Two years ago, I asked my Inside Information readers to send me their best outside-of-the-box practice management ideas—simple office procedures, self-organizational tools or staffing ideas that made their lives easier. The result was a report with the snappy title, "35 Great Ideas: Proven Ways to Improve Your Practice" that now comes as a bonus to new subscribers.

The point of the exercise was that many of the most powerful time-saving solutions can be relatively simple—and (believe it or not) free. Using just a few of them can save you hours a week.

Don't believe me? Consider this creative procedure developed by Elyse Foster, who practices in Boulder, Colo. Foster noticed that she and her staff were spending a lot of time composing letters or email messages for clients and local professionals on a variety of topics. "Financial planning is fundamentally a communication service," she says. But writing all those individualized messages from scratch is a highly inefficient task, and you're judged on the quality of the finished product. If the message is sloppy or leaves out something you intended to say, it can reflect poorly on the advisor and the company. In addition to writing, you have proofreading and revision tasks.

How can you make this activity more efficient? Foster standardized all of her firm's planning letters by creating templates. Every time she or a member of the staff sends out a letter, they take a few extra minutes to create a template for the situation the letter is addressing. "When I send out the Investment Policy Statement, I now have a template that talks about it and a template for creating the IPS itself," she says. "When we talk about model portfolios or changes in model portfolios, there's now a template letter we can pull and customize with a list of the actual changes. When we first get a phone call from somebody, there's a response letter. There are letters for the whole process when people become clients, and our initial plan has its own original template."

The most involved model letters are constructed for a client's annual meeting, on or around his or her first anniversary with the firm. This letter covers goals, progress toward those goals and the financial statement, plus analyses of the portfolio, insurance, estate and education plans.

Before the templates, when she was still creating these letters one at a time, Foster discovered that the quality varied. Sometimes information would be missing, and often the language of the letter sent in February might be superior to the language she sent in June, or vice versa. Now, the template letter prompts Foster to update each analysis with every annual review.

To ensure that clients never receive the same letter twice, every February the staff sits down with the past year's review message and upgrades it. The most significant change is deciding on a new issue that Foster wants to focus on during the year. When Colorado changed the no-fault law on auto insurance, for instance, Foster's staff researched it and sent out a letter with a brief description of the change and a promise that this issue would be addressed over the coming year. The previous year, the letter talked about the need to review homeowners insurance, since some insurance companies had changed the definition of replacement cost. More recently, the letter explained and discussed Sharpe Ratios and beta.

Finding the best words to define these issues can be time-consuming and, of course, extraordinarily difficult if you have to do it over and over. "It can be hard to construct even the simplest sentence about no-fault insurance," Foster says. "Sometimes it takes you 15 minutes to think of exactly how you want to word it. But once it is thought of, and thought of well, you can use it over and over again. As we've standardized our communications the quality of each letter has gone up, and we know each client is receiving a consistent product."

If you want to boost the overall efficiency of the process, take another lesson from Foster and stop typing. "Whenever I want to send out a customized version of a template, I dictate into my recording machine," she says. "I'll say, 'I want to send a letter to so and so, and I want to use the 2004 annual template for this letter: standard opening paragraph; dictate second paragraph; standard third paragraph.' " Her assistants have the template in front of them and can just click through the standard paragraphs and enter specific client stuff. "It makes the process much more efficient for me, and it's a lot faster for the staff, too," Foster adds. Of course, this method also makes it easier to train new staff members to handle client communications.