advisor-dashboards

What this skill does

# Advisor Dashboards

## Purpose

Provide comprehensive guidance on designing, building, and operating dashboards for registered investment advisory firms. This skill covers the full spectrum of advisory practice dashboards — from executive-level practice analytics and AUM/revenue tracking through advisor-facing daily operational views, client flow analysis, exception monitoring, and KPI frameworks. It enables Claude to advise on dashboard architecture, metric selection, role-based access design, data source integration, alerting logic, and the benchmarking frameworks that transform raw operational data into actionable practice intelligence for advisors, managers, compliance officers, and firm leadership.

## Layer

10 — Advisory Practice (Front Office)

## Direction

both

## When to Use

- Designing or evaluating dashboards for an RIA's management team or executive committee
- Building an advisor-facing daily operational dashboard or morning briefing view
- Defining practice-level KPIs and metric hierarchies for an advisory firm
- Tracking AUM growth, revenue trends, and fee analytics across advisors, teams, or segments
- Analyzing client flows — new client acquisition, attrition, money-in-motion, and competitive losses
- Designing exception and alert dashboards for operations, compliance, or billing teams
- Evaluating advisor productivity metrics — clients per advisor, revenue per advisor, capacity planning
- Establishing benchmarking frameworks using industry data for RIA performance comparison
- Selecting dashboard technology and data integration architecture for multi-system advisory environments
- Building role-based views that serve different audiences (advisor, branch manager, compliance, executive)
- Setting firm-level and advisor-level goals with progress tracking and trend visualization
- Reviewing or improving an existing dashboard for relevance, usability, or data accuracy

## Core Concepts

### 1. Practice-Level KPIs

Key performance indicators for advisory practices fall into several categories, each measuring a different dimension of firm health. A well-designed KPI framework provides both a snapshot of current performance and the trend data needed to identify emerging risks or opportunities.

**AUM (Assets Under Management).** The foundational metric for any AUM-based advisory practice. Total firm AUM is the product of client count, average relationship size, and market performance. AUM should be tracked at multiple levels: firm total, by advisor or team, by client segment (high-net-worth, mass affluent, institutional), by account type (taxable, IRA, trust, plan), and by custodian. AUM changes decompose into two components — market appreciation/depreciation and net new assets — and tracking each separately reveals whether growth is organic (advisor-driven) or market-driven.

**Revenue.** Total advisory revenue, broken down by fee type (AUM-based fees, financial planning fees, hourly fees, performance fees, other), by advisor or team, by client segment, and by billing period. The effective fee rate (total revenue divided by average AUM) is a critical derived metric that reveals fee compression trends over time. Revenue should be tracked on both an accrual basis (for GAAP reporting) and a cash basis (for cash flow management).

**Client Count.** The number of active client households, tracked by segment, advisor, and tenure. Distinguish between households (the billing and relationship unit) and accounts (the custodial unit). A firm with 500 households might have 2,000 accounts. Client count trends — net new households per quarter, attrition rate, and average household tenure — reveal the health of the firm's client acquisition and retention efforts.

**Revenue Per Client.** Average annual revenue per household, segmented by client tier. This metric exposes whether the firm is growing revenue through larger relationships or by adding many small ones. Declining revenue per client may indicate fee compression, client downsizing, or an acquisition strategy that targets smaller relationships than the firm's economics require.

**Average Account Size.** Total AUM divided by the number of accounts (or households). Tracked over time, this metric reveals whether the firm is attracting larger or smaller relationships. When combined with revenue per client, it exposes effective fee rate trends at the client level.

**Organic Growth Rate.** Net new assets (new client assets plus existing client contributions minus withdrawals minus terminated client assets) divided by beginning-of-period AUM, expressed as an annualized percentage. Organic growth strips out market appreciation to isolate the advisor-driven component of AUM change. Industry benchmarks for healthy RIAs typically target 5-10% annual organic growth. Negative organic growth — even during strong markets — signals that the firm is losing ground despite favorable conditions.

**Retention Rate.** The percentage of beginning-of-period AUM or client count that remains at the end of the period, excluding market effects. A 95% client retention rate means 5% of clients (by count or AUM) left during the period. Retention is often more valuable than acquisition: replacing a departed $2M client requires acquiring two new $1M clients, each carrying acquisition cost and onboarding effort.

**Referral Rate.** New clients acquired through existing client referrals as a percentage of total new clients. Referral-sourced clients tend to have higher AUM, lower acquisition cost, and higher retention. Tracking referral rate by advisor identifies which advisors have the strongest referral networks and which may benefit from referral training or process improvement.

**Profitability Metrics.** For firms that track practice-level financials, operating margin (revenue minus direct and allocated expenses, divided by revenue) is the ultimate measure of practice efficiency. Industry benchmarks for well-run RIAs typically show operating margins of 25-35%. Revenue per employee (total revenue divided by total headcount) provides a simpler proxy for overall productivity. Compensation-to-revenue ratio (total compensation including advisor payouts divided by total revenue) should typically fall between 55-70% for sustainable practices.

### 2. AUM and Revenue Dashboards

AUM and revenue dashboards provide the financial pulse of the advisory practice. They answer the questions firm leadership asks most frequently: how much do we manage, how much are we earning, where is the growth coming from, and what does the trajectory look like?

**AUM by Advisor/Team/Segment.** A hierarchical view that drills from firm total AUM down to team, advisor, and individual household. Heatmaps or bar charts comparing advisors by AUM highlight concentration risk (if one advisor manages a disproportionate share) and identify capacity constraints (advisors approaching their effective management limit). Segment views (by client tier, account type, or investment model) reveal the composition of the firm's book and inform strategic decisions about target markets.

**Revenue by Fee Type.** A breakdown showing what percentage of total revenue comes from AUM-based fees versus planning fees, hourly fees, or other sources. Firms diversifying beyond pure AUM-based revenue should track the mix over time. A rising share of planning fee revenue indicates successful adoption of comprehensive planning services. Billing exception rates by fee type highlight operational trouble spots.

**Pipeline and Flows Tracking.** The flow of assets into and out of the firm, tracked on a rolling basis. Key flow metrics include:

- **Gross inflows** — New client assets plus existing client contributions. Decompose into new relationship inflows (first deposit from a new household) and existing relationship inflows (additional assets from current clients, including rollovers, consolidations, and savings contributions).
- **Gross outflows** — Client withdrawals plus termin