Note taker for financial advisors: your eyes on the client, the notes afterwards

An AI note taker for financial advisors records your meetings with clients — a first meeting, a review, a call about a change in someone’s life — so you can listen to the client instead of writing, and still have the notes afterwards. Dalm is a Mac app that records without joining the call. The client’s speech is recognised on your Mac and no audio is sent anywhere; the text is a different matter: the transcript is copied to our servers on its own, and a language model from a third-party provider reads it to write up the meeting. There is a Free plan.

What an advisor needs from a meeting with a client

A client meeting is where the facts behind a financial plan are said out loud, often for the first time: what the client earns and owes, who depends on them, what keeps them up at night, what they want the money to do. At a first meeting you are gathering all of it; at a review you are finding out what changed since the last one; when a client calls about a new job, a death in the family or the sale of a business, the plan may have to change with them. Each time, your attention belongs on the person across from you. Afterwards you need their own words on what matters to them, what you agreed to do, and what they asked you to look into.

Video calls, calls on speaker and meetings in your office

On a video call, Dalm records your microphone and the sound of the other apps on your Mac; nothing is added to the meeting, so a client sees no bot among the participants. When Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack or FaceTime takes the microphone, the app offers to record, and you can turn the offer off. A meeting across your desk is recorded through your Mac’s microphone, and a phone call on speaker is recorded the same way. After the meeting you can give the client’s voice a name and the role “client”, so the transcript shows who said what. Step by step, recording is covered for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

A client meeting and what you get after it

Dalm works out from the conversation what kind of meeting it was and shows that at the top; you cannot pick or change it, and if it is unsure, the meeting is filed as a general one. A meeting between a financial advisor and a client is one of the kinds it recognises, and this is what you get after it:

What you get after a client meeting	What it is for in your work
A one-screen summary: topics, decisions, tasks	Your own note of the meeting, to read before you see the client next
A client note, laid out the way advisors keep one	Written to keep what you recommended apart from what the client decided; a draft to check against the transcript before you rely on it

Whatever else you get, there is the transcript and a summary the app writes on its own, in which every point carries the client’s words it came from; where something was not said — a date, who does what — the place stays empty rather than filled with a guess. You can correct any line of the summary before you rely on it, and the documents take one click. The summary sets down what was said; what to recommend stays your decision. If you want the same note after every client meeting — say, what changed since the last review and what you promised to look into — describe it once in your own words as a template and tick the box to build it for each new meeting. Sending the client a letter after the meeting, and what a client can read in the app, is on the client recap page.

Your client’s words: the audio stays, the text goes

Everything a client says in the meeting is recognised on your Mac, and the audio is never sent anywhere. The audio is deleted once the text exists. The text does travel. As soon as the transcript exists it is copied to our servers — you cannot switch that off — and a language model from a third-party provider reads it to produce the summary and the documents you ask for. We keep the text for as long as your account exists, or the team workspace the meeting belongs to; there is no date on which it is deleted on its own. So what a client tells you about their income, their debts or their family is text we hold as well as you. What is kept where is set out on the privacy page.

Keeping each household apart

Put a tag on each household’s meetings — one of eight colours or a colour of your own — and the list narrows to that client; filter further by person, by period or by the kind of meeting. Search reads transcripts, meeting names and descriptions and the text of documents, though not your own notes, so a name or a date the client mentioned months ago can be found again. If you work in a practice, your personal workspace and the practice’s team sit side by side, and you switch between them: a meeting is filed in whichever was selected when it was scheduled, or when recording began, and it cannot be moved afterwards, so check the switch before a client meeting. In a practice’s team a meeting is seen by the whole team by default; a client meeting can be set to elevated or protected privacy, which narrows who sees it. Who in a team sees whose meetings is on the team page. If you are removed from a practice’s team, the meetings you recorded there stay with the team, and your dictations go with you.

Finding what a client said at the last review

Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. Dalm’s assistant answers questions about one meeting at a time — what the client said about retiring early, what you promised to send — and asking one question across all of a client’s meetings is in development. What you and your clients agree to do lands in one task list ordered by due date, and decisions go into a log by month that you can search. In the summary, every point keeps the words it came from. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. Before the next review, that is how you check what the client actually said, rather than what your notes remember.

What to say to a client about the recording

Dalm joins no call and announces nothing, so telling the client is your job; before your first meeting, the app reminds you of that. Whether your firm, your agreement with the client or the rules where you both are allow a meeting to be recorded and its text kept by an outside service is not something this page can settle. What it can give you is an accurate description to pass on, for example:

“I use an app on my Mac to take notes of our meeting. It turns what we say into text on my computer and doesn’t keep the sound, apart from a few seconds of each voice until I put a name to it. The text is stored on the app’s servers, and an AI model from another company reads it to write the summary.”

If the client would rather you didn’t, the meeting goes ahead without it. The rules on recording consent differ by place, and the rules state by state are set out separately.

When Dalm is not the right fit for an advisor

• When your firm approves every tool that touches client conversations and has not approved this one. Ask them first; nothing on this page answers for them.
• When a client’s conversation may not be kept by an outside service, even as text. The transcript is on our servers, and a language model reads it.
• When you need the recording itself — to hear a client again or keep the audio on file. The audio is deleted once the text exists, and there is nothing to play back.
• When notes have to reach your CRM without you. The notes come out as text you copy, or as a Word, PDF or Markdown file; putting them into another system is your step. How Dalm compares with a note taker built for advisory firms is set out line by line, and another one is compared plan by plan, with its prices, and a third on where the sound of the meeting goes.
• When you or your practice work on Windows or on an Intel Mac. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later.
• When the call is very short: a recording under 100 words is not counted as a meeting.

Free for a solo advisor, Team for a practice

Recording client meetings, the transcripts and the summaries are on the Free plan, and Free is a plan rather than a trial. In a practice of several advisors, a team shares one dictionary of terms, one set of templates and one set of tags; who sees whose meetings is on the team page. What the paid plans add is on the pricing page. Dalm needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account; until it is public, the way in is the waitlist.