A wealth assessment is the first step of quality advisory work. It structures the discovery meeting, gathers essential data, and lays the groundwork for the strategy to come. Big, the reference digital solution for wealth management, supports advisors at every stage of the assessment: guided data collection, wealth analysis, retirement, taxation, estate transfer, and client reporting. This article presents the eight key steps of a complete wealth assessment and shows how to turn each step into a lever for performance and credibility.
Why the wealth assessment is the starting point of every advisory relationship
A successful discovery meeting always begins with a simple question: what does the client actually own, and for what objectives? The complete wealth assessment answers that question. It covers assets, liabilities, income, expenses, family situation, retirement, taxation, and estate transfer.
Without this overall view, no recommendation can be reliable. The advisor who structures this first step correctly gains credibility with the client and secures the rest of the relationship. Big was redesigned specifically for this purpose: to offer improved ergonomics and intuitive navigation, letting the advisor stay focused on what matters most — the conversation with the client — rather than on the complexity of the tool.
Step 1: Collecting client information through guided data entry
The starting point of the wealth assessment is knowledge of the client. The advisor must gather the family, professional, financial, and tax situation of the client and their spouse.
With Big, this collection happens through a guided entry process, designed specifically to support the natural flow of a discovery meeting. Guided entry serves one clear purpose: collecting essential information without wasting time.
How does guided entry work?
The advisor follows a structured interview guide that covers the main topics in the same order as a complete Big file. A side menu gives an overview of completion level without losing one’s bearings. For each item, a maximum of five pieces of information is collected, allowing for efficient, fluid data entry.
The information is organized into three main blocks:
- Personal and family situation: essential data on the client, their spouse, children, marital regime, and last-survivor gift arrangements.
- Wealth and budget: assets, liabilities, income, and expenses, broken down into three categories for clarity — real estate and other personal-use assets, savings and provident insurance, and professional and land assets.
- Summary and validation: before the file is created, a summary screen lets the advisor check the accuracy of the collected information.
Flexibility and responsiveness during the meeting
Guided entry presents the client’s wealth asset by asset, with a progressive level of precision: an estimated value first, then detailed data if needed. This flexibility is valuable during a discovery meeting, since it allows the advisor to move quickly without interrupting the conversation with the client. At any point, the advisor can switch to classic data entry to go deeper on certain items; Big allows this without losing the data already entered.
Step 2: An overall view of wealth
Once the data is entered, the advisor needs a clear reading of how wealth is distributed: by wrapper, by vehicle, by investment horizon, by risk level.
Big presents this view in a synthetic, multi-level way. The advisor can immediately see:
- The composition of financial and real-estate wealth.
- The breakdown by wrapper (life insurance, PER retirement savings plan, unwrapped savings, real estate).
- The balance across investment vehicles and time horizons.
- The overall risk level of the portfolio.
Spotting imbalances from the first meeting
This immediate reading adds value to the advice from the very first discovery meeting. The advisor can quickly identify imbalances: too much cash earning no return, lack of diversification, overexposure to a single vehicle. These concrete observations, shown in real time, create a turning point: the client realizes the value of a better-structured wealth strategy.
Big offers different levels of reading to share with the client: charts and key figures that support commercial follow-up, as well as the option to access more in-depth entries for deeper analysis.
Step 3: Budget and savings capacity
The wealth assessment is not limited to existing assets. It also covers household income and expenses, in order to determine real savings capacity and anticipate changes in living standards.
Big allows advisors to enter this information and obtain a projection of budget, wealth, and income tax. This projection spans several years and accounts for the expected evolution of income and expenses.
Anticipating changes in living standards
The advisor thus has a quantified basis to discuss the client’s room for maneuver, rather than relying on stated intentions alone. Savings capacity becomes a lever for discussing accumulation strategy, and the projections make it possible to identify critical periods or windows of tax opportunity.
Big also calculates income across different career periods for all relevant years, making it possible to visualize how income evolves within the budget projection. This comprehensive approach turns discussions about savings into strategic discussions about how wealth is organized over time.
Step 4: Retirement and provident insurance
The question of retirement comes up in nearly every discovery meeting. It is a source of concern for clients and a major strategic opportunity for the advisor.
Fast career reconstruction
Big allows for a quick or complete reconstruction of the client’s career, notably through the import of the individual statement of standing (RIS, the French pension record). This automatic import saves time and ensures data quality.
The advisor thereby obtains:
- A calculation of retirement benefits from mandatory schemes (general scheme, special schemes, supplementary schemes).
- An estimate of the additional income needed through life insurance, a PER plan, or an annuity.
- An analysis of the impact of death, incapacity, or disability on the client’s financial situation.
- The ability to simulate a drop in income during the career by entering negative growth rates, to anticipate the effects of reduced activity.
The retirement diagnostic, a lever for recommendations
Big offers a retirement diagnostic that quickly estimates the amount of future pension entitlements. This diagnostic helps the advisor:
- Determine the retirement gap (the difference between current income and future pension).
- Identify periods where additional contributions or investments will be needed.
- Quantify the life insurance or annuity needs required to secure retirement.
For those who want to go further, Big also offers entry of retirement points by fund, allowing for greater precision in the calculation. Employees can enter their ARRCO and AGIRC points earned before 2019.
Step 5: Client taxation
Taxation is a central lever of wealth advisory. Big calculates income tax, social contributions, withholding tax, and the real estate wealth tax (IFI), and handles several tax filings (2042, 2042 RICI, 2044, 3916, 2074, 2047, 2072, IFI, 2086).
Income tax diagnostic
Big offers an income tax diagnostic that quickly optimizes taxation. The advisor can simulate the tax impact of different investments and highlight:
- The client’s marginal tax bracket.
- The remaining room within the tax scale.
- The cap on tax loopholes (« niches fiscales »).
- Optimization levers (contributions to life insurance, real estate investments, PER plans, gifts).
IFI diagnostic and sale simulations
For clients subject to the IFI wealth tax, Big offers an IFI diagnostic to assess exposure and propose ways to reduce it.
Big also includes a simulation of capital gains tax on real estate, allowing advisors to anticipate the tax impact of a sale before it happens. This feature is essential for advising clients on selling a property.
Management packages and complex tax regimes
Big incorporates the most complex tax regimes, such as the reform of management packages introduced by the 2025 Finance Act. Gains from management packages may be taxable as salary income or as capital gains on securities depending on certain conditions. Big automates the calculation and filing of these complex amounts.
These elements immediately add weight to the recommendations made at the end of the meeting.
Step 6: Estate transfer and succession
The complete wealth assessment finally covers the estate dimension. This step is often seen as complex by the client, but it becomes a strong differentiator for the advisor who masters it from the very first meeting.
Calculating entitlements and optimizing succession
Big calculates heirs’ entitlements and estate shares, taking into account:
- The marital regime and its impact on the transfer.
- Gifts already made (bequests, donations, usufruct, gift-partitions).
- Reimbursements between joint and separate estates (for married couples).
- Debts and costs charged to the deceased or to the joint estate (IFI, income tax, funeral costs).
The advisor can then present the client with several estate-optimization options:
- Life insurance, the classic transfer tool.
- Changing the marital regime, to better fit the family situation.
- Bequest to the spouse, to secure their situation in the event of death.
- Gift-partitions, to plan the division in advance and benefit from the gift allowance.
- Unequal gifts, to favor certain heirs according to the client’s objectives.
- Partial gifts, to transfer a share of a property.
Tracking allowances and exemptions
Big also offers a very useful feature: tracking available allowances and exemptions. In the context of wealth transfer, allowances and exemptions renew every 15 years. If individuals have received gifts less than 15 years ago, the advisor can see the level of allowance recovery for each of them as of the file’s evaluation date. The date of full recovery is highlighted, helping the advisor make the most of available allowances.
Step 7: Professional/business assets
When the client is a business owner, Big collects information on their companies to obtain an overall view of personal and professional wealth. The ownership structure diagram illustrates the current organization and highlights possible areas for improvement.
The data automatically flows into the wealth, projection, taxation, and transfer modules, with no re-entry required. This is a significant time saver and a source of reliability.
Diagnostic on business owner status and compensation
For business owners, Big offers a status-and-compensation diagnostic that defines the optimal split between salary and dividends, with or without a change in social status. This diagnostic is crucial for maximizing the owner’s disposable income while optimizing taxation and provident coverage.
The « Maximize disposable income » objective automatically calculates the optimum between salary and dividends. The advisor has a slider to adjust the split and see the gap versus the optimum. Big also highlights variations in provident-insurance coverage depending on status, making it possible to adjust needs if status changes.
Step 8: Reporting back to the client
A wealth assessment only has value if it is presented clearly. Big offers predefined reports, either summary reports for immediate commercial impact or detailed reports for in-depth analysis.
Customizable, professional reports
These reports can be exported as PDF or Word files and customized, allowing the advisor to:
- Give tangible form to their advice by handing the client a quality document.
- Adapt the presentation to the firm’s colors and branding.
- Choose the level of detail depending on the context (a summary for a first meeting, an in-depth version for follow-up).
- Generate specific pages to go deeper on particular topics (presenting a tax scheme, base pension, available allowances).
The reports have been redesigned to be more commercial and more educational, with a clear, quick presentation of results, while all the details remain available for those who want to go further.
Simulators: tools for optimization and persuasion
Beyond the initial assessment, Big offers a full suite of simulators to support all of the client’s projects. These tools turn analysis into concrete action.
Real estate and tax simulators
- Real estate simulator: project an investment in unfurnished or furnished rental, with support for the latest tax schemes (Jeanbrun scheme for 2026, micro-property regime).
- SCI (real estate holding company) simulator: compare the impact of holding a property through an SCI, under income tax, under corporate tax directly, or through split ownership.
- Notary fees simulator: anticipate the costs of acquiring a property.
- Real estate capital gains tax simulation: assess the tax impact before a sale.
Savings and investment simulators
- Life insurance simulator: measure the value of the contract and the impact of withdrawals over time.
- Savings simulator: track how investments evolve over time under different scenarios.
- PER simulator: project the effects of contributions to the retirement savings plan.
Business owner and income simulators
- Retirement diagnostic: estimate future pension entitlements and identify retirement gaps.
- Succession diagnostic: plan the transfer and optimize entitlements.
- Status and compensation diagnostic: optimize the split between salary and dividends.
Practical simulators
- Annuity simulator: assess the capital needed for a desired annuity.
- Purchasing capacity simulator: define a realistic budget for a real estate project.
Running independent simulations
All these simulators can be used in two ways: run simulations directly from the client file’s data, or create fully independent simulations using data and assumptions of the advisor’s choosing. This flexibility allows advisors to test « what if » scenarios without affecting the main file.
The built-in AI assistant, support during the meeting
Big includes a built-in AI assistant that lets the advisor find an answer instantly, without interrupting the meeting to look something up. This support strengthens the advisor’s independence when using a feature-rich piece of software, and lets them stay focused on what matters most: the conversation with the client.
Improved navigation and ergonomics
The new Big has been redesigned with improved ergonomics and simplified, intuitive navigation. The advisor can:
- Access all features and results instantly through quick-access menus.
- Work on client files anywhere, from a PC, Mac, or tablet.
- Present simulations and calculations to the client in real time.
- Group assets, liabilities, income, and expenses by holder for easier navigation of the list.
Easier file exchange and export between colleagues
Big makes it easy to exchange client files between users at the same firm. The client file export feature allows secure exchanges with people outside the firm, using encrypted, temporary HXP files. Importing the data after sharing preserves the full integrity of the file.
Final summary
A complete wealth assessment rests on eight steps: guided data collection, an overall view of wealth, budget and savings capacity, retirement and provident insurance, taxation, estate transfer, professional assets, and client reporting.
Big covers this entire process in a single tool, with:
- A structured guided-entry process for efficiently collecting essential information during the meeting.
- Reliable calculations covering the full scope of French taxation and retirement schemes.
- Thematic simulators to support all of the client’s projects.
- Modern ergonomics that prioritize the client conversation over technical complexity.
- Customizable reports to give tangible form to the advice and leave the client with a quality document.
For the advisor, this guarantees a structured discovery meeting, an immediate demonstration of the value of the advice, and a solid foundation for the client relationship. Big turns the wealth assessment from simple data collection into a strategic lever for business development.
Frequently asked questions
What is a complete wealth assessment? It is an overall analysis of a client’s situation: assets, liabilities, income, expenses, retirement, taxation, and estate transfer. It forms the basis of any wealth-management recommendation and helps identify optimization opportunities.
How long does it take to complete a wealth assessment with Big? It depends on the level of detail sought. Guided entry allows for a fast reconstruction during the discovery meeting (30 to 60 minutes depending on complexity), followed by further depth in subsequent meetings. The data entered remains editable over time.
Can Big import career data for the retirement calculation? Yes. Big allows automatic import of the individual statement of standing (RIS), which secures and speeds up career reconstruction. Employees can also enter their ARRCO and AGIRC points earned before 2019.
What simulators are available in Big? Big offers real estate, life insurance, savings, and SCI simulators, retirement and succession diagnostics, a status-and-compensation diagnostic for business owners, and more. Each simulator can be used independently or linked to the client file.
Can Big be used for a client who is a business owner? Yes. Big collects information on the client’s companies and automatically carries this data into the wealth, taxation, and transfer modules, with no re-entry required. A status-and-compensation diagnostic helps optimize the split between salary and dividends.
Can the wealth assessment produced with Big be handed to the client? Yes. Big generates summary or detailed reports, exportable as PDF or Word files and customizable to the firm’s colors. The reports have been redesigned to be more commercial and more educational.
Does Big include support for getting up to speed with the tool? Yes. Big offers a built-in AI assistant that lets the advisor find answers instantly, without interrupting the client meeting. The interface has also been redesigned to be intuitive, with quick-access menus that make navigation easier.
Can client files be created directly from Big? Yes. Guided entry allows client files to be created quickly and in a structured way, following a natural discovery process. At any point, the advisor can switch to classic entry to go deeper.
How does Big handle complex situations (partial gifts, unequal gift-partitions)? Big offers detailed guidance for complex cases. For partial gifts, the property must be split into two separate asset lines. For unequal gift-partitions, Big allows the advisor to enter the split between heirs using individualized percentages.
To go further
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