Episode 6 - Google Workspace & Claude with Tom Ashworth

Most planners are on Microsoft and have never seriously considered the alternative. In this episode, Tom and I make our best attempt to convert you away from the Microsoft ecosystem and consider Google. We cover what Gemini can do once it can see every email, document and meeting note you own, why he has never needed a separate note taker, where Gemini still loses to Claude on anything complex.

Migrating your back office is the biggest job a planning firm can take on, which is why most of us put up with the one we have. TFP Financial Planning did it anyway. Curtis Berry joins me to talk about leaving Intelligent Office and moneyinfo for Plannr: what finally triggered it and what the migration was actually like. We get into Plannr’s open API and the tools Curtis has built on top of it, from birthday card tasks to a full LOA manager, and the places where Plannr still feels unfinished. 

A different sort of episode, and the first of what I'm calling my big picture ones: instead of a single tool, we look under the bonnet of a whole firm. Keith Hare, Alex Bond and Craig Fitzsimons of Cadence Financial Planning build most of their own technology, and six people are running a stack that punches far above its weight. We cover the onboarding tool they sketched on a Thursday and released the following week, a suitability engine on version 13 in four months, a case that took 35 outsourced hours and now takes two and a half, and the hallucination that invented an FCA rule.

N8N is the best-kept secret in financial planning tech, and I say that as someone who can no longer run Arboretum without it. Phil Teale of Teale Pen & Pixel builds n8n workflows for advice firms every day, and joins me to explain what it actually is: a visual canvas where you wire your systems together, with none of Zapier's per-step pricing — about £20 a month on their cloud, or £8 self-hosted. We get into meeting note takers, suitability report generators, Phil's chatbot that queries the FCA Handbook, why owning your automations matters, as well as the downside: a real learning curve, and workflows that break.

A first for the show: no guest, just me, and a short one. Wispr Flow is the worst-kept secret in tech, but I still find many advisers that aren't using it.What is it? A voice dictation tool that drops text wherever your cursor happens to be, and it has replaced roughly 60% of my typing. I cover how it actually works, why it is nothing like the Dragon licence I blew some of my first month's wages on as a green adviser, what it costs, and the uses that you don't initially think of when you see the headline purpose of the tech.Affiliate link if you want to try it whilst also contributing to the Podcast's running costs: https://ref.wisprflow.ai/tom-brookes

This is it! The first episode is here, and Bionic Adviser starts as it means to go on, albeit with a special bumper episode of two tools being assessed at once!Dan Graham of Plan Haus joins me in person to talk Calendly and Zapier: the booking tool that kills email tennis, and the middleman that wires it to 9,000+ other apps. We get into why automation adds personalisation rather than strips it, why 16% of planners say they'd never touch a booking tool, and what the two currently cost. Plus the honest bits: Calendly's own reminder emails, Zapier's conditional-logic spaghetti, and the client who booked into my diary while I was in Italy. Enjoy and don't forget to leave us a review! Additionally, head to https://bionicadviser.co.uk/contact to submit a request for a piece of tech that you think should be covered in a future episode!