Pattern Matching versus Doing Maths

I sometimes wonder how much effort has been put into a document which is so often greeted with a groan by those that should use it, both adviser and client alike. The unseen author seemingly looms like a shadow.

One adviser said that between fact-find, needs analysis and recommendation, in one particularly onerous approach, they could spend 15 to 20 hours. There was a lot of maths. Every adviser and client that went through the process deserved a medal, in my opinion. This is like the budgeting tools which require you to record every receipt and spend an hour every evening entering the data into your computer. It was really great – for a very small number of people. Sometimes one has to do all that detail, sometimes that would not even be enough. But if advice is to be affordable for the customer and profitable for the adviser then as a rule, it should be a lot shorter.

Of course, I have seen some good ones, and some very diligent advisers and clients that use them. They tend to be the shorter ones, and are deliberately focused around the financial information that they collect.

One way to speed up the process is to match patterns – or size up the general scope before applying some specific tweaks to get the process exactly right. In an ideal world, we might all buy made-to-measure suits, all the time. In this imperfect world, most people buy off the peg and get small alterations done to get the fit right.