Time saving
The Real Cost of Manual Suitability Reports
Jon Livsey · · 4 min read
Suitability reports don't take two hours because the writing is hard. The writing is the short bit. The expensive part is everything around it: finding the file, re-keying facts you already collected once, and checking that three versions of the same information still agree.
I'm a practising adviser, and I timed my own annual-review process honestly, interruptions and all. Here's where the time went.
Where the two hours actually go
| Task | Time |
|---|---|
| Finding and reading the client file | 40 minutes |
| Cross-referencing plan and fund values | 15 minutes |
| Writing up the meeting notes | 25 minutes |
| Drafting the suitability letter | 30 minutes |
| Checking and getting it signed off | 20 minutes |
| Filing everything | 10 minutes |
Two hours and twenty minutes. And that's a clean run. It assumes the latest valuation is where it should be, and that nobody rings while you're on page 30 of a 40-page fact-find and sends you back to page one.
Look at what the list is actually made of. Drafting, the part everyone assumes is the job, is half an hour. Most of the rest is retrieval and duplication. You read a long file to find the dozen facts that matter. You type those facts into your notes. You type them again into the letter. Then you check the letter against the file to make sure all the copies still agree.
We gather the information once, at the fact-find. Then we pay ourselves to handle it another four times.
Multiplied across a review book
One review is an irritation. A book of them is a structural problem.
Run 100 ongoing clients on annual reviews and two-hours-and-a-bit each comes to roughly 230 hours a year. At 150 clients it's over 300 hours. Call it seven working weeks spent assembling documents about advice, rather than giving any.
And the reviews aren't optional. If you charge an ongoing fee, the file has to show the review happened and was done properly. That expectation has only tightened under Consumer Duty. The volume moves in one direction.
The three ways out
Work the hours. Evenings and weekends. This is the default, and I did it for years. It works until it doesn't, and it quietly caps your book at whatever your goodwill can absorb.
Buy the hours. A paraplanner, salaried or per-case. A legitimate option, and I've written separately about when it's the right one. But notice that much of the two hours doesn't transfer cleanly: you still have to gather the file and brief the case. You've moved the re-keying to someone else's desk and added a salary or a per-case fee for the privilege.
Change the workflow. Stop treating retrieval and duplication as fixed costs. They're only fixed if the facts live in a PDF that a human has to read every time.
Most advisers only ever weigh the first two, because for most of my career the third didn't exist in a usable form.
Why starting from the file changes the arithmetic
Nearly everything a review needs is already in the client file. The client's circumstances, the holdings, the risk profile, last year's recommendation. The cost sits in retrieving and re-handling that information, not in creating it. And retrieval is exactly the kind of work software should be doing.
That's the bet I built Suitable on. It reads the client file, extracts the facts with a reference back to where each one came from, and drafts the agenda, the meeting notes and the advice letter from that data. The 40 minutes of reading becomes a few minutes checking extracted data against its sources. The re-keying disappears, because the information is captured once and flows through. The checking becomes confirming, rather than hunting through pages.
What doesn't compress is judgement. Whether the recommendation is right for this client is still your job, and it should be. Drafts stay drafts until you approve them; nothing reaches a client without your sign-off. That stays true in Suitable, and I'd want it true of anything you buy. The adviser carries the responsibility either way.
So no, the two hours doesn't go to zero. But the judgement was never the expensive part. The assembly was.
If your review book is eating your evenings the way mine used to, this is the exact problem Suitable was built for — book a demo at getsuitable.co.uk.