Advorra blog

The annual client review: an agenda and a record for small RIAs

By the team at The CollabHub · Co-written with Mohammad Aamish Aaftab
Published 12 Oct 2026 · Updated 17 Oct 2026

An annual client review is a scheduled meeting where the adviser and client check that the client's circumstances, objectives, risk tolerance and portfolio strategy still line up, and agree what happens next. For a small RIA, a good one follows the same five parts every time: what changed, objectives and risk, portfolio and strategy, actions, and the next review date. The written record afterwards matters as much as the meeting itself.

The review is booked, the client turns up, and forty minutes later everyone has had a pleasant conversation about their daughter's wedding and the market. Then someone has to write it up, and it's not clear what was actually reviewed. A fixed agenda solves both problems: the meeting covers the same ground every time, and the record writes itself because it follows the same order.

What should an annual client review cover?

It should cover five things, in this order: what changed in the client's life, whether objectives and risk tolerance still hold, whether the portfolio and its strategy still fit, the actions agreed, and the date of the next review. The order matters. Life changes come first because they drive everything after them. A new grandchild or a planned home purchase can change objectives, which can change the strategy, which creates actions.

What should you send the client before the meeting?

Send a short agenda and a list of things you need them to confirm, about a week ahead. The confirm list does more work than the agenda. It gets the client thinking about income, goals, family changes and upcoming withdrawals before they sit down, so part 1 takes ten minutes instead of thirty.

• The five-part agenda.
• A short list to confirm: income, goals, family changes, withdrawals expected in the next year.
• Any documents they need to sign, such as an updated IPS if one is due.

What should the record say afterwards?

The record should say who met, what was reviewed, what changed, and what happens next, with dates on all of it. Write it the same day, while you still remember which spouse raised the concern about risk.

1. Date and attendees.
2. What was reviewed, following the five parts.
3. What changed, and what did not.
4. Actions with owners and dates.
5. Any strategy change, recorded with its effective date, and any IPS update saved as a new version.
6. The next review date.

The fifth item is where small firms most often slip. The client agrees to move from a balanced strategy to a more conservative one, the trades go through, and nobody records the date the strategy changed or updates the IPS. A year later the IPS still describes the old strategy, and the review record is the only clue that anything happened.

A worked example

Take a two-person RIA with about 120 households, reviewing each one once a year. That's roughly ten reviews a month, or two or three a week.

One of those households is a couple in their early sixties. In part 1, they mention that one of them plans to stop working in eighteen months. In part 2, they say they'd like less volatility before that date. In part 3, the adviser suggests moving their joint account from a growth strategy to a balanced one from the first of next month, and leaving the held-away 401(k) as reporting only.

The record that afternoon reads, in short: retirement date noted; risk tolerance lowered; joint account moves to balanced, effective the 1st; IPS to be updated and sent for signature by the 15th, owner the lead adviser; next review booked for the same month next year. Everything the firm would later need to show is on one page, and the IPS change is tied to the review that caused it.

When is a full annual review overkill?

For a small, stable account with a simple strategy, a full meeting every year can be more than the client wants. Some firms offer a short call or a written check-in instead, covering the same five parts in a few lines. That can be reasonable, as long as your advisory agreement and procedures allow it and you record it the same way. What isn't reasonable is skipping the review and the record together. The trade-off to weigh is client time against the cost of a gap in the file.

How Advorra supports reviews

In Advorra, the household page holds member-level suitability and the accounts with the strategy each follows, and the suitability-review clock shows who is due. Strategy changes are dated in the Strategy Journal, and the IPS gets a new version when it changes. Next steps can become tasks on the client record. If you want to see how a review record and a strategy change sit together on one household, look at the product page, or read about suitability review cadence.

A practical agenda, not legal, compliance or investment advice.