Small UK IFA firms — anywhere from a sole RI to a ten-RI practice — usually run a four-to-six-tool stack that grew over a decade. The all-in cost sits around £2,400–£3,200 per RI per year in licences alone, before the paraplanner labour that keeps the data flowing between systems. Wealth Analytica collapses that into one platform at £149.99 per user per month. You stop paying for the seams. Your paraplanner gets their Tuesday back.
The four-tool small-firm reality
Picture the firm. You're the founder. Two RAs and a paraplanner named Sarah. The office is in Cheltenham or Lincoln or somewhere on the south coast where the rent's manageable. Intelliflo Office for the CRM because you've used it since 2014. FE Analytics for the fund research because everyone has FE Analytics. Voyant for the cashflow because a client asked once and you bought it that week. A separate proposal tool — sometimes it's CashCalc, sometimes it's a Word template Sarah maintains in a OneDrive folder. Total subscription bill, somewhere between £900 and £1,400 a month.
The bill isn't the problem. The seams are. Every fact-find gets entered into Intelliflo, then re-entered into FE Analytics for the portfolio view, then re-entered into Voyant for the cashflow. Sarah keeps a paper version on the desk because nobody trusts the digital one to be current. When the FCA's vulnerability flagging guidance updated last year, Sarah updated the field in Intelliflo. The field doesn't exist in Voyant. So Sarah maintains a vulnerability spreadsheet. Which is, of course, where the audit trail breaks.
What changes on day one of WA
We turn on the Intelliflo OAuth in your sandbox. Your client records sync into Wealth Analytica live — names, holdings, planned reviews, the lot. Sarah opens the platform and the fact-find for tomorrow's 10am client is already 60% complete. The fields she'd have rekeyed are pre-populated. The risk profile is staged. The portfolio analysis runs against the actual holdings, not a hand-entered approximation.
Same for the new lead that came in via the website yesterday. Lead capture opens a shell record. Sarah fills the structured fields once during the discovery call. Risk, capacity-for-loss, vulnerability indicators, ESG preferences — one form, one save. The proposal builder runs off the same data. The Voyant subscription's cancellable.
The FE Analytics renewal is the harder call — FE has a fund universe and a brand presence WA's still building. We're honest about that comparison. Some firms keep FE for a year while they get comfortable with the WA analytics; others switch on day one. Both are reasonable.
The maths for a 4-RI firm
Concrete: a 4-RI firm with a paraplanner, running the typical Intelliflo + FE + Voyant + CashCalc stack. The subscriptions add up to about £11,500 a year. Sarah's paraplanner time spent on cross-system data movement — commonly a third of the week in firms we've worked with — call it £21,000 a year at a fully-loaded paraplanner rate. The integration and reconciliation work the firm doesn't bill anywhere comes to maybe another £4,000. All-in stack cost: about £36,500 a year.
WA at five seats (four advisers plus Sarah) is £9,000 a year. Sarah's data-movement time drops by roughly three-quarters once the rekeying's gone — call it £16,000 of paraplanner time back per year. Integration maintenance goes to zero. The all-in cost lands around £9,000 a year, against £36,500. The headroom — £27,500 — is what the firm can spend on growth, on Sarah's pay rise, on a marketing budget that doesn't get raided at quarter-end.
Detailed worked example with sourcing in our consolidation article.
What we won't promise
WA isn't FCA-authorised — we're the technology, not the adviser. The suitability call is still yours. We don't replace Voyant on day one if your firm sells on cashflow depth; we sit alongside it and run the rest of the pipeline. We don't have FE's twenty-five-year fund universe; we have live Morningstar across 350,000+ assets, which is enough for most firms but not all. The decision frame is honest: pull your real numbers, weigh them against the institutional cost of switching, decide.
If you're a sole IFA
One-person practices are the leanest version of the same maths. You're paying for tools designed for ten-adviser firms. The fragmentation tax is proportionally worse because you don't have a paraplanner — every hour rekeying is your hour, not someone else's. WA at a single seat is £149.99 a month. Pre-populated fact-finds and proposal-builder shortcuts give a sole IFA roughly the leverage of a paraplanner-supported one, without the salary line.
Last reviewed: 15 May 2026 · Reviewed quarterly · Author: Michael Fasosin · Editor: Anthony Marris · See our editorial policy.
Run a real client through WA
A free trial seat for you and your paraplanner. Bring tomorrow's 10am client (or anonymise an existing record). We'll wire your Intelliflo OAuth in the sandbox and you'll see the whole pipeline in 20 minutes.