Getting Started
Our charges
No two clients are the same. The way that we work with each client may have some commonality in processes, but it truly is a unique relationship.
Some clients come to us with no pre-conceived ideas about what they want, or how they want it.
They’re happy to benefit from our experience in designing a paraplanning, administration or practice management process on their behalf, which follows the latest guidance and aims to provide the best outcomes. We call this our Centralised Paraplanning Process (CPP).
Because this enables us to use our own, highly efficient processes and resources, we’re able to offer our most competitive prices to clients that use this service. Typically, strategy and suitability reports prepared through our CPP would be in the region of £225-£575 + VAT, depending on the case and its complexity.
Other clients prefer (or need, if they’re tied agents or network members) to follow different processes or use their own templates. These often involve more time, so in some circumstances we may need to charge a little more for clients that aren’t able to use our own CPP.
For this reason, we want to have a really good understanding of what you require, how you want to work with us, and what kind of resources we’d need to support you, before we agree a charging structure that will work best for you.
Please contact us to arrange a convenient time for a chat, so we can understand your needs and provide a fee quote.
Our charges are also dependent on the type of work we do for you.
- Paraplanning tasks are generally charged on a combination of modular fixed fees for reports, and on hourly time charges for general support, technical queries and research
- Consultancy, training and project work are normally charged as fixed fees, based on half-day or whole-day rates
- Practice management and administration support are normally on a pure time-cost hourly rate
You can ask us to provide any combination of services to you. For example, we can provide just paraplanning support on its own, paraplanning and administration, administration only, or one-off consultancy services.
We do not provide one-off paraplanning services, due to the time investment required in setting up and creating bespoke report templates for each client.
Retainers
We charge monthly retainers to clients that require ongoing paraplanning support. This reserves you a block of time each month for us to work on your cases.
The amount of the retainers depends on how much of our time you’re likely to require each month. We don't mind which level of retainer you choose, but recommend our Level 1 retainer of £250 + VAT per month for clients that only require 1-2 cases per month, our Level 2 retainer of £500 + VAT per month for clients typically requiring 3-4 cases per month, or our Level 3 retainer of £1,000 + VAT per month for clients requiring 4 or more cases on a regular basis.
Charging retainers is essential to our business because our income is not linked to ‘assets under management’. Our time is recorded all day, every day, so we charge the same amount for our work, irrespective of whether your client is investing £100 or £10 million. The amount of work and time required at our end is the same either way.
We think of it like membership of an exclusive gym. The more you use it, the better value you get from it. We must still provide the equipment, our highly qualified and experienced team, and the technology, irrespective of how often you use it! We’re therefore keen to establish relationships with firms that require a long-term relationship with us, and who are likely to require regular ongoing support from us, so it’s mutually beneficial.
What next?
The process for starting to work with us will depend on what service(s) you require from us. However, they generally involve the following steps:
1. We’ll have at least one initial discussion with you to find out about who you are, how you work, and what we can help you with. We’ll tell you all about us, how we work, how we’d charge for our services, and the systems and processes we use.
2. If both parties agree that they’d like to work together, we’ll ask you to complete our Terms of Business and return a copy to us. We’ll also confirm how we’d ask you to settle our fees, and whether a monthly retainer needs to be set up (e.g. by direct debit) where we’re providing ongoing paraplanning services. We’re happy to accept digital signatures.
3. Depending on the services you require, we may arrange a further call with you/your team to run through how to send cases to us, how to use our project management system, and how to contact us with any queries.
If you require ongoing paraplanning services, the following additional steps will be required:
4. We’ll create a bespoke report template specifically for your company. We’ll normally ask you to send us a good quality copy of your company logo for this. If you have any specific preference over fonts and bespoke content (e.g. appendices) that you like to include in your reports, we’ll organise that too.
5. Once we’ve completed your case, we’ll upload all the relevant documents we’ve agreed to provide to you through our project management system, where you can view and download them to your own back office system for your audit trail.
6. Just after the end of each calendar month, we’ll email you an invoice with a break-down of all the work we’ve done for you that month, which we ask you to settle within 2 weeks. Your fixed retainer invoices will be sent separately at the start of each month, which will normally be paid automatically by Standing Order or Direct Debit.
