Financial services

The introducer is the business model

A great deal of financial advice arrives through someone else: an accountant, a solicitor, a mortgage broker, an existing client, an employer. That relationship is the reason the firm has work, it takes years to build, and in most firms it exists entirely in the head of one adviser.

The consequences are predictable and expensive. No one can say what an introduction stream is actually worth. Nobody notices when one stops. When the adviser who has the relationship retires or leaves, the stream leaves with them, and the firm discovers it a year later when the numbers are already down.

An introducer as a relationship, connected to every client they introduced, turns that into something the firm owns instead of something an individual owns. It also makes the awkward but valuable question answerable: of the eleven professional connections we maintain, which have actually sent us anything in three years.

The period before somebody is a client is invisible

A back office system begins when a client exists. Everything that determines whether they become one happens first: an introduction, a meeting, a proposal, a fee conversation, a period of the prospective client thinking about it, and frequently a competitor.

In most firms that period is an inbox and a diary. The firm genuinely cannot say how many enquiries it received last year, what proportion converted, how long conversion took, or which introducers produce the ones that convert rather than merely the ones that enquire. Those are basic commercial questions and they have no answers.

That is what a pipeline with stages you name and a stage history that is kept is for. Not because advice is a sale, but because a firm that cannot measure its own front end is making decisions about marketing, hiring and capacity on impressions.

Reviews are the operational heartbeat

For an ongoing advice service the annual review is the thing being paid for, and missing them is both a service failure and a regulatory exposure. Most firms track them in a back office system that knows the date, a spreadsheet that duplicates it, and a diary that somebody maintains.

Held as tasks against the client with a date, appearing in a daily view of what is due and what has slipped, the review stops being a date someone has to remember to look up and becomes work with an owner. It is visible to whoever is covering when the adviser is away, which is when reviews are actually missed.

Not a back office system

No valuations. No platform connections. No fee or commission reconciliation. No suitability reports. No cash flow modelling. No client portal showing a portfolio. No integration with any of those systems today.

Those are the core of adviser back office software, they are genuinely difficult, and a worse version of them inside a CRM would help no one.

We will not claim regulatory outcomes

No software delivers consumer duty, discharges a vulnerability obligation or makes a firm compliant. Those are properties of what your firm does, and they are settled between your firm and the Financial Conduct Authority rather than by a supplier. What software can do is record what happened, keep evidence that cannot be edited, and make the right thing easier to do than the wrong one. That is what this does and it is all we will claim for it.

Data is not held in the UK

The European Union or the United States, chosen at creation and fixed from then on. UK firms should choose the European Union. If your requirement is specifically UK residency, we do not meet it, and the security page lists the other things we do not have alongside it.

What to check first

Run an export on the first afternoon. It is free on every plan, produces everything in a format that opens without our software, and tells you more about a supplier than any page like this one. In a sector where changing systems is famously painful, that is the check worth doing before the data matters. The rest of the questions worth putting to any supplier, including this one, are set out in the questions to ask before you buy.

Tuesday morning, an accountant telephones about a client selling a business

None of what follows happened. It is a hypothetical firm of six people and a hypothetical introduction, written out because the arguments about recording things only become concrete when there is a particular Tuesday attached to them.

The accountant has acted for the seller for years. She telephones the adviser she has known since they were both juniors, gives a name, a rough size, a timescale, and says she has told them to expect a call. The conversation lasts four minutes.

At the end of those four minutes the firm holds everything it will ever hold about how this client arrived, and in most firms no one writes any of it down, because the adviser knows perfectly well where it came from and will remember. He will. What will not survive is the firm's ability to say, in three years, that this accountant sends work of this kind, at this size, at this rate.

The record made before the meeting is even booked

A relationship for the prospective client. A connection to the accountant, who already exists as an introducer because she has sent work before. A pipeline stage set to whatever the firm calls the beginning. Two sentences about what the introduction actually concerned, which is the part worth reading a year later and the part most likely to be left out.

The awkward item is the date. The introduction happened on the Tuesday, not on the Friday when somebody got round to typing it, and a firm that intends to measure how long conversion takes needs the first of those dates rather than the second. That is the whole argument for doing it in the four minutes rather than at the end of the week, and it is a better argument than tidiness.

The first meeting, and the two facts that will matter later

The meeting produces a great deal that belongs in a back office system and two things that do not belong there at all. The first is that the seller's wife will be at every subsequent meeting, has her own arrangements elsewhere, and has her own view about being telephoned. That makes this a household instead of a person, and it is easier to model as two connected records on the day it is discovered than after eighteen months of correspondence has accumulated against one of them.

The second is that the seller's father is elderly, lives with them, and is the reason the timescale is what it is. That was said in confidence, it is exactly the sort of thing that ends up either in a free text note everyone in the office can read or in no record at all, and it is also the single fact most likely to change how the next conversation should be handled. Sensitivity granted separately from the role is what makes it possible to write it down honestly. Notes that are written to be safe rather than written to be true are not worth the storage.

Eleven weeks of nothing, which is normal instead of a failure

The sale slips. The prospective client goes quiet, not because he has gone to a competitor but because he is dealing with lawyers and has no attention left. This is where most firms lose the thread, and they lose it in a specific way: the adviser's instinct for whether something is alive stops working, because from the outside a case that is waiting and a case that is dead feel identical.

What replaces the instinct is a stage that has not moved for eleven weeks and a task with a date on it. Neither is clever. Both have the one property that matters, which is that somebody other than the adviser can see them, and the week the sale completes is very frequently the week the adviser is away.

The point at which it becomes a fee, or does not

Say it converts. The service level, the fee basis and the first review date are decided in a single conversation and then live in three different places: the fee basis in the back office system where it belongs, the review date in a diary, and the service level in the adviser's understanding of what was promised. The second and third are the ones that go wrong, and they go wrong quietly.

Held as custom fields on the relationship, with the review as a dated task created on the day of onboarding instead of the day someone notices, both become answerable by whoever is covering. Say instead that it does not convert, because the buyer walked away and the sale never happened. Then the useful record is the reason, the date, and a consent position that allows a conversation in two years when the business is sold to someone else.

The thing almost no one does, which is telling the accountant

Converted or not, the accountant is owed an answer, and the firm that reliably gives one is the firm that gets sent the next thing. This is not a system problem and no software will make somebody make the call. What software can do is make the call possible: the introducer is connected to the prospective client and the stage change is recorded against both, so the answer to who is owed a telephone call is written down somewhere other than one person's memory.

What the firm can now answer that it could not answer before

How many introductions this accountant has made and over what period. What proportion became clients. How long each took from the Tuesday to the fee. What the ones that did not proceed had in common, which in a firm of this size is usually one thing and usually surprising. Whether the introductions arriving now are the same kind as the ones that arrived three years ago.

None of those is a hard question. All of them are unanswerable in a firm where the introduction is a memory and the record begins at onboarding, which describes most firms and every back office system.

The weeks before the tax year ends are the worst weeks to change anything

Allowances that expire at the end of the tax year in April produce a compressed period in which a firm does a large part of its transactional work, with deadlines set by somebody else and no possibility of moving them. Everyone in the office is doing client work and nobody is available to think about records.

The practical consequence for a firm considering any new system is straightforward. Late winter is the wrong time to start, and the person who insists on starting anyway will do a rushed import, skip the modelling decisions, and reach April with a system that describes the firm badly. May and June are the sensible months. So is the second half of the summer, for the reason below.

The accountant who goes quiet in January has not gone quiet

Professional connections have their own seasons and they do not match yours. An accountancy practice disappears into self assessment in January and reappears in February. A solicitor doing conveyancing follows the housing market. A firm that watches its introduction streams month by month and reacts to the gaps will chase people who are simply busy and will do it in the week they are least likely to be thanked for it.

The only thing that separates a seasonal gap from a stream that has actually ended is two years of introductions with dates on them, which is a reason to record them from the beginning instead of a reason to start recording them once something already feels wrong. By the time it feels wrong the comparison you need is the one you did not keep.

Review dates bunch wherever the firm's onboarding once bunched

The annual review usually falls on the anniversary of onboarding, so a firm that acquired a block of clients in one period, or took on a retiring adviser's book, ends up with reviews stacked into the same few weeks every year for as long as the clients remain. No one designed this. It is simply what happens when the review date is derived from the start date and the start dates were not spread.

It is visible only when review dates are held as dated work rather than as a column in a spreadsheet someone sorts by name. It is worth looking at deliberately, because the two available remedies both need lead time: moving some reviews by agreement with the client, or accepting the peak and staffing for it. Discovering the peak while standing in it is the third option and it is the one most firms take.

What the quiet part of the summer is actually for

August is when an advice firm has time, and it is the natural moment for the work that never has a deadline: going through the introducer list to see which connections have produced nothing in three years, checking which prospective clients have been sitting at the same stage since spring, and reviewing which enquiries did not convert and what they had in common.

None of that is possible in a firm where introductions live in memory and everything before onboarding lives in an inbox. That is the honest case for recording the front half of the business: not that it is tidier, but that it gives the quiet month something useful to work on and turns the busy month into a thing that was anticipated.

What firms are actually arriving from

In practice it is one of six things. An adviser back office system, either bought directly or supplied by a network. A platform's own client list, used as a contact database because it is already open on the screen. A shared mailbox and a set of Outlook contacts. A spreadsheet of review dates maintained by one person who is usually the practice manager. A paper client file. Or, most commonly, four of those at once, disagreeing with each other about the address.

The first thing worth saying is that the back office system is not being replaced. Consonas does not hold valuations, does not connect to a platform, does not produce a suitability report and does not reconcile income, so a firm moving off its back office system onto this is doing something we would advise against. What is being replaced is the mailbox, the spreadsheet and the memory.

What comes across without much argument

Names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and the fact that somebody is a client. Almost every system exports that, and it is the least valuable half of what you hold. Review dates come across if they exist as a field somewhere, which is worth checking before assuming, because in a surprising number of firms the review date is only in the diary.

Household structure sometimes survives and usually does not, because most systems record a couple either as one record with two names or as two records with a shared address and nothing linking them. Expect to make the connections by hand. In a firm of a few hundred clients that is an afternoon, and it is the afternoon that determines whether the system is useful in a year.

What has to be rebuilt by hand, and is worth the hours

The introducers, because they are not held anywhere as a category and cannot be exported from a system that never had the concept. Reconstructing them means going through the client list and asking, for each one, where they came from. That is slow, it will be wrong for the oldest clients, and it is still the single most valuable thing a firm of this kind can do in its first fortnight, because it is the first time the firm will have seen the answer written down in one place.

The prospective clients too. No one's back office system has them, so they are reconstructed from the inbox and the adviser's memory, and only the live ones are worth the effort. Everything older than a year should be left where it is rather than imported for completeness, which is the instinct to resist here.

The consent column is the one to distrust

A spreadsheet with a column marked yes is not a consent record. Consent is a fact with a date, a source and a channel, which is also what the Information Commissioner's Office expects a record of it to contain, and importing an unqualified yes carries an assertion about provenance that will be tested at exactly the wrong moment. Where the provenance is genuinely unknown, the honest import is the one that says so, and the correct response to a large number of unknowns is a campaign to ask rather than a decision to assume.

The same applies to vulnerability. A flag copied across from a free text note without the context that produced it is worse than no flag, because it looks like a decision somebody made and recorded when it is a phrase someone typed.

What not to migrate at all

Correspondence history from a previous system, unless there is a specific reason. Clients who left more than a few years ago. Anything regulated that belongs in the back office system, which stays where it is and remains the record for that purpose.

The temptation is to bring everything across so that nothing is lost. The result is a system full of material nobody trusts, in which the genuinely current information is indistinguishable from the residue of two suppliers ago. Bring across what is true today, and run the export on the first afternoon to satisfy yourself that whatever you do bring can leave again.