For many advice firms, the pressure to do more with less has never been greater. Rising client expectations, increasing compliance requirements and growing volumes of data all place significant demands on operational teams. As a result, firms are increasingly exploring automation to improve efficiency, reduce manual workloads and create more capacity for higher-value work.
The challenge, however, is knowing where to start.
Automation delivers the greatest value when it's applied to the right processes. Rather than attempting to transform every part of the business at once, the most successful firms focus on the tasks that consume the most time, create the most friction and follow predictable rules. These are often the areas where quick wins can deliver immediate operational benefits while laying out the foundation for broader automation initiatives.
The Operational Bottlenecks Holding Advice Firms Back
When advice firms approach VBP looking to improve efficiency, a common pattern quickly emerges.
Many operational challenges stem from the amount of manual data preparation taking place behind the scenes. Teams often spend a considerable portion of their day extracting information from multiple systems, cleaning and consolidating data, validating accuracy and performing repeated checks before work can move forward.
While each individual task may appear relatively simple, the cumulative impact can be significant. Repetitive manual processes slow turnaround times, increase the risk of human error and prevent skilled team members from focusing on more valuable activities.
In many cases, these bottlenecks become so embedded in day-to-day operations that firms simply accept them as part of the workflow. Yet these same processes are often among the strongest candidates for automation.
The Best Processes to Automate First
Not every process should be automated immediately. The most successful automation projects tend to target activities that are repetitive, predictable and governed by clear rules.
Some of the most beneficial areas for automation include:
- Data extraction and preparation
- Data cleaning and formatting
- Reconciliations and validation checks
- Recurring report generation and distribution
- Workflow routing and approval processes
These activities are often highly structured, requiring the same steps to be completed repeatedly with little variation. Because they rely on predefined rules rather than human judgement, automation can handle them consistently and efficiently at scale.
For advice firms, removing these manual tasks can create substantial productivity gains while improving overall process reliability.
Where VBP Typically Delivers the Greatest Impact
At VBP, automation projects most commonly focus on accounting processes and annual review preparation within financial planning practices.
These areas are particularly well suited to automation because they involve significant amounts of data gathering, preparation, validation and reporting. They also tend to follow consistent workflows, making them ideal candidates for automation solutions.
By reducing the manual effort required for these tasks, firms can significantly improve turnaround times, increase consistency and free up team members to focus on activities that require more expertise and client interaction.
One example is a large partner practice where VBP implemented an automation solution covering their Annual Review data gathering and portfolio reporting processes.
That solution processes more than 250 data-gathering tasks each week alongside portfolio reporting requirements. The result is an estimated 125 hours of effort saved every week, equivalent to approximately 3.3 full-time team members. The automation also maintains an average processing accuracy of around 90%, with only a small percentage of cases requiring exception handling and manual review.
Outcomes like these demonstrate how targeted automation can create meaningful operational improvements without requiring a complete overhaul of existing processes.
How VBP Identifies Automation Opportunities
One of the biggest misconceptions about automation is that every manual process should be automated. In reality, successful automation starts with careful assessment.
When evaluating whether a process is suitable for automation, VBP considers several practical factors.
First, the team looks at the nature of the process itself:
- Is it repetitive?
- Does it follow clear rules and decision points?
- Does it require minimal human judgement?
- Are the inputs and outputs structured and consistent?
Processes that meet these criteria generally deliver the strongest automation outcomes.
The assessment also considers the potential impact. This includes factors such as:
- Transaction volume and frequency
- Time currently spent by the team
- Error rates and rework requirements
- Potential efficiency gains
- Improvements to client experience
- Compliance and accuracy benefits
Finally, VBP evaluates readiness and feasibility. Factors such as data quality, system access, process stability, exception handling requirements and stakeholder support all influence whether an automation initiative is likely to succeed.
Rather than relying on a rigid framework, VBP uses these practical criteria to identify opportunities that are both achievable and valuable for the client's business.
The Results Firms Can Expect
While outcomes vary depending on the process being automated, the benefits are often consistent.
Automation reduces the burden of repetitive administrative work, particularly in areas involving data preparation and validation. As a result, teams spend less time on manual processing and more time on activities that directly support clients and business growth.
- Firms typically experience:
- Significant time savings
- Faster turnaround times
- Greater operational consistency
- Reduced manual errors
- Improved scalability
- Increased capacity within existing teams
Importantly, automation is not simply about doing the same work faster. It's about creating a more efficient operating model that allows businesses to grow without proportionally increasing administrative workload.
Getting Started: Focus on Quick Wins
For firms considering automation, the best approach is often the simplest one.
Rather than attempting a large-scale transformation project, start with one or two well-defined processes that are already creating pain for the team. Look for tasks that are repetitive, rules-based and consuming disproportionate amounts of time.
These early automation wins help demonstrate value quickly, build confidence across the organisation and generate momentum for future initiatives.
The good news is that many automation solutions don't need to be built from the ground up. VBP has developed a range of proven use cases that can often be adapted to a firm's existing processes. By capturing the unique variations within each business, these solutions can be implemented more quickly and with lower risk.
The firms seeing the greatest success with automation are not necessarily the ones investing the most. They're the ones starting with the right processes.
Repetitive, rules-based tasks such as data preparation, validation, reporting and workflow management often offer the clearest path to meaningful efficiency gains. By focusing on these operational bottlenecks first, advice firms can achieve measurable time savings, improve accuracy and create capacity for their teams to focus on higher-value work.
Automation doesn't need to be a complex transformation from day one. In many cases, the most effective starting point is identifying a single process that's slowing the business down and taking the first step toward doing it better.
To learn more about how VBP helps advice firms identify and implement practical automation solutions, explore our Intelligent Automation services.
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