AdviserReport, On Your Side

The search bar on the home page accepts four kinds of input: an individual adviser's name (first and last), a firm name, a location (city and state, or ZIP code), or your current location via "use my location."

The most successful searches combine two pieces of information rather than one. Searching by name alone for an adviser with a common surname returns a lot of candidates; searching by location alone returns everyone in a city. Two-input combinations narrow quickly to what you're looking for:

• Individual name + location: best when you know your adviser but not the firm.
• Firm name + location: best when you know the firm but want the specific branch or office near you.
• Individual name + firm name: best when you know both, and the most direct route to a single result.

If you only have one piece of information to work with, start with that and we'll show you the candidates; then add a second input from the results page to narrow further.

Yes. You can enter a city and state, or a ZIP code, and we'll return firms and individual advisers with branch offices in that area. There's also a "use my location" option that detects your current location (with your permission) and searches around you.

A few possibilities:

• Firm name match. The firm may file under a legal name that differs from the marketing brand it uses with clients (a DBA, "doing business as"). Try the legal entity name (if you can track it down), or add the individual adviser's name (if you have a name) instead.
• Registration scope. AdviserReport covers registered investment advisers (RIAs) and broker-dealers (BDs). If the person you're looking for is registered exclusively as something else (an insurance agent, an accountant, an attorney), they won't be in our database.
• Publishing cadence. Sometimes what's published in regulatory sources lags what AdviserReport can surface, or vice versa. New registrations, recent changes of address, or freshly amended filings can take a short while to flow through.

If you believe an individual adviser or firm should be findable and isn't, email support@adviserreport.com with the name and we'll look into it.

Grades show up inside the report, not on the search list. We made that choice deliberately: a letter grade is a structural description of a firm's regulatory responses, and it's easy to misread one without the explanation that lives in the full report. The search results give you enough to confirm you've found the right firm or person; the report gives you the grade in context.

Four pricing tiers, depending on how many firms you want to compare:

• Single Report: $45. One firm, full detail.
• Two-Firm Reports: $65. Two firms ($32.50 per firm). For comparing your current adviser against an alternative, or evaluating two prospects.
• Three-Firm Reports: $90. Three firms ($30 per firm). For comparison shopping across a short list.
• Four-Firm Reports: $100. Up to four firms ($25 per firm). For broader comparison shopping.

With the Two-Firm, Three-Firm, and Four-Firm options, you don't have to redeem all the reports at once. The unredeemed reports stay associated with your account until you use them.

Either, your choice. If you know the name of your adviser, we highly recommend the firm-plus-individual format. When you select a firm for a report, you can also identify a specific individual adviser at that firm; "View Advisers" then select "Get Report;" the report then includes both the firm's grade and the individual's disclosed regulatory history (licenses, registrations, disclosures, employment history). There's no price difference between the two formats.

The grade is firm-level (that's what the regulatory data supports), but the individual section is where you'll see things like how the individual is registered, what that registration means for how they can earn revenue, and any disciplinary history specific to that individual.

Credit or debit card, PayPal or Venmo, processed through Stripe. We don't store your card details. Stripe handles payment end-to-end.

Yes, but only after a report has been delivered to you.

A purchased report expires 12 months from the date it is delivered to your account. We set that lifetime to match the SEC's annual Form ADV amendment cycle: most firms file material updates once a year, and after twelve months a delivered snapshot is no longer the most current view of the firm.

If you bought a Two-Firm, Three-Firm, or Four-Firm bundle, unredeemed reports do not expire. They stay associated with your account as credits until you choose a firm to apply them to. The 12-month clock only starts when you deliver a specific report against one of those credits.

A worked example: You buy Two-Firm Reports and apply the first one to your current adviser's firm right away. Twelve months later, that first report has expired. The second credit, which you never delivered against a specific firm, is still sitting in your account. You can redeem it whenever you're ready, and then its 12-month clock starts at that point.

It depends on what you bought and what you've redeemed.

• Single Report. Non-refundable once delivered, which happens immediately when payment goes through. The product is information, and it's been delivered the moment you can read it.
• Two-Firm, Three-Firm, and Four-Firm Reports. Refundable on the unredeemed portion if requested within 30 days of purchase. Once you've redeemed any report from the bundle, the refund is reduced by the value of what you've already used.

The full terms are in our Terms of Use, §6.4. If something went wrong on our end (the report didn't generate, the system charged you twice, the data is materially wrong), email support@adviserreport.com and we'll make it right.

A full firm report walks through the firm's conflict-of-interest architecture in sequence, with plain-English explanation alongside the regulatory data. The sections you'll potentially see (not all firm reports trigger all report sections), along with some potential details called out for your attention:

• Your Searched Adviser (individual-format reports only). The named adviser's professional designations (CFP®, CFA®, ChFC®, if any), how they're registered (IAR, broker, or dually registered), how they can earn revenue under each registration capacity, and their personal disclosure history.
• Header & grade. The firm name, registration badges (RIA, BD, or both), and the letter grade displayed prominently at the top.
• Firm Overview. Where the firm is registered (SEC or state), the regulatory body that oversees them, principal office, total employees, assets under management, account counts, and other firm-wide facts.
• Grade Summary. A plain-language explanation of why this firm received the grade it did, plus a distribution chart showing where this firm sits relative to every other scored firm in the scored universe.
• Compensation Structure. All the ways this firm is permitted to earn revenue from clients: AUM fees, hourly fees, flat fees, commissions, performance fees, and other compensation methods disclosed on Form ADV. The combination shapes the firm's incentives.
• Brokerage & Trading Practices. How they execute client trades, whether they have discretion over those trades, whether they recommend specific brokers to clients, whether they receive soft dollars or third-party benefits, are there referral channels.
• Business Activities & Affiliations. Whether the firm runs other businesses (insurance, accounting, real estate), whether it has related-party affiliations that can profit from the same clients, and do they sell other products or services to advisory clients.
• Custody. Who actually holds your money and securities, whether the firm has custody under SEC rules, and whether the firm or its affiliates also act as the qualified custodian.
• Disclosures. Any regulatory, criminal, civil, or customer-dispute events on the firm's record, contextualized against firms of similar size.
• About This Report. Sources, methodology version, the firm's most recent ADV filing date, and direct links to the SEC's IAPD and FINRA's BrokerCheck records for verification.

Reports are designed to be read top-to-bottom (each section builds on the one above it), but you can jump to any section using the in-report navigation if you're focused on one specific dimension.

The disclosures section reads two different ways depending on whether you're looking at an individual adviser or the firm itself.

For an individual adviser, each disclosure is shown with the year, the type (regulatory, customer dispute, criminal, civil, financial), and the resolution if one's been reported. Disclosures aren't verdicts. Many resolve in the adviser's favor, some are decades old, and the regulatory record requires advisers to report a broad set of events. The detail of each disclosure matters more than the count of them.

For a firm, we compare the firm's disclosure count against firms of similar size. A large firm with several disclosures may have a lower per-employee disclosure rate than a small firm with one or two. Raw counts can mislead; comparative context tells you more.

In either view, the underlying regulatory source linked from your report has the full filing if you want to dig deeper.

Yes. Every report has a print-friendly view that renders cleanly to PDF through your browser's print dialog. We don't generate a separate PDF file. The live report in your account always reflects the most current data and can be printed at any point in time prior to expiration (12 months from the date of the report being delivered to you).

Yes. The account is what ties your purchases to you. It's how we know which reports you've purchased, which ones you have left to redeem, and where to send receipts.

Click "Forgot password?" on the sign-in page and we'll email you a reset link.

From your account settings, choose "Change email."

If you've lost access to the email associated with your account, email support@adviserreport.com from any address and we'll help you recover it.

From your account settings, choose "Delete account." Deletion is permanent. All your purchased report records, account history, and personal information are removed from our active systems. Deleting your account does not refund unredeemed reports.

Email support@adviserreport.com with your account email, the firm or adviser the report covers, and a brief description of what you're seeing.

Three kinds of "looks wrong" we handle differently:

• Display issue (broken layout, missing section, error message). We fix on our end. A screenshot helps.
• Stale data (filing date from months ago, recent regulatory event missing). If something is materially out of date, we'll investigate whether it's a refresh-cycle artifact or a data flow issue worth escalating.
• Factual disagreement (the report says X about the firm, you believe Y is correct). Bring the specific item and the source you believe is authoritative. If it's a regulatory-source discrepancy, we'll trace it. If it's an interpretation difference, that's a methodology conversation, which we welcome at the same email address.

If you're an adviser writing to flag a factual error in your own firm's report, the process is described on our Learn page and in our Terms of Use, §4.3.

Email support@adviserreport.com with whatever you need: account issues, technical problems, billing questions, factual error reports, methodology questions.

We read what comes in. Response times will vary.

The summary is on our Methodology page. That's the public document. It explains what categories of signals the scoring engine considers, where the signals come from, and how grades are produced.

The full scoring specification (specific weights, internal engine details) is treated as confidential business information. It's available to qualified parties on written request subject to a non-disclosure agreement, as described in our Terms of Use, §2.3.