Ask ten Australian financial planners how long it takes to write a Statement of Advice and you'll get ten different answers. Some say eight hours. Some say three days. A few will quietly admit it can stretch to three weeks when the client situation is complex and the compliance queue is backed up.

The honest industry benchmark sits somewhere between 12 and 20 hours of billable or absorbed time per SoA — and that figure hasn't moved much in a decade, despite every platform vendor promising to change it.

So where does the time actually go?

The five places your SoA time disappears

1. Re-entering the fact find

Your client completed a digital fact find. You recorded notes in the meeting. Now you're typing the same information into your SoA template — and probably into your CRM as well. This duplication alone accounts for two to four hours on an average SoA, and it introduces transcription errors that create compliance exposure down the track.

2. Strategy modelling in spreadsheets

Super contribution modelling. Asset allocation comparison. Insurance needs analysis. Most advisers are still doing this in Excel or a standalone modelling tool, then manually copying outputs into the SoA. The modelling itself might take an hour; formatting and cross-checking the numbers takes another one.

3. Writing the rationale from scratch

This is the highest-value part of the SoA — and it's the section most likely to be written at 10pm under deadline pressure. Explaining why a strategy is in the client's best interests, in language that satisfies ASIC and still makes sense to the client, is genuinely hard. There's no shortcut if you're starting from a blank page every time.

4. Compliance checking

Before the SoA goes to the client, someone — you, your paraplanner, or your licensee's compliance team — needs to verify that the Best Interest Duty obligations are met, the scope of advice is correctly defined, product replacement disclosure is included where required, and the fee disclosure is accurate. Depending on your practice's review process, this adds two to five hours.

5. Formatting and version control

Licensee templates are notoriously brittle. A tab in the wrong place breaks the formatting. Track changes from the compliance review need to be accepted. The final PDF needs to be generated, checked, and stored. This is pure administration — it adds no value — but it reliably consumes another hour or two.

What's the cost of a slow SoA?

At a conservative internal cost of $150 per hour, a 15-hour SoA costs your practice $2,250 to produce. If you're charging $3,300 for the initial advice engagement — a common fee for a comprehensive personal advice SoA in Australia — you're left with $1,050 to cover everything else: client meetings, ongoing service, administration, and professional indemnity insurance.

That margin is why so many advice practices are either struggling to be profitable or rationing the number of new clients they take on. It's not a revenue problem. It's a production problem.

Why the problem is structural, not personal

The instinct is to hire another paraplanner. That helps — until the paraplanner's queue fills up too. The root cause is that the SoA production process was designed for a world where compliance complexity was lower, client data lived in one place, and a good typist could move faster than the regulatory environment changed.

None of those things are true anymore. The FASEA Code of Ethics, the ongoing best-interest obligations introduced by the Financial Services Reform Act, and ASIC's increasing scrutiny of advice documentation have all added legitimate complexity to the SoA. The process needs to be redesigned — not just staffed harder.

What a faster process actually looks like

The practices consistently producing compliant SoAs in under four hours share a few things in common:

  • One source of truth for client data. The fact find feeds directly into the advice document. No re-entry, no transcription errors.
  • Integrated strategy modelling. Scenarios are built and compared inside the same tool that generates the SoA, so outputs don't need to be copied across.
  • Compliance checks embedded in the drafting process. Best-interest traces and scope of advice reviews happen as the document is written, not after it's finished.
  • Templated rationale with adviser override. The first draft of the strategy rationale is generated from the client data. The adviser reviews, edits, and signs off. Starting from something is faster than starting from nothing.

This is not about removing the adviser from the process. The Best Interest Duty sits with the individual adviser, not the software. It's about removing the administration that surrounds the advice — so the adviser's time goes into the decisions that require their professional judgement, not the formatting that doesn't.

The benchmark to aim for

A straightforward SoA — single client, one strategy area, no product replacement — should take under three hours from fact find to compliance-ready document. A complex SoA covering superannuation, insurance, and investment with a product switch should be completable in a day, not a week.

If your current process is consistently outside those ranges, the bottleneck is almost certainly one of the five areas above. Identifying which one — and fixing it specifically — will do more for your practice's profitability than any fee increase.