When was the last time you properly looked at how your CRM is performing?
Or have you resigned yourself to ‘this is how it works for us’? Logging client meetings. Recording review dates. Generating reports. Tracking compliance activities. Your CRM is the operational heartbeat of practice management.
Is your CRM making your life easier?
Your tech choices are (or should be) your most valuable business asset. When it’s working properly, it creates efficiency, consistency, and clarity. It enables automation. It provides insight. It scales with your growth. When you are not making the most of it? It creates delays, confusion, and frustration. It slows you down.
The invisible cost
Time tracking studies consistently show that financial advisers spend 40-60% of their time on administrative tasks that could be automated or outsourced. For a £60,000 adviser, that represents £24,000-£36,000 in annual cost doing work that shouldn’t require a qualified professional. For a ten-adviser firm, that’s £240,000-£360,000 annually on administration disguised as advice work. Over five years? £1.2M to £1.8M in pure waste.
Much of this waste traces directly back to poor data quality and system configuration. You cannot automate what isn’t standardised. You cannot segment what isn’t structured. You cannot trust insights drawn from inconsistent data.
So how do you know if your CRM needs attention?
Based on over a decade of working with financial advice firms, these are the five warning signs to look out for:
Warning Sign #1: Your team can’t agree on basic processes
You ask three different team members how to record a client review and you’ll get three different answers. One uses workflow A, another prefers workflow B, and the third has their own “better way” that bypasses the system entirely. When your CRM doesn’t have clear, intuitive workflows built in, people create their own. Client data gets recorded inconsistently. Important steps get missed. Handoffs between team members break down because everyone’s working to different rules.
What it costs you: Duplicated effort, missed compliance requirements, quality inconsistencies, impossible training for new team members, and complete inability to scale because the business runs on tribal knowledge rather than documented systems.
The fix: Proper workflow configuration combined with process mapping ensures everyone follows the same path through standard activities. When done right, the system guides users through best practice automatically.
Warning Sign #2: You’re maintaining the same information in multiple places
Client address in the CRM. Same address in the back office system. Different address in the client portal. Yet another version in your email system. Which one is correct? Place your bets please..! Data duplication isn’t just inefficient, it’s dangerous. It creates compliance risk, undermines client service, and wastes extraordinary amounts of time on reconciliation and checking.
What it costs you: Research shows that poor data quality costs organisations an average of £10-15 million annually in wasted time, poor decisions, and missed opportunities. Whilst the number varies by firm size, the pattern is consistent: duplicated data creates exponential cost as your business grows.
The fix: System integration or workflow redesign that establishes a single source of truth. When client data changes, it changes everywhere, automatically. This requires both technical configuration and process discipline.
Warning Sign #3: Your “simple” reports take hours to produce
Compliance wants a list of clients reviewed in Q4. Should take five minutes. Actually takes two hours because the review dates aren’t standardised, some are recorded as activities whilst others are appointments, and half of them have no outcome recorded so you can’t tell if they actually happened. Or perhaps you need to segment clients by service level for a pricing review. Except some are tagged as “Premier,” others as “Tier 1,” and a significant chunk have no service categorisation at all because that field was added after they became clients and nobody went back to update the records.
What it costs you: Management decisions delayed because you can’t get timely data. Compliance anxiety because you’re never quite certain your records are complete. Marketing paralysis because you can’t properly segment your client base. Strategic planning based on gut feel rather than solid information.
The fix: Data cleansing combined with standardised field usage and mandatory workflows. This sounds tedious, but it’s transformational. Once your data is clean and consistently structured, the reports that used to take hours become instant.
Warning Sign #4: Your automation keeps breaking
You set up automated review reminders. They worked for a month, then mysteriously stopped. Or they’re working, but sending reminders for clients who’ve already been reviewed. Or they’re not firing at all for certain client segments and nobody knows why.
Automation relies on data consistency. When your underlying data is messy, automation either fails completely or produces unreliable results. That forces you back to manual checking, which defeats the entire purpose.
What it costs you: The opportunity cost is substantial. Firms with properly configured automation systems save 15-20 hours per adviser per month on administrative coordination. That’s £18,000-£24,000 annual capacity per adviser – capacity that could be redirected to client service or business development.
The fix: Before you build automation, fix the foundation. Clean data, standardised processes, and properly configured workflows create the stable base that automation needs to work reliably.
Warning Sign #5: Your best people are compensating for system problems
Your star administrator has become indispensable. Not because they’re brilliant at client service (though they might be), but because they’re the only person who knows how to navigate the system’s quirks, where all the workarounds are hiding, and which processes actually work versus which ones are broken.
When your operation depends on this you have a serious case of key person dependency. The day that person leaves (or goes on holiday), your operation faces serious risk.
What it costs you: Beyond the obvious business continuity risk, this pattern creates scaling limits. You cannot grow beyond the capacity of your heroes to keep the show running. You cannot delegate effectively because the knowledge is locked in individual heads rather than embedded in systems.
The fix: Proper system configuration combined with documented processes transfers knowledge from people to systems. This doesn’t make your best people less valuable, it frees them to focus on work that genuinely requires human expertise rather than system navigation.
What can be done to help?
These warning signs rarely exist in isolation. They’re symptoms of underlying structural problems that have accumulated over time as your business evolved, your team grew, your service proposition changed, and your CRM configuration didn’t keep pace.
We work with advice firms to reveal exactly what’s happening beneath the surface:
✓ Complete data quality audit – We analyse your client records for duplicates, inconsistencies, missing information, and structural problems that undermine automation and reporting.
✓ Workflow analysis – We map how work actually flows through your system (versus how you think it flows) to identify bottlenecks, workarounds, and inefficiencies.
✓ Configuration review – We examine how your CRM is actually set up and configured against best practice for advisory firms, identifying quick wins and strategic improvements.
✓ Integration assessment – We evaluate how your CRM connects (or doesn’t connect) with other systems, identifying opportunities for automation and data synchronisation.
✓ Prioritised recommendations – We deliver a clear action plan with estimated ROI for each recommendation, so you can make informed decisions about where to invest your time and budget.
Sometimes the transformation you need costs nothing but time and proper configuration. Sometimes it requires selective investment. Always it requires honest assessment of current state before you can chart a path to future state.
Real transformation: What proper CRM health looks like
When Hymans Robertson realised their Intelliflo Office investment was delivering a fraction of its potential value, they partnered with Jigsaw Tree to unlock what they’d been missing. Through comprehensive process mapping, strategic system configuration, and targeted training, we transformed their underutilised platform into a powerhouse of operational efficiency.
The transformation was so successful that they expanded our partnership to include outsourced income reconciliation. As Wendy Brunton, their Business Manager, explained:
“We now have full confidence in the accuracy of our data, ensuring complete transparency and control. Thanks to Jigsaw Tree, our review process is now fully embedded, meaning no reviews are missed, and all client touchpoints are tracked and managed effectively.”
That’s what proper CRM health delivers: confidence in your data, embedded workflows that ensure nothing falls through cracks, and repeatable processes that accommodate every eventuality.
You cannot improve what you cannot see. You cannot fix what you haven’t measured.
Before you buy new technology, before you hire more administrators, before you resign yourself to operational chaos as the cost of growth; understand what’s actually happening in your current system.
The Jigsaw Tree Database Assessment gives you the first step towards that clarity. It’s an health check for your most critical business system and is available to all io and Plannr users. If you use other systems, please still reach out to us, we may be able to help via other services to help you achieve operational excellence in your practice management.
To book your assessment, Book a discovery call – Jigsaw Tree
