Short answer: Optics & Finance captures your firm's book-analysis figures, client counts, renewal rates, and revenue per adviser, and it starts by asking you to confirm which team members count as advisers.

Optics & Finance is where book-analysis numbers come together: firm-wide capacity, and per-adviser figures for client numbers, renewal rate, and revenue looked after. The firm totals are calculated automatically from what you enter for each adviser.

This section depends on Your Team being filled in first, since the adviser list comes from there.

Before anything else, the section shows you the list of team members it has identified as advisers and asks you to confirm it. You don't add advisers manually here; the list is derived from Your Team, based on which roles are flagged as adviser roles.

Note: Advisers are derived, not entered. If someone is missing from the list, or someone's on it who shouldn't be, fix it in Your Team rather than in Optics & Finance. See Why does the portal ask "are you an adviser?" for how a role gets flagged.

Answer the firm-level capacity questions. These are single, firm-wide figures rather than per-adviser entries.

For each confirmed adviser, enter:

Once the per-adviser figures are in, the section calculates firm-wide totals for you. You don't need to add these up yourself.

Book-analysis numbers only make sense once VLV knows who's actually seeing clients. Rather than asking you to nominate advisers a second time, the section reuses the adviser flag already set on roles in Your Team and asks you to confirm the resulting list before you enter figures against it. This keeps one adviser view consistent across the portal instead of maintaining a separate list here.

Tip: If you change someone's role in Your Team after completing Optics & Finance, come back and re-check the confirmation step so the adviser list still matches.