Chal Daniels, owner of a small advisory firm in California’s Napa Valley wine country, said he is reaping a bountiful harvest of savings and enhanced customer service by going paperless.
In six years of drastically reducing his firm’s reliance on paper forms and correspondence, Daniel’s Harvest Financial has been able to save on rent by turning a former 10-foot by 10-foot file cabinet room into space for an additional employee.
Savings have also come from reduced insurance costs and time spent on retrieving documents, working with the company’s broker-dealer and dealing with its chief regulator, the California Department of Corporations.
Bottom line?
“By going paperless, I can spend more time with clients listening and finding their solutions. That is what any office system is all about,” Daniels said.
The entrepreneur explained it took his business, with two advisors, 2.5 staffers and $25 million in assets under management, about a year and a half to move to a primarily paperless office with the aid of eFileCabinet, a software and cloud services business.
Part of that time was devoted to coordinating with the broker-dealer, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Finra and the California Department of Corporations to make sure all necessary client data was being collected and kept secure.
The process also involved extending the day of a part-time worker from three hours to five hours so the staffer could scan the tens of thousands of paper documents accumulated in Harvest Financial’s 19 years of business.
Daniels estimates that 25 percent of Harvest clients are choosing to get their statements electronically while the rest are opting for paper. He notes more clients under 40 -- 60 percent -- choose getting their records via e-mail compared with older clients.
“Some people think it is more secure to get paper; that is not logical in my mind,” Daniels said.
While a firm believer in the virtues of electronic, the advisory firm owner admits he prefers to get his news on Saturday from a crinkly paper so he can sit down and relax.
He cautioned that going paperless requires brain power as well as computer power.
“It’s not plug-and-play software.You have to think about setting up a filing system that mirrors how you organized the drawers of your file cabinets,” he said.
One of the big continuing barriers for his office to going completely paperless is that mutual fund company communications are still largely paper.
Another is that most agreements have to be signed, but next year, Harvest will be moving to electronic signatures. The vendor cost is not a one-time charge, he noted. Maintenance fees and charges for storing documents in the cloud make this part of going paperless a continuing expense.
This article was sourced from www.fa-mag.com at the following URL:
http://www.fa-mag.com/news/going-paperless-reaps-bountiful-harvest-for-small-advisory-firm-15303.html?section=139
The contents of this article are sourced from third parties.There is no warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, regarding the information or any aspect of this article. We shall not be responsible for and disclaim liability for any loss, damage (whether direct or consequential) or expense of any nature whatsoever, which may be suffered as a result of, or attributable to, the use or reliance upon the information provided in this newsletter
| company: | pfireStorm |
| address: | 21 Alexander Drive Winston Park, Gillits |
| tel: | +27 87 474 2200 |
| fax: | +27 31 764 4090 |
| website: | https://www.pfire.co.za |
Pfirestorm is an affordable internet based service that organisations are able to offer their clients that will result in the cementing of existing relationships and/or the establishment of new relationships between the clients and the organisation.
This service is CLIENT-CENTRED and simultaneously provides the organisation with a platform that addresses fundamental business matters such as strategy and wealth creation, operations and practice management, compliance issues, day to day matters, vast Marketing opportunities, leveraging IT in a unique way, staff incentives and measurements and impact directly and indirectly on your income flows from day one.
The purpose for this service is to enable organisations and clients to be able to reach out to one another in an environment that is transparent, promotes shared responsibility and facilitates relationships providing mutual benefit for the client and the organisation.
It is no longer a matter of who you know! It is who knows YOU!
It is time!
VALUE PROPOSITION TO OUR CLIENTS
Pfirestorm’s unique collaborative technology will enable our clients to deliver a branded and unified sustainable experience to their customers at all levels of their organisation, through programmed alignment of internal procedures and processes with their Customer Value Proposition.
Our clients will experience the power of a programmed behavioral system designed to sustain, facilitate and deliver to their clients, a distinctive Customer Value Proposition resulting in increased new and retained customers that can be measured in terms of higher production outcomes, reduced operating costs, focused employee and customer activities, customer services that exceed expectations, business continuity, and ultimately good corporate governance aligned to a dynamic regulatory environment.