AdvicePay Financial Advisor Community Blog

When to Speed Up and When to Slow Down: 10 Ways AdvicePay Makes Life Easier for You and Your Clients

June 13, 2019 By Lucy Robeson, CFP®
Lucy Robeson, CFP®

Efficiency matters, both to you and your clients. Knowing when to maximize efficiency and when to slow down is important in doing your best work, in all aspects of life.

For example, while family dinners are about spending quality time together, utilizing a meal delivery service is about saving the time it takes to shop and prepare the meal. You’re implementing an efficient solution for providing the dinner so you can slow down and enjoy it together.

Working with your clients is the same! You don’t want to speed through an important conversation as a client begins to open up about how their childhood experiences impact some of the views they hold about money today. To create more time in meetings, for both you and your clients, you may do them virtually so your clients don’t spend time traveling to and from your office. That time could instead be allocated to longer meetings.

At AdvicePay, we believe it’s about knowing which systems to implement in order to maximize efficiency in some areas so you can slow down and have more time in other areas. Billing is one such process that should be simple and efficient for you and your clients. In fact, we’ve specifically built AdvicePay to add efficiency in several ways and through feature requests made by users like you.

 

10 Ways AdvicePay Makes Life Easier for You and Your Clients

 

1. The AdvicePay Client Portal

  • The AdvicePay Client portal allows clients to perform a number of account actions, without the involvement of their advisor. They can:
    • Update payment information and handle failed payment issues
    • View previous invoice
    • View payment statuses on invoices
    • Update their profile

2. Customer Support for Your Clients

3. Customer Support for Advisors and Enterprises

4. Your AdvicePay Dashboard

  • Your AdvicePay Dashboard, the screen you see as soon as you log in, gives you an at-a-glance view of your data within AdvicePay, including:
    • Total Clients (registered and unregistered)
    • One-time Invoices (total unpaid and overdue)
    • Subscriptions (total active and inactive)
    • Monthly income (total received and still expected during the month)

5. Easy Workflows for Your Clients

  • AdvicePay is usable on mobile devices, and we recently released newly improved client payment workflows for clients paying on mobile devices, making it even easier for clients to pay you from their phones. Because paying bills should be easy!

6. One-Time Approvals for Ongoing Subscriptions

  • You might be wondering if your clients have to approve their ongoing payments every month (or quarter or six months). The short answer is an exciting, "NO!" Once you set up a subscription payment for a client — whether it be monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually — the client will approve the subscription one time and all related payments will be made automatically going forward. Think of it as getting client approval for the subscription, not the first payment of that subscription.

7. Transaction Reports

  • If you are an Account Owner, Managing Advisor, or Admin/Analyst user, you can download transaction and payout reports anytime within AdvicePay. You can also set up yourself and other individuals at your firm to receive automatic daily, weekly, and/or monthly transaction reports via email.
  • This report includes one Excel file with two tabs labeled "Payouts" (showing the lump sum deposits made to your account) and "Transactions” (with all the details of each individual client payment).

8. Download Invoices in Bulk

  • Invoices can be downloaded not only individually, but also by subscription, by client, within a timeframe, or for all time. Wahoo!

9. Email Log

  • With the email log, both you and your Admin user(s) can see a real-time, chronological log of relevant system emails sent to you, your clients, and users on your account.

10. Audit Log

  • If you need to track down who refunded a client, verify when a client last logged in, or run a report on how many invoices were sent last quarter, the Audit Log provides a "paper trail" of key actions performed in AdvicePay by users connected to your account, making it simple to follow (and report on!) the internal activities that matter to your firm.

 

These are some of the key ways we’re trying to make your life easier and more efficient so you focus more time and energy serving your clients and growing your business. We recognize that it’s important to speed some tasks up and slow others down. AdvicePay is here to speed up billing, making life smoother for you and your clients!


 

Posted by Lucy Robeson, CFP®

Lucy uses her leadership skills to guide the AdvicePay team, while implementing the company vision, mission, and long-term goals. She is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and has extensive experience in comprehensive financial planning, directing firm operations, and (unrelated) swimming with bull sharks while living in Fiji. Lucy is passionate about promoting the fee-for-service business model and helping financial planners understand how and why to adopt it into their businesses. When she’s not working, you can find Lucy on the tennis court, hiking in the mountains, and cheering on the Virginia Tech Hokies.

Topics: Practice Management