A brand-new client is onboarding — what should you tell them to bring?

At a fundamental level, financial planning requires a great deal of information about clients' income, assets, insurance and taxes. A financial advisor who wins the business of an incoming customer needs a certain level of data to start the process.

Winning new clients is a constant focus of industry growth strategies, and removing onboarding headaches is a key area of emphasis for fintech firms, custodians and other large wealth management companies. Given those perpetual challenges, two planners told Financial Planning what forms and figures they ask new customers to bring to early meetings, and what the investors should keep in mind about this somewhat painful yet pivotal phase of the relationship. 

Compiling documents — starting with pay stubs, W-2 or 1099 forms and recent tax returns and extending into areas like Social Security, insurance and 401(k) plans — tests clients' willingness to be "bought in" and "committed" to planning, according to Dinon Hughes, a financial consultant with Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based Nvest Financial.

"It is an undertaking, and it's going to be the hardest thing in the financial planning process for you," Hughes said in an interview. "This is something that you have to do. We can't go to someone's house, log into their computers and gather all these documents for them."

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The client's last two pay stubs, Social Security statements, two years of returns, bank and investment account details, employee benefits, insurance, trust and estate documents help Raman Singh of Phoenix-based Singh Private Wealth Management to "see the consistency of their income" for cash flow and tax-planning purposes, he said in an interview. 

After an hour-long "discovery session or let's get organized session" to talk about their long-term financial goals and background information about their loved ones, Singh asks clients for a list of documents but clarifies that only certain ones will be essential for the next meeting, he noted.

"I want the clients to know that this is everything we're going to cover," Singh said. "It's a lot easier to take tiny bites and being able to accomplish that, versus saying, 'Send me everything.' That's when clients get stuck."

Planning clients should bring up to 30 documents or types of information with them to a meeting with a planner, according to a blog post for professional services firm Withum by Emeritus Partner Edward Mendlowitz, who's also a columnist for FP sister publication Accounting Today and the author of "Memoirs of a CPA." 

The incoming customer should remember that, "The greater the input, the more applicable the output will be," Mendlowitz wrote.  

"The above information request seems like a lot and might seem overly voluminous, but it is all necessary," he wrote. "You should consider the meeting as something that might alter the course of the rest of your life, and the degree of financial security you should have. In that case, shouldn't you use as much information as possible?"

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An additional relevant figure for retirement planning comes from calculators available through the Social Security Administration that provide clients and advisors with a forecast of future benefits based on their income history, Hughes noted. His firm sends clients a list of required documents and uses a software program to track their expenses over a span of three to six months, with the exception of "a few very attentive clients" who are already doing so with spreadsheets or other methods, he said.

"We want to make sure that this plan works well into the 90s for the client, so if we don't have accurate expenses to start, we are really setting ourselves up for failure down the road," Hughes said. "We really need to know where the money's coming out because we need to replace that at retirement."

Hughes and Singh stressed that document and information gathering should only commence after the clients and advisors view each other as a fit. 

Before worrying about paperwork, the clients can decide "whether your personality goes well with the advisor," and the advisor ought to get a sense of the clients' beliefs, values and financial aspirations for the next year and subsequent decade or more, as well as what they hope to leave behind, Singh said.

"The goal is to lead them," he said. "The behavioral part to me comes first."