The financial planning process is a critical part of your business. It involves a number of processes, including forecasting, budgeting, project finance planning, and more.

Traditionally, financial planning was done manually in spreadsheets that were disconnected from other areas of the business. Now, planning applications are designed to integrate with other systems in finance, lines of business, and operations for a fully connected enterprise plan.
Scale Your Staff

Financial planning is an incredibly important process for any business. It involves modeling strategic direction, forecasting future trends, and creating a financial plan to ensure you have the resources necessary to reach your goals. Traditionally, this process has been done through spreadsheets, which introduce many risks, including security issues, human error, lack of auditing, multiple versions with no governance, and limited reporting and analytics capabilities. Today’s FP&A solutions offer best practices and built-in capabilities to support financial planning, predictive planning, driver-based budgeting, robust what-if scenario modeling, sandboxing, bottom-up/top-down budgeting, approvals, workflows, and more for a fully connected enterprise plan.

Fortunately, as the industry evolves, more and more independent RIA firms have access to world-class planning technology and tools. This allows them to grow their client base and scale their operations much more quickly than if they were tied down by legacy systems and processes. For example, the emergence of virtual meeting software has allowed hyper-specialized RIAs to expand their national audience and client base without having to move offices or hiring additional advisors.

Another factor driving the demand for larger-scale financial planning is the recent retirement surge that has pushed many baby boomers into early retirement. This has created a huge demand for investment advice as individuals shift from accumulating wealth to managing it. This has also fueled the growth of ad hoc services, such as tax preparation and insurance coverage.

As these trends continue, the ability to scale will be key for both new and existing RIA firms. To do this, they will need to increase revenue faster than they increase expenses – and that requires the right planning system. In addition to scalable technologies, RIAs will need to hire additional support to handle the increased workload. This will be especially critical for smaller, niche practices, who may need to bring in paraplanners or associate advisors to allow the principals to focus on their clients and growth strategy.
Scale Your Technology

For many years, financial planning was a fragmented, disconnected process done on spreadsheets. This left little room for scalability and led to issues with security, accuracy, speed, and more. Today, there is a growing demand for planning and budgeting applications that can be used by the entire organization to build plans with a connected view of finance, business lines, operations, supply chain, and more.

These apps should come with best practices and built-in capabilities such as predictive planning, driver-based modeling, detailed what-if scenarios, sandboxing, bottom-up/top-down budgeting, and more. They should also integrate with other systems such as HCM, ERP, and supply chain to create a seamless plan for the whole enterprise. 大規模修繕 

Additionally, today’s clients are much more comfortable with teleconference meetings and online interaction which opens up the potential for hyper-specialized firms to build a national audience and client base. This trend, coupled with the increasing democratization of the technology that supports large-scale financial planning, can help drive more M&A activity in the RIA space as older advisors look to cash out or move on to bigger firms. This can feed the scalability of the industry even further.
Scale Your Marketing

A large-scale financial planning strategy needs to include multiple channels and tactics. This includes social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and traditional marketing campaigns like direct mail and events. It also requires the use of analytics to understand what types of content are performing well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

As clients become more comfortable with conducting business online, RIAs can gain a national client base and scale their business beyond local markets. This trend is further enhanced by the fact that hyper-specialized financial planners can serve niche audiences across the country, allowing them to grow their firms without compromising their client service.

Historically, financial planning was a manual process that was disconnected from other areas of the organization and limited in scope to what could be accomplished with spreadsheets. This approach was not agile, and it introduced risks around security, speed, and accuracy. Today, however, FP&A employees can incorporate predictive modeling into their planning and budgeting processes to deliver more accurate forecasts and detailed what-if analysis. Moreover, they can align financial planning with other systems in finance, lines of business, and operations for a fully connected enterprise plan. This is possible because of advanced planning technology, which is cloud-based, supports business intelligence, and integrates with other systems for a complete view of the organization’s performance.
Scale Your Operations

Many independent practices reach a point in their growth where they become stagnant and struggle to scale. They may find themselves unable to attract new clients, or their existing client base may not be growing fast enough to keep the business profitable.

There is a lot of discussion that the digital and marketplace revolutions in financial planning may ultimately drive down the cost of planning and asset management services for the public, making them available to people who were previously unable to afford them. Seamless, mobile-friendly digital portals will make it possible for clients to access their accounts and communicate with planners around the clock. Automated programs will be able to determine a client’s risk tolerance and time horizon and formulate an investment strategy for them.

As RIA firms continue to struggle to scale, M&A momentum is picking up. As older advisors retire, they will sell their firms to aggregators and integrators that can provide them with the technology and resources they need to grow their businesses. This is feeding the growth of larger RIA firms, which in turn is fueling the growth of financial planning services for the general public.