Lately we’ve noticed a trend of more and more advisors moving to a fee-for-service model, and often once they try it out, they find it is the best solution for their business. Removing the monthly time investment required to process invoices and payments can be a huge advantage with this type of service. That is why companies choose to utilize a platform like AdvicePay that can be leveraged to accept and manage payments easily and seamlessly, while still remaining compliant. With more time freed up, you can focus on getting more work done for your clients.

According to a report by Cerulli Associates, advisory firms are expecting to increase their fee-for-service revenues from 4% to 5% this year. This translates to a 25% increase in revenue across the industry. However, it’s important to note that a fee-for-service model is only appropriate when an advisor has enough clients to make it worthwhile, otherwise the fee can become too costly.

The Value of AdvicePay

At first, $50 per month may not sound like a lot, but if you compare it to the number of clients you have on a fee-for-service model, it could be consuming a relatively high percentage of your revenues and not make good financial sense. This is obviously something a wise financial advisor would want to avoid. The good news is that AdvicePay has a tiered service, which allows anyone who is interested to try it out with an affordable fee structure.

The basic version of AdvicePay is only $10 per month and comes with all the core features that users find convenient in the full version. With one-time subscription billing, low ACH and credit card fees, and invoicing, it will cover all the most pressing payment processing problems advisors often face. Moreover, it allows you to easily manage all payments in one place and remain compliant while saving time and money.

The service works for up to 10 clients, which should be sufficient to get a good feel for the service and see if it would be useful for your business. There are two groups who would benefit most from the trial plan: smaller businesses that don’t want to spend $50 a month on an untested service when they don’t have many clients on that business model to begin with, and larger businesses that want to do a small test of the software to see if it makes sense for their business before they begin to fully transfer over to a new service.

Sometimes clients are hesitant to cross over to the fee-for-service model so they continue to collect checks from their clients. This is not using the software to its best advantage, and creates unnecessary extra steps for both their clients and themselves. These extra steps - tracking checks as they come in, reconciling accounts and all the other minutiae involved in manual payment processing - create extra tasks and busywork. The time spent on these tasks is time diverted from other business tasks you could be performing. With the fee-for-service model, businesses can leverage the platform to accept and manage payments right away while still being compliant and saving valuable time that can be better used elsewhere.

A charge of $50 per month can really add up if you don’t have a lot of clients on a fee-for-service model. A rate of $10 per month for the basic AdvicePay service is much easier to justify, and you can always upgrade once you have enough clients to support a fee-for-service model.