How long does your average suitability report take to write?
suitance
Member
Doing some research into the paraplanning workflow and curious how much time people are actually spending on report writing.
For a straightforward ISA case — how long does it realistically take you from notes to finished report?
And for a complex case — pension transfer, IHT planning, vulnerable client — are we talking half a day, full day?
Asking because I've been building a drafting tool called Suitance that generates a first draft from meeting notes in 60 seconds and would love to know whether the time saving would actually be meaningful in practice for working paraplanners.
Happy to share a sample output if anyone wants to see what it produces — genuinely would value honest feedback from people doing this day to day.
suitance.co.uk
Comments
A SR requires 4 things. Client objectives; recommendation; reason recommendation works; risk warnings. Everything else is either from a compliance department or from your own preferences.
To my mind most of a suitability report is actually an amalgamation of repeated paragraphs, fund portfolios, and risk warnings that you're probably using all the time. Making use of file insert within Word is a far more cost-effective method, to my way of thinking, and certainly that's the way we do it. The only thing that you really need to grab is the client objectives. What is it that the client has told you they want to achieve as a result of taking your advice and repeating that back into your suitability report and getting that out of either a meeting note or a record in your back office system should be relatively simple.
From what I can see on the internet, we're all being pushed into using AI to solve every single problem however I'm not convinced that AI is the solution to every question, although you might use it to provide the solution.
The biggest time for more complex cases, such as a pension switch, is more likely to be the analysis that needs to be done before you write the suitability report. Once this is done, you have the data to hand to add into any sort of additional supporting material you want to put into a client suitability report but even that isn't particularly difficult.
You may even want to do further challenge disclosure in your suitability report and you'd be getting those figures from your illustration. Strictly speaking you don't need to do this but I know many of us do prefer that way to ensure that the client has no doubt as to what fees and costs they are going to incur. I get our charge figures for a particular plan from the illustration and I have a Python programme that reads the illustration and produces the relevant wording that I can insert into a suitability report. I didn't write the code. I got ChatGPT to write the code for me.
In a nutshell I'm not completely convinced that AI-based suitability report writing software or systems is actually a cost-effective solution for most people. I can see how it could be beneficial if you have a huge turnover in more transactional type work rather than detailed financial planning advice.
Really appreciate the honest response Richard — exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for.
You make a fair point about templated paragraphs working well for straightforward transactional cases. Where I've seen Suitance add most value is the opposite end — complex cases where the analysis is already done but writing it up in a way that's fully personalised, Consumer Duty compliant, and covers every required section still takes significant time even with good templates.
The output it produced on a complex case last week — widowed client, £1.2m estate, NHS pension, IHT exposure, vulnerable client — came out as a 14-section report covering transferred nil rate band calculations, April 2027 pension IHT changes flagged unprompted, full Consumer Duty four outcomes per recommendation, sequencing risk, protection needs. Independent compliance assessment scored it 96/100.
Not suggesting it replaces paraplanner judgement — the [INFORMATION REQUIRED] placeholders it generates are exactly the kind of thing a good paraplanner would flag. But as a first draft that takes the blank page problem away, it seems to save meaningful time on complex cases specifically.
Happy to share the full sample report if you'd like to see it — genuinely curious whether you'd score it differently.