Technology
Firms ask what can be automated. The answer is nearly everything, which is exactly why the question does not help.
Firms ask what can be automated, and the answer is nearly everything, which is why the question does not help. The useful question is what should be automated first, and that is a different calculation.
The tasks worth automating first are the ones done constantly and the ones that fail quietly. Something done twice a year is not worth engineering, however tedious. Something done four hundred times a quarter by a person who is occasionally interrupted is where errors live.
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 judgement 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 judgement, 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 synchronisation 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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