Technology
Automate the wrong process and you have made a broken thing fail faster, at scale, without the person who used to catch it.
You have been told everything can be automated, which is true and completely useless. The question is what to automate first, and that is a different calculation.
Get the order wrong and you have made a broken process fail faster, at scale, without the person who used to catch it.
Rank your recurring work by how often it happens and how badly a small mistake propagates. The top of that list is almost always the same in every firm: anything touching money movement, billing, and the numbers clients see.
1. Reconciliation and data. Unglamorous and foundational. Everything downstream is computed from it, so a manual step here contaminates reporting, billing and performance simultaneously.
2. Billing. High frequency, high consequence, low visibility until it is wrong. It is also the process most firms are quietly doing partly in a spreadsheet.
3. Rebalancing and drift monitoring. Turns a judgment made inconsistently into a rule applied consistently, and produces the supervisory record as a by-product.
4. Reporting production. Not report design — production. The assembly, not the thinking.
5. Client communications that are genuinely templated. Onboarding sequences, review scheduling, annual document requests.
Notice that advice appears nowhere on that list. The work worth automating is the work that does not benefit from your judgment, and the fastest way to devalue a firm is to automate the part clients are actually paying for.
Automating a broken process makes it fail faster and at greater scale. If the billing exceptions live in someone's memory, automating billing does not fix that — it removes the person who was compensating for it.
Document the process first. The documentation usually reveals that a third of the steps exist only because of a limitation you no longer have.
Most automation projects at advisory firms fail for the same reason: the work spans systems that do not share a record, so the automation becomes a synchronization project wearing an efficiency costume.
A firm running one set of records automates by configuring. A firm running five automates by building and maintaining connections between them, permanently.
Why the records disagree in the first place →
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