Prepared for: Meridian Financial Planning · Burlington, ON · 4 staff
Session: 60 minutes with the principal and office manager
Report: 5 pages · delivered 3 business days later
1. Where the hours are going
Three opportunities, ranked by hours recovered against effort to build. The estimates come from what your team told me in the session — I have not measured your practice, and I have said so where a number is soft.
New client onboarding
Every new client requires the same five details to be typed into a welcome letter, the account-opening checklist, the CRM, and a welcome email. Sandra estimates 40 minutes per client, and the practice onboarded 31 clients last year.
- Estimated saving
- ≈ 20 hours a year
- Suggested next step
- Practice Autopilot — $4,500 to $5,500 depending on CRM integration
Meeting notes into the CRM
Notes are handwritten during meetings and typed up later, often days later. Two of the four follow-up commitments I sampled had not been entered at all. This is a client-experience risk before it is an efficiency one.
- Estimated saving
- ≈ 45 hours a year, plus fewer dropped commitments
- Suggested next step
- Practice Autopilot — $5,500 to $6,500
Quarterly client review packs
Each pack is assembled by hand from three sources. The layout is good; the assembly is the cost. This is the least urgent of the three because the volume is quarterly, not weekly.
- Estimated saving
- ≈ 12 hours a year
- Suggested next step
- Revisit after the first two are running
2. What your team is already using
This is the half of the report most principals do not expect. I ask to see the browser rather than asking what people use, because the honest answer is usually different from the remembered one.
| Tool | Who / how | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT — free tierDrafting client follow-up emails, occasionally pasting client names and portfolio details | Office manager, daily | Stop this weekOn the free consumer tier. Move to a business plan and configure it, or stop using it for client work today. |
| Microsoft 365 CopilotSummarising internal documents | Principal, occasionally | KeepOperates inside your existing tenant and inherits its permissions. Appropriate as it stands. |
| A meeting-recorder browser extensionUnclear — neither user could say where recordings are stored | Installed on two machines | Stop this weekClient conversations are being recorded to a third party nobody in the practice can name. Remove pending review. |
3. What I recommend
Do this week, without me: move the office manager off the free ChatGPT tier, and remove the meeting-recorder extension until someone can say where the recordings go. Neither costs anything and both reduce real exposure.
Do first, if you engage me: AI Safe Start ($1,500–2,500, about a week). Your team is already using these tools daily with nothing written down. Automating a process on top of that is building on sand.
Do second: Practice Autopilot on client onboarding ($4,500–5,500). It is the clearest of the three, and the one your office manager will feel within a fortnight.
Do not do yet: the quarterly review packs. Quarterly volume does not justify the build cost until the other two are running.
A note on scope. This is a review of your practice's operations and AI use. It is not a security audit, a penetration test, or a statement that your practice complies with PIPEDA, CIRO requirements, or any other regulation. Where you need assurance work of that kind, I will refer you to a qualified specialist.