Your Virtual Office is Anywhere You Are

With a virtual office your practice technically is wherever you are. And with the technology currently available you can meet the needs of your clients from almost anywhere.

One thing is for sure...

According to David Drucker, co-author, Virtual-Office Tools for a High Margin Practice,(Bloomberg Press) many of the most successful players in today's financial planning industry the fee-only and fee-based independent advisors are stuck in a trap of their own devising.

The trap is the business model created and perpetuated by industry veterans that locks its followers into a narrow blueprint for building an advisory business.

The blueprint dictates that what often starts out as a sparsely furnished room housing a sole practitioner will become an ever-expanding office full of employees, each armed with a full complement of office equipment and benefit plans, as will be the new partners who are eventually added to the mix. In short, the firm's overhead will ratchet up with every client it adds.

The virtual office is not for everyone. That's because no two financial advisor practices are run the same. This is radical stuff. Yes it is very difficult to give up the conventional way you do business. We're talking about no more office, no more filing cabinets, no more water cooler.

(read about the advantages of a virtual office)

Even if the idea of giving up the bricks and motar for a virtual office still doesn't appeal to you it doesn't mean you can't used the tools, software and concepts in your business to create fast, efficient, processes. Use what works for you.

That's why I highly recommend you get the book I believe this book is a must read for the financial advisor looking to cut paperwork, overhead and wasted hours.

To Read An Exsclusive Interview with Drucker click here

What does this mean for you?

A better way to greater profitability

Fair enough?

Whether you want to be fully virtual with your practice or just be on the move more, will mean travelling to clients or other places away from your home base, you should seriously consider buying a laptop rather than a desktop computer. But both systems will serve you well.

You just have to decide what works for you. Some of the software packages you'll need should include:

How a Virtual Planner adds time and value to your bottomline

With time management a challenge for advisors today. Has the time for a virtual planner come? Think about it, running an office, working with clients and prospects - is it any wonder many advisors don't take the time to provide financial plans? And of those that do, Investment Executive's and www.AdvisorTechSolutions.com's 2004 research into technology use shows 73% of advisors who do provide plans input client data themselves.

The question is: do you prefer to spend time with clients or at your computer? According to virtual planner Sarah Holland, many advisors don't have the time to work on plans. They also may not have the expertise or don't want to face the learning curve to work with financial planning software.

The Virtual Office-How to Live the E-Life

By Sharon Sinpapel

No Copies, Please! Scan and Store

What is the "paperless" office? It's an office where documents are scanned and stored. The can be annontated, indexed and searched. They can be viewed, printed, faxed or sent as an image file to an end-user. The paperless office provides access to all historical data in the form of CDs, DVDs, or stored on a large hard drive.

The greatest thing about it is, provided you have a laptop, data can be accessed from wherever you are from your car or at a client's location. You can display a document on the laptop screen, transfer it over a wireless modem and print the document to a printer or fax to a remote location. Using other wireless technology you can access client investment transactions and eliminate the need to "see" a paper statement.

The financial planning industry of necessity, under ordinary and traditional circumstances, deals with large quantities of paper. And each piece is handled many times. It could, for example, arrive at your office in an envelope. It's opened by a secretary and put in your in box. You read it and decide on appropriate action. You probably give it to someone else to act upon.

It has to be physically filed, possibly in a filing cabinet which takes up a lot of space. And it will more often than not generate more paper - a letter in response, or the completion of forms. That's a lot of paper and it's alot of handling. A paperless office would eliminate both the paper and the multiple handling.

Is the Finanacial Services Profession Ready?

I think the answer to this question is "yes" In addition to paper client files being nonexistent, all firm accounting records - bill, financial statements, personnel and payroll records are digital. You can receive downloads daily from the investment companies that are directly added to client's accounts in the computer system.

Sales tickets are on the computer and investment applications are on-line. Bank information is provided so that the client will write no check. An electronic signature box can also be used so that the signature will be directly transmitted and the client will not even have to sign anything!

Planners often need to be able to produce historical information periodically, retrieving information electronically is a lot more efficient and a lot faster than going through paper files. Planners also need to keep documents for legal purposes and one of the nice things about electronic data is that it doesn't age the way paper does. It doesn't get torn or fade; it doesn't smudge or carry coffee stains.

Legal and Regulatory Concerns

A paperless office is superior to one filled with paper. It eliminates not only original documents but also the many copies of documents which might have been stored in different filing cabinets around the office. In a paperless office, the only equipment required is required is computing and electronic data equipment.

Traditional office equipment like fax machines, photocopiers and filing cabinets - and space to house them! - is no longer required. And because there is less paper to manage, offices need fewer staff. All of these things make the paperless office more cost-effective and more efficient than the paper -based office.

Are regulators going to be satisfied with electronic records? With the technology know as "WORM" (write once read many), documents cannot be altered electronically. In the U.S. if we destroy the paper files, the electronic ones are the valid ones. Keeping paper files is only needless duplication and regulators would prefer to see them. They want to see the document closest to the original.

In order for the images to be used for legal purposes, they must be in a form that cannot be altered, so paperless office managers need to make sure they are stored that way. There are different regulations in this regard for NASD broker/dealers than for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs). If documents are available, they must be produced rather than an image.

But electronic storage of data is very appealing from a compliance perspective because it's permanent, it can be electronically dated and timed, and it contains evidence of who entered the document.

Backup Systems

To safeguard against potential loss of information two backups are suggested. Two backups are suggested off site, one in a fireproof safe at home and one at another location. And let me ask this - if your office burns down or is flooded, what backup do you have for your one and only paper files?

Equipment Needs

In order to design a paperless office, you need equipment rather than paper. You need storage media, computing power, scanning/imaging equipment, indexing/searching software and specially trained personnel. Regarding storage media, you'll need a hard drive or disks with complex optical storage options.

Before you can decide upon which is the most suitable you need to ask yourself not only how much storage you need now, but also how much you'll need in the future and then how much you'll need as a safeguard.

The faster your processor is and the more memory you have, the better off you will be. You can use the two types of scanners flat bed scanner and a high-speed scanner. While higher in price, the high speed scanner allows a greater amount of work to be done efficiently.

Regarding indexing and searching software, you'll need file folders and indexing capabilities. They'll also need Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - some brand name examples are Laserfiche by Compulink, ImagePlus by Exigent and Scansoft and PaperPort by Visoneer.

Staffing and Getting Started

A paperless office eliminates the long-term need for a large staff. Planners should consider whether to hire a service to do the conversion or to hire short-term employees (i.e. college students, part timers from households with children, etc.) to do the work in house. Services are worth their money because that is their speciality and the cost and disruption to a planner is obviously short term.

An alternative is to have planners hire computer literate people to scan in house, allowing them to maintain effective control of all files. Confidentiality is a big concern, so many choose to do the scanning in house. Training short-term employees saves both time and money-time in which a planner would have to learn how to scan or teach someone else and money in avoiding costly errors.

All practices will obviously still have a need for some staff to maintain the office and the scanning system. Those are the people who will need to be trained, preferably professionally, to scan and maintain the new system.

As you convert to a paperless office, you'll need to think about how to file and label the images in folders. Think when OCR'ing and indexing about what data should be searchable. Images should be able to be paged through or searched like a file. They can also have folder tabs and labels.

But remember that images by themselves are unwieldy for large searches. OCR'ing and indexing is more suited for large quantities of paper but it uses more computer capability and it's harder to "just look" for documents and requires more preparation time to input into the system. Some older documents, especially inactive files, can be scanned in large batches, OCR'ed, and left under a single file name.

This takes less preparation time, and stimulates what an archived paper file would be anyway. On the other hand, each new document entered in on a daily basis into the system is heavily indexed and placed in one or more labeled folders or tabs. This makes future retrieval options a snap, as you can quickly identify a document by company, client name, date etc...

Cost Issues

The total cost for a system, hardware and software, can be about $20,000. You may decide to lease the hardware. Training and ongoing input of documents is a cost concern but this is not rocket science! When using an outside scanning service, a per page cost can be anywhere from $.05 to $.20.

The in-house time is the going hourly rate for a data entry employee. That is between $8.00 and $10.00 per hour for such personnel. The input system is easily learned and the retrieval is even easier. The key factor is that time is taken to set the electronic system like your paper system, using the advanced computer capability to speed up complex retrievals.

Summary

Clients will need to move with the times too. They "sign" forms on computers electronically. They transfer their money from their bank account to their investment account in nano-seconds. All that transacting is done right on a screen in front of a client. They enjoy immediate validation.

Don't be left standing there with manila folders, pencils and erasers in your hands. Be part of the (r)evolution. Be at the forefront of the paperless office. Serve your clients with the most efficient and cost effective standard available today. If you are left behind, "the good old days" will not be so good.

Sharon Sinpapel ,CFP, Virtual Office Coach;

Along with your scanner you are going to need scanning software. (click here for more) What the software will do is make it easier for you to keep your documents in order with a folder layout and a desktop with thumbnail versions of each of the documents you've scanned into it.

Stay In Touch With Clients...Any Place...Any Time

Staying in touch with clients has never been easier than it was 15-20 years ago. Email has become a way of life for some and the only communication method used by advisors have with some clients.

If you think about it how did you keep clients up to date with their investments, handle day to day administrative problems, solidify client relationships? Your phone was the main tool and then the fax machine began to enter the market, then car phones and email hit the scene. Things have changed very quickly.

As technology advanced, client expectations and the amount of work to meet them have also advanced. You now produce a lot more work a lot faster and the expectations of higher productivity continue to climb because technology is enabling you do it faster.

So what does this all have to do with communications and how you communicate with clients in a virtual business environment?

As a financial advisor you can take advantage of the technology available for communications to solidify client relationships. Even better news...use this new found freedom to take back some of your life. Here are some tools:

Virtual tools if anything will give you more time to work on your business as opposed to working in your business, work more closely with clients and more importantly give you more time in your life to do the things that are important to you.

Here's How To save time and find anything in your virtual office

Have you considered the amount of time wasted in your office coping with paperwork and clutter?

Statistics show the average worker spends 150 hours a year looking for misplaced information.

If that worker earns $20 an hour, that’s $3,000 a year wasted in unproductive activity. In addition to paper, there is the seemingly endless stream of e-mail and electronic files.

If you can take control of this area of your business, it will greatly reduce your costs — and frustration level.

According to Aileen Cooke, president of Toronto-based Simply Put Organizing, getting organized is a learned skill for most people — even those with the best intentions.

Cooke visits homes and offices to help individuals organize their lives and their businesses. She works side by side with clients until their space is organized and clutter-free. Simplicity is key; she strives to remove excess files and information, leaving clients with lighter loads to manage.

To get a better handle on organization in your office and personal life, Cooke recommends The Paper Tiger software.

The revolutionary new way of filing and retrieving information harnesses the power of your own computer to help you get and stay organized; it can be applied to paper, collections of audiotapes, CDs, photographs, maps, training materials, memorabilia — anything you need to keep on file.

The Paper Tiger promises to find anything in five seconds or less, and it delivers.

This software was developed by Barbara Hemphill, a U.S. pioneer in the field of organization and the author of Kiplinger’s Taming the Paper Tiger at Home, Kiplinger’s Taming the Paper Tiger at Work and Simplify Your Work Day, all published by Reader’s Digest.

Hemphill was approached by a software maker to turn the methodology she espoused in the books into software.

The first version came out in 1996, and version 3.11 is now available. This latest version of The Paper Tiger software interfaces with Google Desktop, a Google application that searches your computer, allowing you to find your electronic files easily.

The new Google tool works in the background, silently indexing e-mails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, pdf files — just about any file you have on your hard drive. Using the Paper Tiger interface, you’ll be able to find not only your paper files but also your electronic files.

Cooke is one of only two Canadians who have been trained by Hemphill, and she is an “authorized” consultant for the software. The Paper Tiger software is extremely user-friendly.

You’ll find it will reduce the stress level in your office because your team members will all be using the same filing system. And because everyone in the office speaks the same filing language, you’ll be reminded in advance of what needs to be done to which file and when it is due. There will be fewer missed deadlines and less money spent on express and overnight mail.

Because confidentiality is important for financial advisors, information should always be filed rather than left in full view on a desk.

The Paper Tiger makes filing so easy that paper will be more likely to be put away. You’ll be able to meet regulatory requirements by retrieving appropriate documents when they are needed — in five seconds or less.

When staff turns over, new employees will easily learn the system. Office files will become instantly retrievable, eliminating duplication of information — because everyone in the office will know where to find that one copy