Planning Pros, a boutique financial advisory firm specializing in personal insurance for New Zealand’s trade businesses, serves approximately 250-280 families with a lean team of just two people, owner Nikki Kane and her Virtual Assistant. Operating in one of the most heavily regulated industries, they needed a solution that could handle complex compliance requirements while enabling remote collaboration across time zones.
The Problem: “Without Process Street, we’d either burn out or get shut down.”
Before Process Street, Planning Pros operated at the mercy of manual processes and disconnected systems. New Zealand’s shift from prescriptive to “vibe-based” regulations, where regulators wouldn’t specify requirements but would punish non-compliance, left sole advisors facing an existential choice: sell out to larger firms or risk regulatory shutdown.
The compliance burden was crushing. Month-end reporting alone could consume entire days. Tracking replacement business for annual returns meant manually combing through records for hours. Client onboarding stretched across multiple days with constant risk of missing critical compliance steps.
How does Process Street help Planning Pros?
“Without something like Process Street, you would not be able to keep trading in accordance with the law. The financial markets authority would come knocking on your door and basically shut you down.”
The Solution: Automated Workflows Replace Manual Compliance Gambling
Process Street became the backbone of Planning Pros’ compliance infrastructure through four critical implementations:
- Client Application Processing: Previously dispersed across Excel, email, and paper checklists, new client onboarding now flows through mandatory sequential tasks. Each application triggers automatic document generation, insurer submissions, and compliance documentation, with gates preventing progression until regulatory requirements are met.
- Replacement Business Tracking: Annual regulatory returns once required full-day manual audits of client transfers between insurers. Now, each replacement automatically logs to Google Sheets via Process Street’s integration, turning year-end reporting from an eight-hour archaeological dig into a five-minute export.
- Claims Management Workflows: Their tech-phobic claims contractor couldn’t access Dropbox or complex systems. Process Street solved this by housing pre-written client communications in workflow task fields; they simply copied text blocks and pasted them into emails. Every claim followed identical compliance steps, eliminating variability that regulators scrutinize.
- Month-End Compliance Checklists: Professional development hours, financial reporting, regulatory updates, all tracked through recurring workflows that surface exactly what needs attention.
The killer feature: workflows cannot close with incomplete mandatory fields. Every file meets the same standard, regardless of who handles it.
What are your favorite Process Street features?
“Gamifying is always my friend. The automations and integrations: if I can do one thing and three other things happen as a result, that’s a cool outcome. That’s my happy place.
I really love all of the features. I love the way that if I want to do something, I can. I don’t remember the last time I had to do a workaround with Process Street. I don’t need a workaround. Process Street just works.”
The Results: 80% Time Reduction, $20,000+ Annual Savings
The impact was immediate and measurable:
- Client onboarding time cut from days to hours, roughly an 80% reduction
- Annual savings exceeding $20,000 through automation alone
- Year-end compliance reporting reduced from full days to 5 minutes
- Claims processing time cut by 30 minutes per claim, saving 30% in contractor costs
- Zero compliance violations with complete audit trails
Perhaps most significantly, Planning Pros remains one of the few sole advisor businesses still operating independently while competitors sell to larger firms unable to manage the regulatory burden.
“By the time we close off our workflow, there is literally nothing that is not done.”
In an industry where one compliance miss can destroy generational wealth, Planning Pros’s systematic approach has created unshakeable confidence. While other sole advisors exit the market, Planning Pros continues to grow, knowing every client interaction meets regulatory standards without sacrificing efficiency.
As Kane puts it: “By the time we close off our workflow, there is literally nothing that is not done.”
Process Street transformed what began as “checklists on steroids” into the infrastructure that makes regulatory compliance operationally viable. In highly regulated environments, it’s the foundation that determines whether independent firms can continue operating.
The alternative isn’t inefficiency. It’s non-existence.
Process Street: The difference between surviving & thriving.
Cut workflow time in half without missing any compliance steps that threaten your firm’s viability.
Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis.
The post Planning Pros Cuts Compliance Time by 80% and Saves $20,000+ Annually with Process Street first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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