Northbank Advisors

“We were three years deep into Salesforce and one ops person away from a meltdown. The migration was honestly the least dramatic IT project I've ever run.”

— Sarah Chen, COO, Northbank Advisors

$28K saved per year

12 mins to migrate

0 IT hours needed

Northbank Advisors manages money for around 400 households. After three years on Salesforce Financial Services Cloud they were spending more time configuring the CRM than serving clients. The team migrated 12 minutes of CSV import later and have not looked back.

01

Before — the Salesforce tax

Northbank's Salesforce instance had been customised by three different consultants over three years. The household-account model worked, technically, but only the founder remembered which fields mattered. A full-time operations lead spent her days writing validation rules, tweaking page layouts, and chasing Report Builder bugs that surfaced after every release.

Renewal sat at $34,000 per year before user licences, plus $9,000 to the implementation partner on retainer. The team genuinely liked their data — they just resented the upkeep. The breaking point came in the run-up to a planned FCA review, when the team realised they could not generate a complete client file without a half-day operations sprint per household.

02

The switch — 12 minutes of CSV

The COO ran a Salesforce report exporting contacts, accounts, opportunities, tasks, and the custom household-link object. Tonic Desk's HubSpot-and-Pipedrive-flavoured CSV importer auto-mapped 91% of columns on the first pass. The remaining 9% (custom KYC and risk-tolerance fields) mapped manually in a five-column wizard with live preview. Total elapsed time, from Salesforce export click to a functioning pipeline ready for the team Monday morning: 12 minutes.

No IT contractor. No data warehouse. No three-month transition project board. The team kept Salesforce read-only for 30 days as a safety net, ran weekly diffs between the two systems, found zero discrepancies, and cancelled the Salesforce contract at the next renewal window.

03

The workflow — households modelled properly

Tonic Desk's household record holds the Smith family as one client and five accounts (joint ISA, two SIPPs, a junior account, a trust). Reviews fire per account on the cadence the compliance manual requires. Birthday workflows fire per individual. AUM rolls up per household for fee billing and per advisor for performance reporting. The compliance file pulls in one click instead of a three-day operations project.

Notes are immutable after 24 hours — edits create an addendum with the original preserved. Phone-call summaries log against the household and any specific account discussed, with channel, duration, and follow-up action captured in a structured form. The full audit file exports as a single PDF that satisfies FCA SYSC 9 record-keeping requirements. The COO tested it on five live households before signing the renewal cancellation.

04

Results — and what they did with the freed budget

The full-time CRM admin role was reassigned to client services. Northbank now spends zero IT hours on CRM maintenance — the platform updates automatically and nothing has broken in the seven months since the switch. The first compliance spot-check under the new system pulled a complete client file in 40 seconds (versus three days on Salesforce, and that was on a good week).

Annual saving: $28,000 in licences and consultant retainer, plus the half-FTE of admin time the team got back. The team reinvested it in a junior paraplanner and an annual client appreciation event. The advisors say the most noticeable difference is that nobody talks about the CRM in the Monday meeting any more.

Northbank Advisors

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