Every financial advisor knows that great advice starts with great data. But before you can create a financial plan, optimize tax strategies, or adjust an investment portfolio, you need accurate, up-to-date, and complete client data.

That’s where things get complicated.

Clients don’t hand over perfectly structured financial reports. Instead, you’re dealing with:

• Documents: Investment statements, tax returns, credit reports—each in different formats, with key details buried in PDFs.

• Conversations: Critical financial insights are often shared verbally in meetings but never properly recorded.

• Follow-Ups: Client emails, phone calls, and informal updates create a stream of data that must be tracked and organized.

Before you can even start providing real financial advice, you’re stuck gathering, organizing, and entering this information manually. 

This data bottleneck isn’t just frustrating—it’s slowing down your practice, reducing efficiency, and keeping you from spending time where it matters most: guiding clients.

Why data capture is so hard for financial advisors

1. Too many documents, too many formats

Every financial institution presents data differently.

• One investment statement might clearly list holdings, while another requires digging through footnotes.

• Tax returns are packed with useful details, but key numbers are scattered across multiple schedules.

• Loan agreements, trust documents, and estate plans often contain critical but hidden clauses that impact planning.

Because there’s no standard format, every document requires manual review and interpretation.

2. One client, dozens of files

A single client may have:
✔️ Multiple investment accounts (401(k), IRA, brokerage, HSA)
✔️ Multiple bank accounts
✔️ Multiple tax documents (W-2s, 1099s, K-1s)
✔️ Insurance policies
✔️ Loan agreements

Multiply this by dozens or hundreds of clients, and document management becomes a full-time job.

3. Some of the Most Important Data is Qualitative

Numbers alone don’t tell the full story. Clients share goals, fears, concerns, and life updates that significantly impact financial planning, but:

• These insights come up verbally in meetings and calls.

• They don’t fit neatly into spreadsheets or financial planning software.

• Advisors often rely on memory or scattered notes to track these details.

Without a structured way to capture, organize, and act on qualitative data, these insights can easily be lost.

4. A fragmented data landscape

Right now, advisors deal with data arriving from multiple sources in different formats:

• Some accounts connect through aggregation tools (e.g., Plaid, Yodlee).

• Some require manual uploads of financial statements.

• Some details are entered by hand from verbal conversations.

• Some clients fill out paper or digital questionnaires.

Because no single source provides all the necessary data, advisors have to piece everything together manually—which is time-consuming, prone to errors, and inefficient.

5. Clients Delay, Forget, and Send Incomplete Data

Even when clients have all their financial data, getting it from them is another challenge:

• Many don’t have their data well-organized—it’s scattered across email, bank logins, and paper files.

• Some take weeks or months to send documents—if they remember at all.

• Advisors have to remind them, follow up, and chase them down multiple times.

• The data they send is often incomplete or unclear, requiring back-and-forth emails to clarify missing details.

Advisors don’t just collect data—they wrangle it

The risk: incomplete data may lead to flawed advice

When advisors don’t have clean, structured, and updated data, financial planning becomes reactive instead of proactive.

• You build a retirement plan assuming an investment portfolio is well-diversified—only to find out later it’s concentrated in a single stock.

• You create a tax strategy without knowing about an upcoming business sale that will trigger a huge capital gains event.

• A client’s risk tolerance shifts, but because it was only mentioned verbally in a meeting, their portfolio isn’t updated accordingly.

Without a continuous, structured approach to capturing all client data—including verbal insights—advisors are constantly playing catch-up.

Fixing the data bottleneck

Advisors shouldn’t have to choose between efficiency and accuracy. The next evolution of financial advisory will be built on automated, structured, and real-time data capture.

1. Automate document extraction

AI-powered tools can instantly extract key details from PDFs, tax returns, and investment statements—eliminating manual data entry and reducing errors.

2. Direct data feeds—when they work, and when they don’t

Account aggregation tools aim to simplify data collection by linking directly to financial institutions. But in reality, many advisors can find these tools unreliable:

• Some banks and brokerage firms block account aggregation.

• Accounts frequently disconnect, requiring reauthorization.

• Some platforms only pull partial data, leaving gaps.

Because these tools can fail, advisors still need complementary ways to capture data, like document uploads and manual entry. A hybrid approach—combining direct feeds with automated document processing—ensures a more complete picture.

3. AI-powered transcription for meetings

Some of the most important financial insights come from client conversations—but unless they’re recorded and structured properly, they get lost.

AI-driven meeting transcription tools can capture key details and structure them into actionable data points, automatically summarize insights and flag missing information and integrate with a client’s financial profile, reducing the need for manual notes.

4. A unified hub for data consolidation

Instead of juggling multiple disconnected sources of client data, the future of advisory work will revolve around a central hub that brings everything together:

• Aggregated account data (when available)

• Automated document extraction for manual uploads

• AI-powered meeting transcription for verbal insights

• Client questionnaire integration for structured self-reported data

This ensures all client information is captured in one place, no matter where it comes from—eliminating data gaps and inefficiencies.

More time for strategy, less time on admin

Right now, data capture remains one the biggest bottlenecks in advisory work—but it doesn’t have to be.

At Sherpas, we’re changing the game. Clients can connect their accounts, or manually input data. But here’s the real breakthrough: we’ve automated data extraction from documents.  From ANY document—tax returns, investment statements, credit reports—instantly. Even handwritten documents.  No more manual data entry. No more chasing clients for missing numbers. Just clean, structured data—ready for analysis, in seconds.

If you’re ready to eliminate the bottleneck and take your practice to the next level, Sherpas can help. Book a demo to see it in action.