When someone asks what a client received last year
The firm's compliance lead is preparing the annual review of how clients are being served, or a board member asks whether ongoing service clients are getting what they pay for. The question sounds simple: for each client, what did we do?
Answering it means opening the back office for fees, adviser calendars for meetings, sent items for letters, the document store for reports, and the phone system for calls. For a handful of clients that is a morning. For the whole client bank it is weeks, so it ends up being done on a small sample.
Why the evidence is scattered
Each system was chosen for its own job. The back office records fees and plans, the calendar records meetings, email records correspondence. None of them was set up to answer "what service did this client receive?". So the answer has to be assembled by hand.
- Reviews recorded as calendar entries, not as outcomes against the client.
- Client contact spread across adviser mailboxes.
- Documents sent from different systems.
- Service levels recorded in the back office inconsistently.
- No regular report comparing service promised with service delivered.
Staff changes make it worse. When an adviser leaves, their mailbox and calendar hold much of the record of what their clients received. Unless it is captured against each client before the account is closed, that history goes with it.
What the scatter costs
| Question | Effort today |
|---|---|
| Was every ongoing service client offered a review? | Checked by sampling files |
| Which clients have had no contact this year? | Hard to answer across mailboxes |
| Are fees in line with the service level? | Cross-referenced by hand |
| What did a particular client receive? | Half a day assembling records |
Because the work is heavy, it happens once a year on a sample. Clients who slipped through the gaps are found late, and the fix is an apology rather than a phone call in good time.
How we build the service record
- We agree with your firm what counts as service delivered for each of your service levels: reviews, contact, valuations, communications.
- Data is pulled from your back office, adviser calendars in Microsoft 365 or Google, your document store and, where appropriate, your phone system logs.
- Each activity is matched to the client and stored as a dated service event.
- A per-client timeline shows every event, alongside the service level and fees charged.
- Firm-wide reports list clients below the level your firm set, for example no review offered or no contact in a given period.
- Reports can be run at any time, for all clients or filtered by adviser or segment, and exported for your own records.
We build the reporting. We do not decide what your obligations are, or whether your service meets them. Your compliance lead and your firm set the rules the reports apply.
What the firm gets
Gaps show up monthly rather than annually, while an adviser can still pick up the phone. Assembling a client's service history is a click rather than half a day. Your compliance lead reviews a whole client bank instead of a sample. And advisers can see, for their own clients, who has gone quiet.
The owner gets a clearer view of capacity as well. If some advisers consistently fall behind on reviews for their service level while others do not, the reports show it, and the conversation about workload or client allocation can start from real information.
Does this apply to your firm?
- Showing what a client received means opening several systems.
- Service reviews are done on a sample because the full job is too big.
- You find clients with no contact after the year has ended.
- Service levels are recorded inconsistently.
- Advisers cannot easily see which of their clients have gone quiet.