Every year at her old firm, they assembled a task force. They called it "Bookmaker." The job was straightforward in description and brutal in execution: create the client report books. These weren't simple one-pagers. For multigenerational clients with complex estate plans, a single book could run 40 to 50 pages. And every page was assembled by hand.

Nicole McMullin, now SVP of Product at Wealth.com, lived this reality as a young associate at a registered investment advisory firm in the early 2010s. The memory still resonates.

"I'm sitting in front of Excel where I'm extracting client portfolio performance from some software, maybe Citrix, and I'm copying and pasting into Excel and screenshotting and making these beautiful client books and they took hours," McMullin recalled. "And your job is also to learn what the client goals are, what these investment strategies are. And a majority — probably 90% of it — was really just spent on copy-paste, create client books."

Why the copy-paste problem persists at advisory firms

Here's the uncomfortable truth: more than a decade later, variations of the bookmaker problem persist at firms of all sizes. The software names have changed. The workflows might run through different platforms. But the fundamental pattern — extracting data from one system, reformatting it for another, assembling it into something client-ready — still consumes a disproportionate share of associate and operations time.

This isn't because firms haven't adopted technology. Most have. The problem is that much of the technology adopted over the past decade automated individual tasks without connecting them. You might have a portfolio accounting system, a CRM, a financial planning tool, a document management platform, and a reporting engine. Each one works. None of them talk to each other in a way that eliminates the copy-paste layer.

The result is that associates — the people firms are investing in to become the next generation of advisors — spend their formative years doing data assembly instead of learning client relationships. It's the problem with most RIA tech stacks: lots of tools, not enough connectivity.

The hidden costs of manual data assembly

The bookmaker problem isn't just an efficiency issue. It's a talent issue and a client experience issue.

The talent cost. Associates who spend 90% of their time on manual data assembly aren't developing the skills that make great advisors. They're not sitting in on client conversations, learning to read emotional cues, or understanding how to translate complex planning into accessible guidance. They're screenshotting Excel charts. Firms that can free their associates from this work will develop better advisors faster — something we explored in the race for talent: building the next generation of advisors.

The client cost. A 50-page client book assembled over hours might be comprehensive, but it's also stale by the time it's delivered. If a client's situation changes between the book creation and the meeting — a market move, a family event, a new tax consideration — the book doesn't reflect reality. Clients increasingly expect real-time relevance from their advisors, not quarterly snapshots.

The scalability cost. Firms trying to grow can't scale the bookmaker model. Every new client with a complex estate plan requires more manual assembly time. At some point, the back office becomes the bottleneck, not the front office. Growth slows not because there aren't enough clients to serve, but because there aren't enough hours to assemble the materials to serve them. Scalable processes are the backbone of great advisory firms — and manual data assembly is the opposite of scalable.

How modern platforms are solving the bookmaker problem

McMullin described her initial conversation with Wealth.com's CPO as a lightbulb moment precisely because she recognized the bookmaker problem from the other side — as a product builder who could now help eliminate it.

"For me it was just this light bulb moment of going back to me in 2012, talking to Danny about the company and thinking, oh my god, this is bookmaker. This is what we set out to do," she said. "I'm so glad we're kind of past the SaaS software era which allowed them to build this platform and now we're pulling in AI to do so much of the work that we were doing on our own."

The convergence of several trends is making the bookmaker problem solvable in ways it wasn't five years ago:

Data consolidation. Platforms that aggregate data from multiple sources — documents, balance sheet information, K-1s, and other data through integrations and tools like Plaid — are eliminating the extraction step. When the data already lives in one place, there's nothing to copy and paste. A robust data engine with 130+ integrations can replace the manual extraction that consumed McMullin's early career.

AI-powered document understanding. Complex trust and estate documents that previously required an attorney call to interpret can now be parsed and summarized by AI trained on domain-specific data. The executive summary that took hours to create can be generated in seconds.

Dynamic reporting. Instead of static client books assembled quarterly, platforms can generate real-time views that reflect the client's current situation. The 50-page book becomes a living document that updates as circumstances change. Modern business intelligence tools make this shift from static to dynamic reporting practical.

What firm leaders should do about the bookmaker problem

For operations leaders and managing partners, the bookmaker problem is worth auditing. Map out how client materials are actually assembled at your firm. Count the steps. Count the systems. Count the hours. Then ask whether the tools you've adopted are truly connected or simply coexisting.

The firms that solve this problem won't just save time. They'll develop better advisors, deliver better client experiences, and build the operational capacity to grow without proportionally growing headcount.

That's not a technology upgrade. It's a structural advantage.

This article is adapted from a conversation on Next Mile, Milemarker's podcast. Watch the full episode.