Emails are Records in Your Practice - Here’s How to Get Them Into Your Advice System.

If you are like a majority of advice firms, email communication with your clients is key to your record-keeping and noting requirements. Questions between meetings, confirmations, "just following up on this," attachments, decisions made in a two-line reply - it all adds up. In a regulated advice practice, that email trail is often just as important a record as your file notes and Statements of Advice.

The problem is that email lives in Outlook or Gmail, not in your CRM. If someone has to manually copy and paste every important email into your advice software, two things happen: it takes forever and it gets skipped when things get busy - right when you need the record most.

The good news is that the main advice platforms have all built ways to solve this. Here's how it works in three of the big ones: XPlan, AdviserLogic and Midwinter.

XPlan: Forward an Email and it Files Itself

XPlan's approach is simple once it's switched on: you don't need a plug-in. You can forward an email from any email client - Gmail, Outlook, whatever - to a special XPlan address and XPlan does the filing for you.

There are two levels to this:

• Forward to a specific client - You can file an email against an individual client record by forwarding it to that client's entity ID, in the format entity-id@your-xplan-site-name.

• Forward to your whole team's inbox (the smarter option) - You can instead forward or CC an email to your XPlan User Group's inbox and XPlan will scan for matching email addresses across your entire database and automatically file the note against the correct client record without you needing to look up an ID. XPlan can even go a step further: it can automatically set the note's type and subtype based on words or phrases it detects in the email subject line, using rules you set up!

Before this will work for you, there's a setup step: if incoming email filing isn't switched on for your site yet, you'll need to submit a request to have it activated and make sure the sending domain is added to your XPlan whitelist.

AdviserLogic: Send From Inside the Platform, or Import From Your Inbox

AdviserLogic gives you two distinct ways to make sure emails end up as records, depending on where the email starts.

1. Sending emails from within AdviserLogic

If you compose and send the email from inside AdviserLogic itself (rather than from Outlook or Gmail), the filing is automatic: emails sent using the platform's client-selection tool are automatically saved as File Notes in each client's record - no extra step needed. There's one important catch: if you type the recipient's email address directly into the To field instead of selecting the client from the search list, no file note will be created - so it's worth training your team to always pick clients from the list, not type addresses freehand.

2. Importing emails sent from Outlook or Gmail

This is the one that solves the "I already sent this from my normal inbox" problem. AdviserLogic gives every user their own personal AdviserMail address. By forwarding a message to your unique AdviserMail address - or CC'ing or BCC'ing it on an email sent from Outlook or Gmail - the email and its attachments get automatically or manually linked to the right client record as a file note.

Here's how the matching works: AdviserLogic will try to match the incoming email to an existing client based on the sender's or recipient's email address and if it finds a match, the client's name automatically populates in the "Client Related To" field. If it gets it wrong, or can't find a match, you can manually assign the correct client from the list, tick Confirm and select "Confirm and Create All" to finalise it. Attachments aren't left behind either - the original email itself (as an .eml file) and any attachments are automatically saved along with the File Note.

Midwinter: Native Outlook Integration

Midwinter has taken a more "built-in" approach for Outlook users specifically. Since a Microsoft Office 365 integration was added, users can send emails directly through Midwinter's AdviceOS platform using their normal Outlook address, while the software keeps a record of what was sent. Because it's sent using your actual Outlook identity, client replies land straight back in your familiar Outlook inbox, rather than getting stuck somewhere unfamiliar.

Setup is intentionally light-touch: users authenticate their Office 365 integration and from that point forward. sent emails carry through into the record automatically. It's available to all Midwinter users at no extra cost.

Unlike XPlan and AdviserLogic's forward-to-file approach, this is built around emails you send from within the Microsoft ecosystem, so it's worth checking Midwinter's help centre for the latest detail on whether inbound (received) emails are captured the same way, since this integration was framed as the first phase of a broader email capability.

The Common Thread

Regardless of which platform you're on, the pattern is the same: the software is trying to meet your email where it already lives (Outlook, Gmail, wherever) rather than forcing you to change how you communicate. The setup step usually takes a few minutes per user, but it typically pays for itself the first time a compliance review - or a client dispute - asks "do you have a record of that conversation?"

If your practice hasn't set this up yet, it's worth treating it the same as any other compliance essential: pick your platform's method above, get your site administrator or IT contact to switch it on and give your team a procedure on the "select from the list, don't type the address" type gotchas - that's usually where most of the missed file notes come from.

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