Calculate the ROI

“It'll save us time” is a nice thought, but it's hard to make a decision on. This module turns that feeling into numbers you can weigh against what an agent costs. At an advisory firm, the most useful of those numbers usually isn't salary saved. It's advisor hours, and what those hours could be doing instead.

Why salary is the wrong yardstick

The usual automation math asks what an hour of staff time costs and multiplies it by the hours saved. That works when the work is done by someone whose hours you could reduce. At most RIAs, a lot of operations work is done by advisors themselves, squeezed between meetings or done at night. Nobody's payroll goes down when an advisor stops typing up notes. What changes is what that advisor can do with the time: more reviews, more prospect meetings, deeper planning conversations, or a life outside the office.

So the calculator below looks at the same workflow three ways: hours back, client capacity, and dollars.

The numbers that matter

• Hours back. The hours a week your advisors and ops staff spend on the workflow today, times the share an agent can realistically take over. Very few workflows are 100% handed off; someone still approves drafts and handles the odd case, so a conservative share is safer.
• Client capacity. If those hours went to client reviews instead, how many more meetings could you hold in a year, and how many more households could you serve at your current review schedule? This is the number that speaks to growth without hiring.
• Value of an advisor hour. What an hour of advisor time is worth to your firm. There's no standard figure, so use your own. One simple approach: take an advisor's annual compensation, or the revenue they bring in, and divide it by the hours they work in a year.
• Payback. How long it takes for the net value each month to cover the one-time setup. With our Starter, setup is waived on a 3-month commitment, so payback is about the monthly cost alone.

Putting it together

Hours back per year × value of an advisor hour = what the workflow is costing you in advisor time. Subtract the monthly agent cost over a year, and you have the net value. Divide the setup cost by the net value per month, and you have payback in months. Separately, hours back ÷ hours per client review = extra meetings the time could fund.

Keep in mind that freed hours don't automatically become revenue or new clients. The gain depends on what your advisors do with the time. That's why the capacity numbers are worth looking at alongside the dollar figure: they show what's possible, and you decide what to do with it.

The value that doesn't show up in the math

Some benefits are real but hard to price: fewer NIGO rejections, transfers that don't stall for a week unnoticed, notes that are filed the same day instead of from memory on Friday, a CRM your whole team can trust, and a clean record of what was sent and approved. Treat the calculator's result as a floor, not a ceiling.

Run the numbers on your workflow

Plug in your top-ranked workflow from the last module. Every default is an example, so replace the hours, the value of an advisor hour and your review schedule with your own figures.

If the result looks worthwhile, you're ready for the final module: setting the approval and record-keeping rules that let you switch the agent on with confidence.