The time an advisor loses gathering client data every month

1. Where the hours go

The work is rarely analysis. It is requesting statements, waiting for the client who has not sent theirs, downloading from three platforms, normalising formats that do not agree, converting currencies, and rebuilding last month's file because this month has one more position.

Multiply by the number of clients and the pattern is familiar: the effort scales linearly with the client book, so growth makes the problem worse rather than better.

2. The cost that is not the hours

Hours are the visible cost. The invisible ones are worse: reports that arrive late enough to be history rather than decision support, a client question you cannot answer live, and the version control problem of five spreadsheets that all claim to be current.

And the risk one: a manual consolidation error in a client report is not an inconvenience, it is a credibility event. That is the part nobody puts in the time estimate.

3. What exists today, honestly

FinBoard today is a personal finance product: one user, their own accounts, their own consolidated view. There is no multi-client workspace, no client-facing report branding and no advisor permissions model. We would rather say that plainly than let a landing page imply otherwise.

If your work is closer to financial reporting in spreadsheets — consolidation, budget versus actuals, executive reporting — we do already publish material on that in the reporting and FP&A part of this resource centre, and it may be more immediately useful to you.

4. What would help us to know

If any of the above describes your month, the useful thing you can do is tell us about it. Not to be sold to — to shape whether this gets built at all, and in which direction.

• How many clients you report on, and how often.
• How many institutions a typical client portfolio spans.
• What the report has to contain to be usable by the client.
• Which part of the process you would pay to never do again.