved for self-licensed practices was production: getting advice out the door faster, cheaper and with less risk. The Blueprint framework did that, and still does.
But somewhere around the tenth year of running advice technology for practices, we kept hearing a different question from principals, and it wasn't about producing advice at all.
"I can't see my own business"
It came up in almost every conversation. A principal would want to know revenue by adviser, or which clients were most profitable, or how FUM had moved over the quarter, and the honest answer was that the number existed somewhere, in XPLAN or the platform or the brokerage system, but nobody could produce it without a weekend of exports and spreadsheets.
These were well-run practices. They produced good advice efficiently. They just couldn't answer basic questions about the business that produced it, because the data lived in five systems and nothing brought it together.
That seemed to us like the next problem worth solving.
Blueprint Analytics: the first answer
Our first answer was Blueprint Analytics: a suite of dashboards that pulled practice and client data from any source into visualisations a principal could actually use: revenue streams over time, client demographics, FUM by asset class, the ability to drill from a licensee view down to a single client.
It worked, and practices used it. But building it taught us something: the analytics problem was bigger than an add-on to an XPLAN framework. Practices wanted their own branding on it. Licensees wanted to see across multiple practices with proper data isolation between them. Everyone wanted to ask questions of the data in plain language rather than build a chart. And the infrastructure needed to do that well was a platform in its own right, not a module.
So we built the platform.
Coremetryx: what it became
Coremetryx is Blueprint Analytics grown up into a standalone product. It pulls your practice and client data into branded, multi-client dashboards and reports, built on Amazon QuickSight so the heavy lifting is done on enterprise-grade infrastructure rather than a spreadsheet.
What's different from the original:
- It's AI-powered. Ask a question of your data in plain language and get an answer, with the data story behind it, rather than waiting for someone to build the chart.
- It's multi-tenant by design. Each organisation's data is isolated. A licensee can see across practices; each practice sees only its own.
- It carries your brand. Dashboards look like yours, which is the right thing when you're showing a client, a board or a licensee.
- It's built to scale. Thousands of users across many organisations, with proper roles and access control.
What's the same is the reason it exists: so a principal can open a dashboard and see the business behind the advice, in minutes, without the weekend.
What this means if you were a Blueprint Analytics user
Blueprint Analytics as a name is retired. Everything it did, Coremetryx does, and a good deal more. The product page on this site now points to Coremetryx, and if you'd like to talk about moving across, get in touch and we'll walk you through it.
Why a consultancy builds products
We get asked this. The answer is that more than a decade of running advice technology for practices shows you exactly where the gaps are, and at some point the right response to a gap you keep seeing is to build the thing that closes it. Blueprint closed the production gap. AdviceStudio closes the gap between a good advice document and a client meeting the client actually remembers. Coremetryx closes the visibility gap.
Three products, one lifecycle: produce the advice, present it to the client, understand the business. That's what we mean when we say Planfocus is the partner across the whole of it.