Advisor Perspectives

Where Advisor Time Actually Goes: Data, Paperwork, and the Work Behind Every Meeting

Advisors are paid for advice, yet most of the week goes to gathering data, handling paperwork, and building materials. Here is what the published research says about each, and what we think actually helps.

AdvisorPilot

Ask an advisor what the job is and you will hear about clients. The retirement conversation. The surviving spouse who needs a steady hand. The business owner trying to decide when to sell. Ask the same advisor to walk through last Tuesday and a different picture shows up: statements to chase, forms to reconcile, and a review packet that took longer to build than the meeting took to run.

That gap is not just a feeling. It shows up in the research, and it has for years.

Your client meetings are the smallest part of your week

In its 2018 study of more than 1,000 advisors, Kitces Research found that the average lead advisor spent 8.8 hours per week meeting with current clients, plus another 5.3 hours per week preparing for those meetings and an additional 6.6 hours per week on the supporting financial planning, investment, and analytical work, followed by an average of 6 hours of follow-through client servicing. The meeting was the biggest single task on the list, and the work surrounding it was still larger.

Newer data has not changed the shape much. The fourth edition of the Kitces Research Advisor Productivity study, built on survey data gathered in 2024, reports that the typical Senior Advisor spends just 17% of their time in client meetings. Fidelity's 2025 Advisor Insights Study frames it from the other side: advisors spend just 41% of their week supporting clients and prospects, and 59% of advisor time goes to administration, compliance, and other non-client tasks.

These are different studies with different samples and different definitions, so the numbers should not be stacked on top of each other. They do point the same way. And when advisors tell us where the rest of the week goes, three answers come up again and again.

You didn't become an advisor to chase statements

Before any advice happens, someone has to know what the client actually owns. For many households, that means accounts at more than one custodian, a 401(k) left at a former employer, an annuity bought a decade ago, and a brokerage account a spouse opened on their own. The held-away pieces are often where the most interesting planning questions live. They are also the hardest to see.

Account aggregation was supposed to fix this. Advisors adopted it widely, and they are not happy with it. The 2025 Kitces Research study on advisor technology (The Kitces Report, Volume 1, 2025) found that despite 72% of advisors using technology for account aggregation, satisfaction rates are the lowest of any technology adopted by a majority of advisors. The major stand-alone aggregation data providers scored poorly, in a very narrow range between 5.3 and 5.8 out of 10, and the report traces the frustration to two primary issues: data quality and connection reliability, with advisors reporting broken data feeds and missing or incomplete data. In its July 2025 AdvisorTech column, Kitces described the practical cost: the hassle of frequently broken connections and incomplete data has offset much of the value in time savings that data aggregation had theoretically promised.

Even when aggregation works, it does not always save time. Kitces' 2018 planning research found that advisors using account aggregation tools spent more time in their planning process, apparently using the extra data to go deeper rather than to go faster. That is a fine outcome for clients. It just means the data problem was never really solved; it moved.

So advisors do what they have always done. They ask for statements. In that same 2018 study, 79% of advisors reported gathering data in an in-person meeting where clients bring in statements. The statement is still the most trustworthy record in the room. The trouble is what happens after it lands on the desk: someone retypes positions, cleans up tickers, works out which account is the Roth and which is taxable, and hopes nothing gets dropped between the PDF and the analysis.

Your paperwork never shows up on a client's calendar

The second place the week goes is administrative work: operations, compliance, forms, data entry, and the follow-up that keeps a client file clean. Cerulli's Q2 2025 Advisor Research Collaborative newsletter reports that, on average, out of a 40-hour work week, an advisor spends 9 hours on administrative tasks. The same edition notes that ineffective delegation to staff is a major productivity challenge for 60% of advisors.

Part of the burden is the technology stack itself. The 2025 Kitces technology study found that a typical advisory firm supports 12 distinct software applications to implement 20 different business functions. Kitces' productivity research adds that those 12 applications require ongoing training, integration across tools, and data entry. Each tool may do its own job well. The seams between them are where the hours leak out.

It is worth being honest about what the research says software can and cannot do here. The same Kitces productivity study found little relationship between firms' investments in technology and revenue productivity. The most important driver it identified was implementing the right team structure. A good client service associate or associate advisor is not something an app replaces. What better tools can do is take the retyping and reconciling off everyone's plate, including theirs, so the team's hours go to clients too.

Your best meeting starts long before the client sits down

The third pain is the one advisors describe with the most feeling, because it sits closest to the client. A review meeting needs something to review: where the portfolio stands, the analysis behind any recommendation, and something the client can follow in the room and take home afterward.

Planning software helps, but it rarely finishes the job on its own. In the 2018 Kitces planning study, 56% of advisors also used spreadsheets for supplemental analyses, and 45% used Word or a similar tool to actually produce their financial plans, because planning software alone did not allow enough customization of the report. The same research found that the average time to create and deliver a financial plan was 15 hours. An ongoing review is lighter than a first plan, but the pattern repeats every time: pull the data, run the numbers, write the narrative, format it, check it, and then start over for the next household.

You already trust the statement. That is where we start.

We built AdvisorPilot out of these same frustrations. In our ongoing conversations with advisors, and in the surveys we run with them, the same struggles come up again and again: pulling a household together from scattered accounts, keeping up with the paperwork, and building materials worth putting in front of a client. We hear about the evening before a review spent rebuilding holdings from a stack of statements, and the morning spent turning that work into something a client can read. None of it is advice, and all of it has to be right. These are exactly the pains we aim to solve, so that every advisor's day gets easier and better, with more of it spent on the people they serve.

What we keep hearing shaped where we started. Instead of making the workflow depend on a data feed that may break, we start with the client statements and documents advisors already have. AdvisorPilot helps turn those documents into organized holdings and account information that the advisor reviews and confirms before any analysis relies on it. Account aggregation is something we are evaluating, but we did not want the core of an advisor's preparation to wait on it. A confirmed record built from the source document is something an advisor can stand behind.

From there, the work moves to the meeting itself. Once the holdings are confirmed, AdvisorPilot supports portfolio review preparation and helps produce client-ready summaries and draft materials, which the advisor edits and approves before anything reaches a client. We also built planning and analysis tools around the questions that come up most often in those conversations, including retirement income, Roth conversions, fee analysis, tax-loss harvesting, annuity and FIA illustrations, and equity compensation. None of this makes the decision. The point is to get the advisor into the room with the groundwork already organized, so the hour before the meeting goes to thinking rather than formatting.

You don't need a bigger book. You need more time in the room.

There is a version of this argument that ends with "save time, serve more clients." The research does not really support it, and most advisors we talk with do not want it. Kitces found that the rising use of more capable financial planning software did not appear to be generating time savings, and was instead being leveraged by advisors to go deeper with clients.

The more useful target is face time. In the 2024 productivity data, Kitces concluded that most advisors would benefit from increasing client face time from the Senior Advisor median of 17% to 35% to 40% of their week, with team support being key to making that possible. That is the prize worth chasing. Not a bigger book for its own sake, but more of each week spent where clients actually feel it.

This article is for educational purposes for financial professionals. It is not investment, tax, or legal advice, and it does not recommend any specific strategy or product. Statistics are reported as published by each source; see the linked studies for methodology.

Sources

1. "How Do Financial Advisors Actually Spend Their Time And The Limitations Of Productivity?" Kitces.com (Kitces Research, 2018 study "How Financial Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning"), article published March 18, 2019. https://www.kitces.com/blog/how-do-financial-advisors-spend-time-research-study-productivity-capacity-efficiency/
2. "Announcing The Second (Bi-Annual) Kitces Research Study On The Real Financial Planning Process" Kitces.com, article published March 9, 2020, reporting results of the 2018 Kitces Research study. https://www.kitces.com/blog/second-kitces-research-study-real-financial-planning-process-2020/
3. "The 4 Key Drivers Of Advisor Productivity: How The 'Right' Team Unlocks New Growth" by Mark Tenenbaum, Kitces.com, published September 29, 2025, on the fourth edition of the Kitces Research Advisor Productivity study (survey data gathered in 2024). https://www.kitces.com/blog/advisor-productivity-key-drivers-practice-management-team-structure-revenue-client-pricing-success/
4. "The Technology That Independent Financial Advisors Actually Use And Like" The Kitces Report, Volume 1, 2025 (Kitces Research 2025 AdvisorTech Study). PDF read at the copy hosted by Advyzon: https://www.advyzon.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/The-Kitces-Report-The-Technology-That-Independent-Financial-Advisors-Actually-Use-And-Like-Vol-1-2025-4.pdf
5. "Wealthbox Signals Plan To Move Upmarket After Selling $200M Majority Stake (And More Of The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech, July 2025)" by Ben Henry-Moreland and Michael Kitces, Kitces.com, published July 7, 2025. https://www.kitces.com/blog/the-latest-in-financial-advisortech-july-2025-news-fintech-wealtbox-upmarket-sale-pe-investors-envestnet-conquest-nerdwallet/
6. "Cerulli Connections: Prioritizing Healthy Growth for Your Practice" Cerulli Associates, ARC Newsletter, 2Q 2025. https://www.cerulli.com/arc-newsletter-q2-2025
7. "The Time-Value Equation: Optimizing time to unlock growth" Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions, citing the 2025 Fidelity Advisor Insights Study (and, for the revenue analysis, the 2024 Fidelity RIA Benchmarking Study). https://clearingcustody.fidelity.com/insights/topics/running-your-business/time-value-equation-optimizing-time-unlock-growth