Admin scorecard for advice firms: how many hours a week could AI prepare for the adviser to sign, job by job

An advice firm's capacity is set by its paperwork. An adviser can hold only as many clients as the firm can review each year, and the FCA's February 2025 work on ongoing advice found reviews delivered in 83% of cases, with firms asked to look back to 2018 at the rest. Each review means an invitation, a pack, a meeting note and often a report. This scorecard asks how many hours a week each of those jobs takes in your firm and shows which could be prepared for the adviser to sign, which are the adviser's alone, and what the time costs.

Free tool

Admin scorecard for a advice firm: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job

Review invitations and review packs (hours a week)Prepared by AI: the invitation, the chasers and the pack of valuations and last year's notes Drafting suitability reports (hours a week)Prepared by AI: a draft from the fact-find and the adviser's recommendation, with the gaps flagged File checks before submission (hours a week)Prepared by AI: a pass or fail list against the rule and your own checklist Letters of authority: sending and chasing providers (hours a week)Prepared by AI: the request and the dated chasers, with what is still missing Meeting notes and back-office updates (hours a week)Prepared by AI: the note from the recording or your jottings, and the fields to update Gathering valuations and policy details (hours a week)Prepared by AI: the figures pulled into one sheet, with the source and date of each The advice itself (hours a week)Stays with a person: the adviser's, by regulation Client meetings (hours a week)Stays with a person: the relationship is the adviser's Cost of an hour of the person doing this work (£)Wage plus employer costs. 15 is an example; put in your own figure Share of each job kept for checking the draft (%)Our assumption is a quarter. Raise it if you would read every line twice Weeks worked a year The way you do these jobs is written down, or could be in an afternoonYesNo The work arrives by email, web form or a system with an exportYesNoNo if it is mostly by phone or on paper One named person would approve drafts every working dayYesNo

Works in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this device.

The jobs it asks about

Six of the eight jobs are preparation from the client file. Review invitations and chasers go out on fixed dates and the pack gathers valuations and last year's notes; the ongoing service tracker shows what a missed one costs. A suitability report is drafted from the fact-find and the adviser's recommendation, with the gaps flagged. A file check is a pass or fail list, and the suitability file check runs the COBS 9.4.7R minimum. Letters of authority are sent and chased on a working-day rhythm, as in our LOA chase template. Meeting notes are written from the recording or the adviser's jottings. Valuations are pulled into one sheet with the source and date of each.

How the score is worked out

There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.

Where the line sits

Two jobs stay with the adviser by regulation as much as by preference. The advice is the first: the recommendation, and the reasons it suits this client, are the adviser's, and a tool that drafts the report writes down a decision already made. Client meetings are the second. The checking share matters more here than in most sectors. A suitability report must set out the client's demands and needs, why the recommendation is suitable and the possible disadvantages, and the adviser who signs it answers for all three. Under the Consumer Duty the firm must also be able to show the client understood it. If the adviser will read every report line by line, set the checking share to 40% or 50%; the result is smaller, and it is the one to plan on.

A worked example

With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 44 hours of office work a week, 26 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 19.5 hours a week handed over, 44% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £13,455 a year. The three largest are drafting suitability reports (6 of 8 hours), review invitations and packs (3.8 of 5) and letters of authority (3 of 4). What stays with a person: the advice itself and client meetings, 18 hours. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small advice firm; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.

The three readiness questions

The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your advice firm this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.

What to do with the result

Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.

Overlyft sets up AI assistants for financial advice firms built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to financial advice firms sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.