Most "financial planning CRM software" checklists are the same ten generic-CRM questions with a financial-services logo pasted on top — contact fields, calendar sync, price per seat. None of that tells you whether the tool understands what a client actually is in a planning practice: a household, on its own review cycle, connected to other households through referrals. Run your shortlist against this instead, category by category, during the demo — not after you've signed a contract.
Household and relationship modeling
Don't take "yes, it supports households" at face value. Verify:
- You can attach a spouse, adult children, and a trustee to one household — not create three separate contact records and link them with a note
- A household can hold multiple named roles (decision-maker, beneficiary, executor), not just a generic "related contact" tag
- An outside professional — the referring CPA or estate attorney — can be attached to the household directly, without living in a separate "business contacts" list
- Viewing one household member shows you the whole household, not just that one person's activity
Review scheduling
Your book runs on cadences, not a single pipeline stage. Check for:
- Support for annual, quarterly, and ad hoc life-event review cycles, set per household, not one global default
- A view that surfaces who's due for a review this month without you opening every household to check
- Somewhere to log what changed since the last review — new goals, a job change, a new grandchild — that surfaces automatically the next time you prep for that household, instead of living in your memory or an old email thread
Referral tracking
If referrals are part of how your book grows, the CRM should treat them as a real object, not an afterthought:
- Referral sources (CPAs, attorneys, other advisors) can be tracked as their own entities, not buried inside a household's notes field
- You can see, at a glance, which households came from which referral source
- You can tell when a referral relationship has gone quiet — no referrals in months — the same way you'd want to know a client has
Data handling
Before you commit, confirm the boundaries of what the tool actually does:
- You can export your full client and household data in a usable format, on your own schedule, without a support ticket
- The vendor is explicit about what it doesn't do — most CRMs aren't compliance recordkeeping systems, and shouldn't be treated as one for archiving client communications
- It's positioned to sit alongside your planning and portfolio software, not replace it or trap your relationship data inside it
Test it with one real household during the trial, not a demo account. Take a household you actually manage — say, John and Maria Torres, their daughter Emily as designated executor, and Dana Kwoh, the CPA who referred them three years ago. Enter it into the candidate CRM and time yourself. If Maria needs her own disconnected contact record, if there's no field for Emily's role, or if Dana can't be tagged as the referral source, that's not a minor gap you'll work around later — it's the tool telling you it wasn't built for how your practice actually runs.
A tool that passes all four categories is rare enough that it's worth naming directly: Retainer's financial advisor product was built around exactly this checklist — household mapping, review cadence, and referral tracking as first-class objects, not bolted-on fields in a generic contact record.