How to Automate Redtail Technology

Redtail holds what a firm knows about a household

Redtail Technology makes the CRM a large share of independent advisory firms run their day on, and it is now part of Orion, whose planning, reporting and portfolio tools sit around it. Most people who use it just say Redtail CRM.

The object at the centre is the contact record, and in this business a contact is almost never one person. It is a household: two spouses, several accounts each, a trust, an adult child who inherited an IRA, plus the accountant and the estate attorney hanging off the side.

Everything the firm has ever known about them hangs there. The call in March about selling the rental. The note from an annual review where somebody mentioned a grandchild starting college. The signed paperwork. The reason a position was sold four years ago and the client's exact words about it. Calendars, tasks and the pipeline live in the same place, which is why Redtail is the tab that never gets closed.

A review week begins on nine other websites

The record is only ever as good as the last person who updated it, and updating it means going elsewhere.

The week before a client review, somebody opens the custodian's site for the balances, because the meeting cannot be held on last quarter's numbers. Then the old employer's recordkeeper for the held-away plan. Then the carrier's site for a policy nobody has opened since it was sold. Then the required distributions that have to be out before year end, checked account by account against what has actually been paid.

The compliance calendar runs on its own clock underneath all of that. The annual ADV amendment has a filing deadline whether or not anyone is watching it. Mock audits get scheduled and quietly slip. New account paperwork sits half executed at the custodian, and which half is unknown until a person logs in and looks.

Every one of those findings ends up typed back into Redtail as an activity or a note, by a service associate whose actual job is clients.

Redtail Technology

Balances on the record before the meeting Read off each custodian's own site the week before a review, so the advisor opens the household with this month's figures rather than last quarter's.

Deadlines that count themselves down Required distributions still outstanding, the annual ADV amendment, paperwork stuck at a custodian for eleven days and nobody watching it.

Client contact stays with the advisor Lists are built and messages are drafted. Anything filed with a regulator or sent to a household waits for the person answerable for it.

A workflow starts when something changes in Redtail

Redtail automates its own ground properly, and a firm should exhaust that before asking for anything else.

Workflows turn a repeatable process into steps and tasks with owners, attached to a contact, a seminar or an opportunity, built from a template and cloned for the next household that needs the same treatment. Automations set common actions running off a triggering event elsewhere in the database, so the next step does not depend on somebody remembering it. Tag groups and QuickLists cut the book into the lists a firm actually works from: everyone with a review due, everyone from one referral source, everyone approaching a distribution age. Speak and Imaging keep texts and documents attached to the record, where compliance can find them later.

There is a pattern in all four, and it is worth stating plainly. Each one fires on something that happened inside Redtail.

The custodian's balance did not happen inside Redtail. Neither did the distribution, the transfer stuck in limbo for eleven days, the filing deadline or the lapse notice from a carrier. Those sit on other people's websites behind other people's logins, and the CRM has no way to go and look.

Balances that arrive on the record without being typed

Suppose the household record filled itself in during the week before the meeting instead of the night before.

Balances read off each custodian's own site and written up against the household, so the advisor walks in with figures from this month. The held-away plan at a former employer's recordkeeper, which no data feed was ever going to reach, checked once a quarter. Pending transfers and half-executed paperwork followed at the custodian until they clear, with anything stuck more than a week named and dated.

Then the dates that cost money when they slip. Clients owing a required distribution this year, listed with what has actually come out so far. The annual ADV amendment counted down rather than remembered. A referral source who has sent three households this year and never been thanked. Birthdays surfaced with the last few notes on that household attached, so the call is a conversation rather than a greeting.

None of that is advice. It is the collecting that has to happen before advice is possible, and it grows heavier with every household the firm takes on.

An associate's hour belongs to clients, not to custodian logins

Custodian sites do not send anybody a summary. An associate opens each one, reads the balance and types it onto the household record, and that hour is gone.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Redtail, the custodian, the recordkeeper and the carrier in turn, reads what each of them says, and puts the answer back where your team already looks.

The gathering runs on a schedule and does not need supervising. Anything that changes a client record, goes to a regulator or reaches a household waits for the person who is answerable for it, and you can watch a run live and stop it mid-way.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the sites it opens.