How long does a record of advice take? The real numbers

Ask any adviser what they dislike most about compliance and the record of advice is usually the answer. Not because the requirement is unreasonable, but because of when it lands: after the meeting, after the driving, at the end of the day, for every single client. Here is what that actually costs, in numbers a practice owner can check against their own diary.

The manual numbers

• Straightforward case: 30 to 60 minutes for the RoA once the needs analysis is done. Risk-only reviews sit at the bottom of the range; anything with product comparison at the top.
• Complex case: 90 minutes to several hours. Replacements carry extra disclosure duties, business assurance carries valuations, and multi-product recommendations need the "what was considered" trail per product.
• Plus the FNA: the financial needs analysis that precedes the advice is its own document, typically another 30 to 60 minutes done properly.

Now multiply. An adviser doing eight client meetings a week produces, at a conservative 75 minutes of drafting per client across both documents, ten hours of drafting per week. That is more than a full working day, every week, spent writing up what already happened, at the hourly value of your most expensive person. Priced at even R800 an hour of adviser time, the drafting alone costs the practice roughly R400,000 a year per adviser.

The hidden cost is worse than the visible one

Because drafting is deferrable, it gets deferred. RoAs written a week after the meeting are reconstructed from memory, which is how files end up thin, templated and late: exactly the gaps that surface in FAIS audits, which we detail in the section 9 checklist. The compliance risk and the time cost are the same problem wearing two hats.

What changes with an agent

This is drafting work with a defined structure, defined inputs and a defined reviewer, which makes it close to ideal for a managed AI agent. The workflow we build: the adviser sends their meeting notes (typed or voice) the moment the meeting ends; the agent drafts the FAIS-structured RoA and the FNA from those notes and the practice's own product set; both documents come back in a few minutes for the adviser to review, correct and approve. The model cost is roughly R20 per client file. Not per month: per file.

The adviser still gives the advice, still owns the reasoning, still signs off every word: section 9 remains satisfied by the person it binds. What disappears is the ten hours of typing, and the week-long gap between the meeting and the record. Same-day files, written while the meeting is fresh, reviewed by the person who was in the room.

See how it works at Tallify, or read the plain-language RoA guide if you want the regulatory grounding first.