Judge every tool in your advice firm by what you would get back if you left

Five to eight. That's the number of separate systems our own piece on fragmented stacks counts in a typical UK advice firm: a CRM, a back office, research, cashflow, risk profiling, a report writer, a platform feed or two and something for file checking.

Each one arrived for a good reason. A planner wanted better cashflow modelling. The old risk questionnaire was retired. The report templates had become something nobody wanted to touch.

And each one was judged the same way, on the way in. The demo, the trial, the price, the list of integrations.

Very few firms asked the question that decides what a tool really costs over five years. When we stop using this, what do we get back, and in what shape?

I'd move that question to the front of every purchase.

The tools you can't leave end up running the firm

A stack like this is rarely designed. It builds up, one sensible decision at a time. What makes it hard to change later is that some of those tools are easy to walk away from and some aren't, and the hard ones stay year after year because leaving would mean losing history, rebuilding records or retyping notes that go back to a client's very first meeting with the firm.

Nobody chose that on purpose. It was agreed quietly, on the day the contract was signed.

"You can export your data" covers a lot of ground

Almost every supplier will say it. The useful question is what the export contains, because the options aren't equal.

This bites harder in advice than in most businesses. You're expected to show what a client told you, what you recommended and why, long after the event. If that evidence lives inside a tool, the tool's export is part of your record keeping, whether or not anyone thought of it that way when it was bought.

What to ask before signing

None of this needs a technical team. It needs a few plain questions put to the supplier early, and I'd expect anyone to put the same ones to us.

Start by asking for a sample export for a test client, before you sign. A file you can open tells you more than any assurance on a sales call. Then check whether it carries history or only the current state. Earlier risk scores, previous fact-find answers and old valuations are the parts that are hardest to recreate.

Documents matter too. If they come back as a folder of loose PDFs, with nothing tying each one to a client and a date, a migration turns into a filing job.

Ask what happens to your data after you leave, and for how long you can still reach it. Notice periods and deletion timelines belong in the contract.

And look for anything that depends on the supplier's own codes. Internal fund identifiers or model names that only mean something inside one product won't travel.

A paraplanner can run a test export in an afternoon, open the files and say whether the firm could live with them. That afternoon is cheap. Finding out halfway through a migration isn't.

Fewer systems raise the stakes

I spend a fair bit of time arguing that advice firms should run fewer systems, and I still think that. But pulling more of the client record into one place makes this question matter more. The more one supplier holds, the more the firm depends on being able to leave cleanly if it ever has to.

A supplier that's confident in what it offers should have no trouble showing you the way out. If the answer to a request for a sample export comes back slow or vague, that's useful to know before you've committed anything.

Where to start

List every tool you run. Against each, write one line: what we'd get back if we left tomorrow. Where the honest answer is "we're not sure", ask for a sample export this quarter, while nothing is riding on it.

It's a short exercise. It may also change which tool you worry about most, and that won't always be the one people complain about.

Which system in your firm would you find hardest to leave?