Making the Most of Advisors’ Tech Tools

MoneyGuide Pro gets the job done, but over the years I found I was only using about five pages of the entire report. The report I most needed was eliminated a few years ago. It was a one-page summary of the clients' different savings options and their probability of success. It was visually attractive and was a simple way for clients to grasp how much saving they needed to do. When MGP deleted this report, it added a lot of extra work for our client service managers (CSMs) because they have to take the data and summarize it on one page.

We are hoping that eMoney, which is more interactive, will save our CSMs time and be more compelling for our clients and help with the stickiness factor. The downside is, I have to master it, too. This takes valuable time away from meeting with clients.

For aggregation and reporting, we have been using Blueleaf. Once again it is a lower cost option. However, I began to notice that the return calculations were off, way off. The year-to-date returns were particularly troubling because they took the percentage a portfolio was up or down, and projected it out to the end of the year. This has the effect of exacerbating down returns to look much worse than necessary and has the positive returns looking much better than they should.

Occasionally, the longer-term reports were also off. This created a lot of extra work for the team as they had to do the calculations manually and I spent a lot of time reviewing them for inaccuracies instead of (you guessed it) meeting with clients.

We also had some problems with the aggregations accurately pulling over account values. Going forward, we will use the aggregation of eMoney and will be using Black Diamond for reporting. We haven't integrated Black Diamond yet, so I am cautiously optimistic that it will help.

Dictation Demands

Up until recently, all of my meetings had handwritten notes along with dictation. Using Notability allowed me to dramatically reduce the number of dictations I had to do. Dictations would usually take me about 15 minutes per case. So you can see with an average of 15 cases per week, this comes to almost four hours a week. To me that is two extra client meetings; over the course of a year, it could either mean increased revenue of 10% or going home earlier. Both good results.

This particular issue has really contributed to my tech hassles. For a number of years, I used Copytalk. Unfortunately, it only allowed a limited number of minutes for my cheapest version. Most of my dictations were longer. Also, one of the big laughs my team got was the quality of the transcriptions. It degenerated over time. Sometimes it was impossible for me to figure out what the transcription meant, even though I dictated it!

From Copytalk, we tried to migrate to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This was another exercise in frustration. The learning curve for me (and the software, which uses AI!) was steep. It about doubled the amount of time I spent dictating and then started crashing. We never could get it to work. So I will be looking for a refund on this one.

Then I tried using the dictation programs that come with Word and with our email program. This was adequate for simple dictation, but usually I can type faster than I can accurately dictate with them, so it wasn't a good solution either.

Recently we went back to Copytalk. It has improved a lot in the last few years and I am hoping it is a keeper.

So let me know about your tech solutions. I would love to hear them.