More than one adviser has told us the same thing recently. Their annual reviews are deliberately booked into the same few weeks every year. Ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty reviews, all planned that way well in advance. And actually, it makes a lot of sense. Once a review is booked, it tends to stay exactly where it is. Advisers protect that hour, and rightly so, because it is the part of the process the client actually sees.
What is harder to protect is everything built around it: provider information gathered, valuations chased, client records updated, files prepared, any technical work completed, recommendations implemented, and someone making sure it all actually gets followed through. One review at a time, spread across the year, that can feel manageable. Ten of them landing together is a different problem, and it is bigger than it looks on paper.
Put a number on it
Across the review work we support, a fairly standard case will often involve around five hours of admin and paraplanning time in total, split either side of the meeting itself. Roughly two hours might go on admin beforehand, gathering provider information, pulling valuations and preparing the file. After the meeting, report writing and paraplanning can take around another two hours, with implementation and updating records adding roughly another hour.
Ten standard reviews booked into the same month therefore means around 50 hours of admin and paraplanning work landing around those meetings, on top of whatever else is already sitting with the team. Even that understates it, because a review is not one task, it is a sequence: gather, prepare, meet, report, implement, chase. Each stage depends on the last one finishing, so once several reviews are moving through the process at once, they start to queue behind whichever stage is slowest.
That is often where the real problem sits. Ten reviews rarely feel like ten times the work. They feel like everything backing up behind one narrow point while the meetings booked months ago carry on regardless.
Why batch them at all?
There is no one right way to structure annual reviews. Some firms spread them across the year, while others deliberately work in surges and group them into known periods. Both can work. The real question is whether the rest of the process has been designed around that choice and whether anyone is actually watching where the queue builds.
The hours do not always tell you where the problem is. The gaps often do. How long does a case spend waiting for a valuation, waiting for technical work, or waiting to be implemented compared with the time someone is actually working on it? That waiting time can quickly become the real capacity problem.
A useful way to test your own process is to look at the last five reviews you completed. Do not just record how many hours they took. Look at how many days passed between each stage and where each case spent the longest waiting. If every case spends three days waiting for provider information, adding another paraplanner will not necessarily solve the problem. If everything reaches the same technical reviewer at once, speeding up the admin beforehand might actually make the queue worse.
Where we actually fit
We do not think every firm needs to run annual reviews the same way. Some want help with the whole process. Others only need support with provider information, report writing, implementation, or just the weeks where workloads spike.
We have never been in the room for the review meeting itself, and that is deliberate. That is the adviser’s conversation to have. What we can do is support the work around it, from arranging the meeting and gathering information beforehand through to suitability work, implementation and follow-up after. Our annual review service was built around exactly that split. Some firms hand us most of the process, while others only hand over the part that is creating the bottleneck. Either way, the adviser keeps the client relationship.
It is not always about how many reviews you have
The more annual review conversations we have, the less I think the interesting question is “how many reviews do you have?” and the more it is “how much of each review still sits with the adviser?”
A firm can have a perfectly manageable number of reviews on paper and still feel stretched if the adviser is carrying the preparation, technical work, meeting, documentation and follow-up alone. If reviews are already planned months in advance, that is also the moment to decide who does each part of the work, before the batch lands rather than during it.
If your reviews are already scheduled in one batch every year, which stage backs up first once that window opens: the admin before, the paraplanning after, or the implementation and records once it is all agreed?
