Why Most IFA Pipeline Management Still Lives in Spreadsheets, and What It Costs You
16 February 2026
If you ask most advisers how they track their pipeline, the honest answer is: a spreadsheet. Sometimes multiple spreadsheets. Sometimes a spreadsheet and a notebook. Occasionally, a CRM that nobody quite trusts enough to use as the single source of truth.
It works. Until it doesn't. A follow-up gets missed. A fee isn't logged. A promising lead goes cold because nobody remembered to chase it. And the managing director trying to understand the firm's pipeline across four advisers is left stitching together data from different files at the end of each month.
This isn't a technology problem in the traditional sense. Most firms don't lack software. They lack a process that's easy enough to actually stick with.
The real cost of an unclear pipeline
When your pipeline lives in scattered spreadsheets, a few things tend to happen.
First, follow-ups slip. Not because advisers are careless, but because there's no structured prompt to act at the right time. A prospect who needed a call in two weeks gets forgotten for six. That's not poor advice. It's poor tooling.
Second, revenue becomes hard to forecast. If you can't see what stage each opportunity is at, you can't project fee income with any confidence. That makes planning harder than it needs to be, whether it's hiring, investment, or simply knowing whether Q3 looks healthy.
Third, manual data entry introduces errors. Fat-finger a fee figure, misfile a client, paste into the wrong row. Spreadsheets don't protect you from any of this. In a regulated environment, that's more than an inconvenience. It's a risk.
None of this is new information to anyone running an IFA firm. The question is whether there's a better way that doesn't involve a six-month implementation project and a system that's harder to use than the spreadsheet it replaced.
What a structured pipeline actually looks like
The advisers we work with tend to want two things: the flexibility they're used to from spreadsheets, and the structure they know they're missing.
In practice, that means being able to view your pipeline the way that suits you. A Kanban board for drag-and-drop simplicity if you think visually, or a table view if you prefer something closer to a spreadsheet. Both feeding the same underlying data. Both keeping the pipeline honest.
It also means having task workflows that do the chasing for you. When a prospect moves to a new stage, the next steps should follow automatically. A task created, a reminder set, a workflow triggered. Not because automation is a goal in itself, but because advisers shouldn't be spending their time on process admin when they could be spending it on clients.
And it means giving the person running the firm, whether that's the MD or the practice manager, a clear dashboard. Not a monthly export cobbled together from four different sources, but a live view of pipeline health, adviser activity, and projected fee income. The kind of visibility that helps you make decisions without having to ask everyone to update their spreadsheets first.
Where this is heading
Pipeline management isn't a solved problem for most IFA firms, and it won't be solved by simply digitising a spreadsheet. The next step is tooling that actively helps. Calendar and email integrations that keep your CRM up to date without manual input. Intelligent notifications that surface what needs attention. Reporting that helps firm leaders see patterns across their adviser team.
We're continuing to build in this direction. Outlook sync is already part of what we're developing, and we're exploring how to surface useful insights from pipeline data. Things like deals that have stalled, follow-ups that are overdue, or patterns in conversion rates that might not be obvious from a flat table.
The aim isn't to replace the adviser's judgement. It's to make sure the admin around the pipeline doesn't get in the way of good advice.
A better default
The underlying point is simple. If your pipeline process creates work, if it requires you to maintain spreadsheets, chase your own tasks, and manually compile reports, it's costing you capacity. And for most IFA firms, capacity is the constraint. More capacity means more clients, more advice, and more income.
Modern CRM infrastructure should reduce that friction, not add to it. If you're running an adviser firm and this sounds familiar, it might be worth looking at what's changed in the tools available to you. Glimzer is one of them, and we're building it specifically for the way IFA firms work.