Forge for the independent RIA — a working demonstration

First of all

Here's what it is.

Forge is a machine that builds machines.

Tell it the shape of your problem — out loud, in your own words — and it builds the little machine that handles it: a tracker, a planner, a transformer, one simple place for everything about the stuff you run. Anything you can think of.

Every machine it builds is yours forever: it lives in a folder on your own computer, and you can change it by voice any time — “make it work like this instead” is all you have to say to mold it into exactly what you need.

The machines on this page were built exactly that way — each one by describing an advisory-firm chore out loud. You’ll see the page each one produced, the numbers it found, and how to check its work. Every machine prepares, organizes, and flags; your people verify and sign. None gives advice, places a trade, or touches client money.

Before anything else

We know your world.

A small advisory firm runs on paper that never stops arriving, on a few custodians' statements, and on two or three people who hold the whole practice in their heads.

The operations seat

Pulling account values every quarter, computing each household's fee against its own agreement, and reconciling the statements — usually in a spreadsheet, one household at a time.

custodian statements · fee schedules · the billing register · account values

The client-service seat

The onboarding chase, the transfer that has to land, the scanned paperwork that piles up in one folder, and the RMD that can't be missed.

advisory agreements · ACAT transfer forms · scan_0412 (2).pdf · account applications

The owner & CCO seat

The regulatory year in one head: the annual ADV amendment, Form CRS delivery, the quarterly attestations, and the day the exam letter arrives.

Form ADV · Form CRS delivery log · code-of-ethics attestations · the exam request list

Most firms this size run all of this on the custodian portal, a spreadsheet, and somebody's memory. That's not a criticism — it's the job these machines were built for.

Alderbrook Wealth Partners, the firm on this page, is a fictional independent RIA, built to show you shapes. Every document is invented and marked SPECIMEN; the custodians, clients, and figures are fiction. The reasoning isn't — every figure below links to the page it came from, so you can check the machine's work. And the office itself is open: browse every real document the machines read — the statements, the agreements, the registers, all of it.

The whole thing, on one screen

Nine machines. One board.

This is Alderbrook's Forge today: nine machines on one board, alongside the basics every Forge ships with. Each one was built once, from one conversation — someone described a chore, and out came a machine. They live here now, to run any time, instantly. Everything below is the story of where each card came from.

the office board · every machine this firm has built, on one screen open the full board ↗

The board counts twelve because it also carries Forge's built-in basics — a to-do list, an inbox, and a people book — that come with every install. The nine that follow on this page are the ones built for the advisory firm. In your real board every document link is live: open any file straight from the folder it sits in on your own computer. In this demo those source links are marked but inert, since the underlying files stay in the demo world.

Not just dashboards

Forge builds the most beautiful dashboards you'll never have to open.

Every machine here has a conversation attached — and so does the whole board. Ask any machine anything, from anywhere, at any time; you don't even have to be inside it. A top-tier Claude brain wakes up against all of it at once and does the work: pulls the answer, reads the files, writes the summary, or changes how a machine runs when you ask it to.

The dashboards are just the window. The real thing is the AI standing behind every one of them, on the whole practice at once, ready the moment you speak — and still, nothing leaves a folder or issues an invoice until a human says go.

Start with the one built last.

This is the Practice Overview: an overview machine whose only job is to read what all the other machines produce, plus the firm's own registers, and say what no single one can see. It doesn't watch anything and it isn't an overseer — it's a tool like the rest, built by asking, and it runs when you run it. The page it produced: the four items an examiner's request letter names that have nothing filed against them anywhere, and a paying client who hasn't been reviewed in over a year — each one a gap that only exists between two files.

practice overview · “what no tool in this world can see” open full page ↗

“A gap is only a finding when something expects it. The gaps are where nobody has a machine.”

That first line is the machine's own, printed on the page it produced. Everything that follows on this page circles back to it.

The problem reel

Nine chores from this firm. Nine machines that now exist.

Each one below follows the same arc: a real chore, someone describing it to Forge in plain words, and the machine that came out. Three are shown in full — with the actual page each one produced, live in the frame; the other six are one line each. Every number links to where it came from, and every machine below is a card on that board.

A note on honesty: the demo pages below are the machines' real output, on invented (SPECIMEN) data. The one-line “how you'd ask” in each unit is an illustration of the kind of thing you'd say — not a captured transcript. What's real is every page you can open.

01 The mystery-file drawer the client-service seat

① The problem

Every firm has the drawer: the folder where scanned paperwork lands in a hurry — custodian PDFs, phone photos, email attachments, things with names like scan_0412 (2).pdf, final_v2.pdf, and a buried to file/ subfolder. Somewhere in this one is a Rickard IRA statement filed under nothing, an advisory agreement saved twice, and an amended agreement that quietly supersedes the original — and nobody can say which is which by the filename.

② How you'd ask

You:“There's a drawer on this computer where everyone dumps client paperwork they don't have time to file — scans, custodian statements, photos, things named scan_0412 or final_v2. Go through it, figure out what each file actually is, give it a proper name, and file it by household. One rule: show me the whole plan before anything moves, hold any duplicates instead of deleting them, and don't guess a client I can't confirm.”

Illustrative — the kind of ask this machine answers. The real artifact is the page it produced, below.

③ What it built

This is the page to spend a minute on. The drawer holds 37 items; 30 would file cleanly into client households, and the handful that need a human are held out by name — the mystery name each arrived under beside the clean name it would get, nothing summarized away, nothing moved.

THE FILING PLAN — from the drawer, by household then class open the full plan ↗

There's also a run log the machine leaves behind after each pass — open it from the plan — but the plan above is the actual work.

④ How it runs

One pass over the drawer: 37 items read; 30 proposed into 20 client households under clean, dated names; two look-alike pairs held side by side, nothing deleted — the Rickard IRA statement and the Tilley advisory agreement each kept in both copies. And it named the governing document where there were two: the Bexley advisory agreement exists as an Amended & Restated 2026 version that supersedes the 2024 original — both kept, the current one named. [source: the filing plan]

⑤ What you throw into it

What went in

to file/rickard ira stmt.pdf
Copy of AWP_agreement_FINAL(2).pdf
final_v2.pdf
stmt 17 - Copy.pdf
old stuff/notes from call.md
inv_rent_sept.pdf · copy of eo premium.pdf
untitled.txt · fax_0418 (1).txt

→

What came out

Filed by household → class (30)
Duplicates held, not deleted (2 pairs)
Amendment vs. original, governing named
Confirm-household flags (Bexley)
Firm docs, not a client's (2 payables)
Junk left where it sits (1 empty)

Real filenames from the demonstration drawer; the full before-and-after is the [filing plan].

⭐ What it did that was awesome

37 in — 30 filed by household, duplicates held not deleted, firm payables and one empty file set aside. [source: the filing plan]
Two versions of the Bexley agreement kept — it named the Amended & Restated one as governing, not the original. [source: the filing plan]
A file naming a “Howard Bexley” not in the register was flagged to confirm, never forced into a household. [source: the filing plan]

02 The quarterly fee true-up the operations seat

① The problem

Every quarter the firm pulls account values, computes each household's fee against its own agreement — tiers, family discounts, exclusions — and instructs the custodian to deduct it. Done by hand in a spreadsheet, a fee-calculation slip is one of the most common findings an examiner writes up. The question is always the same: does the draft register match what each client actually agreed to, before the invoices go out?

② How you'd ask

You:“Before this quarter's invoices go out, check the draft billing register against every household's own fee agreement. Re-derive each fee from the account values and the agreed tiers and discounts, and flag anything that doesn't match — show me the math. Don't change the register and don't bill anything; I'll verify each flag and sign.”

Illustrative — the kind of ask this machine answers. The real artifact is the page it produced, below.

③ What it built

It checked all 142 households and put each flagged draft beside what the agreement actually says, with the full derivation one click deep. The headline is consequence-first, in dollars:

fee true-up — the draft beside the agreement, every flag with its math open full page ↗

④ How it runs

Of 142 households, 138 match to the cent. Four don't — and if those invoices had gone out as drafted, $5,949.21 would have been billed wrong. One household billed at the top rate with the lower tiers skipped (Deverell, +$674.68); two related households billed without the family discount their agreements grant (the Voss group, +$484.28 and +$411.75); and a household that closed in May queued for a full quarter's fee anyway (Halloran, +$4,378.50). Nothing was billed or changed — Dana verifies each flag and signs. [source: the fee true-up]

No “what you throw into it” beat here, on purpose: this machine eats two clean inputs — the custodian values and the fee schedules. The mess it finds is in the arithmetic, and beat ④ is where that shows.

⭐ What it did that was awesome

It caught the fee errors before the money moved — the exact finding examiners write up, headlined in dollars. [source: the fee true-up]
It showed its work: every flagged fee re-derived tier by tier, so a human can check the math, not just trust a flag. [source: the fee true-up]
It knew a closed household should bill nothing — and flagged the biggest single overbill as an error, not a number. [source: the fee true-up]

03 The compliance calendar the owner & CCO seat

① The problem

In a small firm the owner also wears the CCO hat, and the regulatory year lives in that one head: the annual ADV amendment clock, Form CRS delivered to every client and logged, the quarterly attestations, and the standing question — if an examiner asked today, what could we not produce? For a fiduciary, organized documentation isn't housekeeping; it's the proof the duty runs on.

② How you'd ask

You:“Lay the regulatory year out as a live board: the ADV amendment window, the Form CRS delivery log, who owes which quarterly attestation. Then tell me the honest part — if an examiner asked tomorrow, what's the one thing this office couldn't put its hands on? Track it; the calls stay mine.”

Illustrative — the kind of ask this machine answers. The real artifact is the page it produced, below.

③ What it built

compliance calendar — the ADV clock, CRS delivery, attestations, and today's gaps open full page ↗

④ How it runs

The board answers the examiner's question directly: two items the firm could not produce today, each tied to the request-list item it answers and the exact record that's missing. Here, of 141 active households, two have no Form CRS delivery on record — the Tilley and Nash households, both onboarded in June — so a request for proof of delivery to every client couldn't be met for those two. The machine tracks the calendar; the CCO makes every call. [source: the compliance calendar]

This is the buyer's own desk — and the reason the pitch lands here: most tools buy a firm time; for an RIA, a tidy calendar and a complete delivery log buy a calmer exam.

⭐ What it did that was awesome

It answered the examiner's question in advance: here are the items we could not produce today, and exactly why. [source: the compliance calendar]
It found the two clients with no CRS delivery logged out of 141 — a needle a spreadsheet doesn't raise its hand about. [source: the compliance calendar]
It tracks; it never rules. The ADV clock and CRS log are the machine's; the compliance judgment stays with the human who signs. [source: the compliance calendar]

Six more, one line each.

The point of this list isn't any single row. It's that this is one firm's whole paper week, and each row is a machine that already exists in the demonstration. Click any row to open it.

04 Onboarding Chaser › A new client is a stack of documents and weeks of chasing signatures and watching transfers land — and the one thing nobody chased is always the one that matters. Built: one checklist per household — signed, outstanding, landed, overdue for a nudge — across custodians and documents. It flagged the account already funded ahead of its executed advisory agreement — the sequence nobody wants backwards. [source: onboarding chaser]

Four households in flight, four open items; the longest has sat 97 days, the most urgent is a funded account waiting on its own paperwork.

onboarding chaser — signed · outstanding · landed · overdue open full page ↗

05 Meeting Minutes → Memo + Tasks › A client meeting becomes a books-and-records memo and a list of who owes what — and buried in one is a beneficiary change that contradicts what's on file. Built: from each meeting note, the record to file and the task list that actually follows — only what was decided becomes a task. Out of the Quaid review it drew a task to change the IRA beneficiary — the register still names the ex-spouse; the memo says otherwise. [source: meeting memo]

It also held four things it heard but did not make tasks: legal drafting routed to the client's own attorney, market anxiety that was a reassurance call, and work waiting on a client trigger — each kept on the record with the reason.

meeting memo — the record to file, the tasks that follow, and what it declined to make a task open full page ↗

06 RMD & Beneficiary Flagger › A client past the age who doesn't take the year's required distribution eats a tax penalty — and the one most at risk has taken nothing and has no meeting booked. Built: who's short on this year's RMD, how much is left before Dec 31, who has a review on the calendar — and which beneficiary designations have gone stale. Nine households still owe part of 2026's distribution — $125,470.93 left to take, eight with no touchpoint booked. [source: RMD flagger]

The Rickard household — age 79, $33,649.29 required, $0 taken, no review on the calendar before year-end — is the exact case the practice overview picks up by joining three files. This machine sees the money; the overview sees the silence around it.

RMD & beneficiary flagger — short on the year, and stale designations open full page ↗

07 Statement Check › Custodian statements arrive one at a time, and the one that never arrived is the one you don't notice is missing. Built: a cross-read of the statements the firm downloads against its own register — every value to the cent, and what only a cross-reader can see. Every value matched to the cent; the finding was an absence — one statement that never arrived, and one that came late but is on file. [source: statement check]

23 accounts checked, zero value mismatches — the point isn't the errors it caught, it's the gap it named: nothing here is broken, the gap only exists between two files, so only something that reads both can see it.

statement check — values to the cent, and the statement that never came open full page ↗

08 Exam Binder › When the examiner's request letter arrives, the firm assembles years of records against a twelve-item list — and finds out what's missing the hard way. Built: a production plan against the request list — where each responsive record lives today, what's partial, and what's a hole. Of 12 items requested, it named 4 holes today — a plan that copies, moves, and sends nothing; Ellen verifies and produces. [source: exam binder]

This machine leans on the drawer having run first: it points at where responsive records already sit. A hole means nothing responsive was found in the office — not that the firm is deficient — and it's far better to learn that today than the week the letter lands.

exam binder — the production plan against the request list open full page ↗

09 The Practice Overview — and the two unwatched desks › In this demonstration firm, the defects clustered exactly where nobody had a machine — a paying client not reviewed in over a year, a closed household still on the billing register, a year-end RMD with no meeting booked — all sitting in the paraplanner's and the bookkeeper's folders. Built: the overview you started with — it reads every machine and register and joins what no single one can see: two lists · year-end at risk · blind spots. The gaps are where nobody has a machine — the install starts by mapping your desks. [source: practice overview]

Two lists that should agree and don't: billing calls the Ostrander household an active, paying client ($1,574.91 this quarter); the review calendar has no meeting for her since July 2025. No single tool surfaces that — only putting billing beside the calendar does. Every gap the overview found lived in a folder no machine was watching. The first working session of an install is finding your unwatched folders. That conversation is the first door at the bottom of this page.

practice overview — two lists that should agree, and don't open full page ↗

The world view

These aren't nine apps. They're one practice.

Two of these machines exist in every office we fit, on purpose, because together they're the proof: the machines share one set of files, and something reads all of it.

The Organizer: mess in, filed out.

Straight from the drawer, on the run you watched in unit 01:

to file/rickard ira stmt.pdf
→ 2026-09-30 · Rickard IRA statement · filed under The Rickard Household → Statements
Copy of AWP_agreement_FINAL(2).pdf
→ duplicate of the Tilley advisory agreement · held side by side, nothing deleted

And the part that matters more than the filing: it never deletes. When it finds what looks like a duplicate, it holds both where a person decides. The mess gets smaller; nothing gets gone. [source: the filing plan]

The Overview: what lives between files.

The blind-spots view at the top of this page is this machine. It's built last, it reads everything the other machines keep plus the firm's registers, and its job is the thing no single folder can hold: the gap that only exists between two files.

A paying client with no review booked in over a year. Four exam-letter items with nothing filed against them. A closed household the billing register still bills. Now that you've walked the reel, you know why it can find those and nothing else in the firm can. [source: the blind-spots view]

And in this firm, the gaps clustered where nobody had a machine. That list is the demonstration selling the next build.

📁 Browse every document in this office — all 111 files the machines read →

The graveyard

What this deliberately does not do.

Not missing features. Wars I'm deliberately not fighting — and lines I won't cross.

It never gives advice.

No portfolio moves, no trade suggestions, no financial-plan drafting, no performance claims. It reads the paper around the advice; the advice stays with your advisors.

It never touches money or trades.

No wires, no billing execution, no orders. It re-derives a fee and flags a mismatch; a human verifies and the custodian deducts. Nothing moves on its own.

No custodian connections.

It reads the statements and values you already download. No portal logins, no feeds, no sync. It never holds a login to anywhere your clients' assets live.

It doesn't replace your systems.

Your custodian keeps custody, your CRM keeps the relationship, your planning software keeps the plan. These machines work the paper between those systems, beside them.

Nothing runs unattended.

Machines prep, organize, reconcile, summarize, and flag. Your advisors and your CCO verify and sign. You saw the fee plan wait to be signed in unit 02 — that's the posture everywhere.

No direct integration with your existing software.

Forge will process any data you give it — pointing your exported files into a machine's inbox folder is all it takes, and it runs from there. Wiring that export up is easy, but it's yours to set up: I stay out of the live-integration and security side on purpose, so that part stays in your hands, not mine.

The part your world will ask about first

These are only files on your desk.

A fiduciary is right to be careful about software. So here's the honest shape of this: these machines work on files you're already moving around anyway — the custodian statements you already download, the agreements already in the drawer, the register you already keep. Nothing new leaves your building; Forge is just reading what's already there.

And it doesn't demand to be your system of record. Keep storing documents wherever you store them. When paper arrives, organize it through Forge and take the clean output wherever it needs to live. Tell the machines the folder structure you currently keep — or the one you wish you kept — and they rename, sort, and stage into it. From there it's a simple matter of moving files from one gigantic messy pile to clean and organized — which, for a firm that has to prove its documentation, is worth more than the hours it saves.

The honest mechanics

What you'd actually own, and what it costs.

What you'd own

Plain files, on your own computers. Every machine is folders and pages you can open, read, and audit — and change by talking to it: “make it work like this instead” is all you have to say to mold it into exactly what you need. What you own is the machines themselves, never “the app.”

For the $10,000 install, that's every machine on this page: built onto your firm's home dashboard and shaped to your actual desks, with me in the room. They stay editable by talking, and you build your own any time after I leave.

The install also stands up the shared side of the shop: one pooled tank of gas — the metered AI everyone's machines run on — that the whole firm draws from, so no one person gets rationed and you run on a single predictable pool. Plus a shared tools shelf, where the team pushes and pulls the best version of each machine it builds — use one straight from the shelf, or pull it onto your own Forge and make it yours.

What it costs

$10,000 one time, for the install: every machine on this page, built onto your world and shaped to your desks, with me in the room.

$50/mo per seat after that, for the people who use it — half the standard professional price, for the full professional seat: the commercial-grade version of every tool.

That's the whole cost. No per-document pricing, no tiers invented for this page.

About the firm you just toured

Alderbrook Wealth Partners is a fiction — invented firm, invented clients, invented custodians, every document marked SPECIMEN, built so you could see real machines work without anyone's real papers on the internet. The numbers are fiction; the questions it asked and the gaps it found are not — and every figure links to the page it came from, so the dare stands: check its work.

Two doors

If this looks like your firm, here's what's next.

Talk to Nate about the $10,000 install.

Every machine on this page, pre-installed on your firm's home dashboard — then shaped to your actual desks, with me in the room. They stay editable by talking, and you build your own machines any time after I leave.

It also pools the whole firm's gas into one shared tank everyone draws from, so no one gets rationed, and stands up a shared tools shelf — the best version of every machine the team builds, in one place to use, or pull down onto your own Forge and make your own.

After the install, seats run $50/month — half the standard professional price, for the full professional seat. What you're paying for is the machines, the install day, and me.

Grab a short meeting with Nate

Or try Forge yourself first.

Download Forge and run it in your own firm at $100/month per professional seat, for as many people as you want to test it. Cancel any month; everything you build stays yours, in plain files.

To be straight about it: the trial doesn't come with this page's advisory-firm machines — those come with the install. What you get is Forge itself, to build your own machines and feel how it works. If you like what you see, the $10,000 install brings all these machines onto your world and drops your seats to $50.

Download for Windows Download for Mac

Know the person who should see this?

This page forwards well — it was written to need no introduction. Send it as-is to the person in your firm who owns the paper.

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Not an independent RIA? If your world has its own version of this paper problem, ask for your vertical — these demonstrations are built per field, and yours might be next.