There are two reasons thinking about this is important, the first is that an employee’s time in the office should be about adding value. But, because the family office market is a niche market, there is also the problem of staff shortages – hence the need to have a conducive work environment and to do more with what you have.
The graphics below from the Family Office Exchange provides a lot of insight into these two factors.
A great deal of family office employee time (45%), and so office overhead, is spent on tasks that allow the office to report back to the family.
What are some of these tasks that take 45% of the time?
- Data aggregation
- Transaction entry
- Data normalization
- Data reconciliation
- Exception management
- Report data consolidation
- Report creation
- Report reconciliation
- Report customization
In terms of staff compensation, the cost to the office is around 36 bps, and of course although this varies by office it indicates a real problem using expensive staff for basic work, especially when you look at the tools many family offices use to perform these tasks – Microsoft Excel and QuickBooks – there must be a better tool!
This approach also severely impacts other key areas such as office efficiency, risk management, job satisfaction, staff recruitment, staff retention, etc.
The route to a solution is fourfold:
- Automate to get the data right first time
- Get a single source of data
- Apply best practice business rules, processes and workflow
- Automate standard and custom report generation
This is where a new tool comes in and the whole process needs to be re-engineered.
The benefit will be increased efficiency, reduced risk and transformation of the work environment into one where staff can add analytical value, rather than spend their time doing data entry and data manipulation.
Family Office Tomorrow
- Complexity made simple
- One integrated source of the truth
- Efficient, timely, accurate reporting to drive improved decision making
- Client 24/7/365 anywhere access to reporting and secure communications
- Automated, enforced, and documented integrated best practices
- Engaged staff providing high value-added work
- Significantly reduced cyber security vulnerability
Just think what highly engaged and efficient staff delivering excellent, timely reporting could do with that with all of that “recovered” time.
Eton Solutions – The New Tool
- Provide the only truly integrated platform for single and multi-family offices
- Revolutionize the management and operation of single and multi-family offices
- Facilitate the implementation of best practice workflows across multiple disciplines
A family office should have enterprise class process, technology, reporting, automation, and client delivery capabilities. Eton Solutions is a next generation tool for the holistic management and optimization of the efficient family office.
