Month end, and the owner opens Excel
The owner of a growing advice firm wants a few simple answers each month. How much recurring income came in? What is in the pipeline? How many clients are on each service level? Which advisers are behind on reviews? How long are cases sitting with paraplanning?
Getting them means running several reports from the back office, exporting fee data, pulling figures from Xero, and pasting it all into a spreadsheet that has grown formulas nobody wants to touch. By the time it is done, the month is half over. At the partners' meeting, someone questions a number, and the discussion turns into a debate about how it was calculated.
Why the numbers are always late
Back office systems hold most of the data, and their built-in reports are useful for day to day work. But the owner's questions cut across systems: income from the accounts package, cases from the back office, reviews from calendars. No single report answers them.
Definitions drift too. Does pipeline include cases waiting on the client? Is a review held when the meeting happens or when the report is sent? Each person answers slightly differently, so two people building the same figure get different results.
- Owner questions cut across the back office, accounts and calendars.
- Reports exported and combined by hand every month.
- Definitions of pipeline, income and activity not agreed.
- Spreadsheet formulas that only one person understands.
- Figures ready too late to act on.
What running on late numbers costs
| Question | Answered today | Answered with a dashboard |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring income this month | After the reconciliation, weeks later | As statements are reconciled |
| Pipeline by adviser | Exported and filtered by hand | Live, by stage and age |
| Clients by service level | Report plus clean-up | Current, with trend |
| Reviews overdue | Asked of each adviser | Listed by adviser |
| Cases waiting on paraplanning | Rough guess | Count and average age |
Decisions about hiring, pricing and adviser capacity get made on stale or disputed figures. The owner spends hours of each month as a report builder instead of running the firm.
The dashboard we build
- We sit with the owner and partners and agree the handful of figures that matter, with a written definition for each.
- Data is pulled on a schedule from Intelliflo Office, Xplan, Curo or your records, from Xero, QuickBooks or Sage for income, and from calendars where review activity needs it.
- Figures are calculated to the agreed definitions in one place, so everyone sees the same numbers.
- A dashboard shows the firm, each adviser and each team, with trends over time.
- Any figure can be clicked through to the underlying clients or cases, so a surprising number can be checked immediately.
- A short monthly summary can be emailed to partners automatically.
Where data quality stops a figure being reliable, the dashboard says so rather than showing a number that looks precise and is not. Often the first version exposes data problems worth fixing.
The month end afterwards
The owner opens the dashboard rather than a spreadsheet. Partner meetings discuss what the numbers mean rather than how they were worked out. Advisers can see their own pipeline and review status. And the firm notices trends, like a pipeline that has been shrinking for three months, while there is still time to act.
The spreadsheet does not have to disappear overnight. Running both side by side for a month or two, until the new figures are trusted, is a sensible way to switch.
Is this how you run the firm?
- Month end means exporting reports and combining them in Excel.
- Partners argue about how figures were calculated.
- You learn about slowing pipeline too late.
- Only one person can update the management spreadsheet.
- Advisers cannot see their own numbers without asking.