Fragmented tooling produces a fragmented client picture: spending in one tool, property in another, reconciled by hand at review time. earmarkIQ puts categorised Open Banking expenditure, subscriptions, and Land Registry-indexed property valuation with mortgage and equity in a single client-facing app — and gives the adviser one consented view of the lot through the live adviser dashboard, with exports for whichever cashflow tool the firm models in.
The three-tool problem
Most planning firms have assembled a data stack nobody would design from scratch. Expenditure comes from a questionnaire or, in better firms, some form of bank data analysis. Property value comes from a portal estimate the paraplanner looks up, or whatever the client last said at review. Mortgage balance comes from a statement the client forwards annually. Net worth is a spreadsheet that stitches the three together — accurate on the day it's built, decaying from the moment it's saved.
Each tool in the stack is defensible on its own. The problem is the joins. Every join is manual, every manual join happens only at review time, and so the client's "current position" in the file is really a photograph of whenever someone last did the stitching. Between reviews, the firm is advising on a picture that no longer exists.
There's a quieter cost too: the client sees none of it. The spreadsheet lives in the firm's drive. The portal estimate lives in a browser tab. The client — whose engagement every firm says it wants — has no living view of the position their plan is built on, which makes the annual review a reveal rather than a conversation.
Why property belongs next to spending
For most UK planning clients, the home is the largest asset on the balance sheet and the mortgage the largest liability — and the two interact with expenditure constantly. Overpayment decisions depend on monthly surplus. Remortgage timing shapes the biggest line in the budget. Downsizing modelling needs a defensible current value, not a number from two reviews ago. Treating property as a separate world from spending means the two halves of every one of those decisions live in different tools.
Dedicated property-tracking tools do the property half well. But a property figure with no expenditure context answers only half of any question a planner actually asks: can this household afford the overpayment; what does the surplus look like after the fix ends; what does equity release change about drawdown? The value is in the join — and the join is exactly what the fragmented stack does badly.
What one view looks like in practice
The client connects their banks once (read-only, via Finexer, an FCA-authorised provider) and categorised spending accumulates continuously — the full case is in how advisers collect expenditure data.
The client finds their address, earmarkIQ produces an estimate indexed from Land Registry house price data and keeps it current, the mortgage sits against it for a live equity figure, and the client can override the estimate with their own number at any time.
Accounts, spending, property and equity in one client-facing picture — on the client's phone and on the web — rather than a firm-side spreadsheet rebuilt at each review.
Through the adviser dashboard: client list, categorised expenditure with transaction access at the scope each client granted, recategorisation to match how the firm models, CSV export for cashflow tools, and a full audit log.
earmarkIQ does not currently aggregate pensions or investment platform accounts, and direct feeds into modelling tools are planned rather than live (exports work with any tool today). We'd rather you build the stack knowing exactly where the edges are.
What changes at review time
With the stack collapsed, the annual review stops being an exercise in reassembling the client's position and starts from a position that already exists. Expenditure is twelve months of categorised reality, exportable into the firm's modeller that morning. Property value is this month's indexed estimate — or the client's own override — with equity calculated against the actual mortgage. Net worth is whatever the app says today, because today is when you're looking.
The conversation changes shape accordingly. Instead of "let's confirm your figures" — twenty minutes of data archaeology the client experiences as an audit — the meeting opens on what moved and why: the equity built since last year, the category that crept, the surplus that could be working harder. Data collection becomes advice, which is the trade every planning firm is trying to make.
And because the client lives with the same picture between reviews, nothing in the meeting is a surprise to them. A client who has watched their equity figure update all year arrives at the downsizing conversation already halfway through it.
Getting there without a migration project
Collapsing the stack doesn't require a firm-wide systems change. The sequence that works: clients download earmarkIQ and connect their banks — minutes each; they add their property and mortgage — the address search does the rest; they grant the firm consented access at whatever scope they're comfortable with. From that point the adviser dashboard carries the combined view, and the firm's existing modeller keeps its place in the workflow via export. The spreadsheet retires quietly, unmourned.
FAQ
One client view, live today
Expenditure, property and net worth in one consented picture — with the adviser dashboard live and pilot places limited.
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