Paper vs. Electronic Reports: Financial Advisor Mastery

do you recommend to have a hard copy ofeach document every report you know the

circle chart and the five critical

reports the GPS and all these things uh

or can you have a a folder available on

the computer which The Trusted adviser

can open and show the client on the

computer and save a few

trees well um I would say probably not

it depends on your technology and I’ll

show you what I do in a minute but if

now these this technology is available I

just you know I I think before you stop

printing out paper reports for clients

at the client meetings you need to have

some better technology than a single

computer monitor so what you’re looking

at here is a is a gigantic monitor

that’s that’s a touchscreen that’s built

into a tabletop okay so now as long as

you can get these reports to be uh at or

larger than regular uh letter size so in

the US that would be 8 and a half by 11

and uh elsewhere in the world what is it

A4 it’s roughly the same size so uh but

some reports and it depends on the age

of the client so for example the numbers

history which has a lot of little bitty

numbers on it uh if we have older

clients uh overage 60 uh we will often

print those reports onto an 11 by 17

double-sized sheet of paper so that they

can see the numbers and and those big

reports fold up nicely into if you fold

it in half it turns into an 8 and 1 half

by 11 uh sheet of paper in the stack but

when they get to that report they open

it up it’s a nice big report so if you

have a big tabletop monitor like this

then when you okay so the two things

that make it hard to to do it

electronically is that clients often

look at two or three reports

simultaneously so which is something you

typically cannot do on a on a computer

monitor or an iPad unless you have a

setup like this so if you had a setup

like this you could open up three so

let’s say they’re looking at the the

numbers history the circle chart and

let’s say the behind the numbers report

and they’ve got all three in front of

them if you have a tabletop monitor like

this you could open all three and if the

numbers history needs to be twice the

size you could grab the corners of the

document and pinch it make it larger and

that would work just fine my office is a

little bit different uh I’ve got a um

half of half of a wall is a monitor and

so these are not actually pictures of my

offices I found better pictures online

but if in in instead of a tabletop if

you’ve got this kind of a setup like I

do where like half your wall is a

monitor and you could do in essence the

same thing where you could open up two

or three reports and you could resize

the reports to be larger if they need to

be read larger uh I think you could do

it electronically that way as well but

uh other than that I would say no uh

that until you get such technology

available in your office uh the the

paper reports are the most practical and

primarily because clients need and often

will understand an issue better if they

are looking at two or three reports