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Business As Usual in the Family Office

During the COVID19 crisis Family Offices have been struggling with remote working and in meeting client requests for updates - often daily. The impact on staff has been tremendous.

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Fund Accounting At the Abyss

The expanding universe of alternative investments is accelerating the use of investment partnerships and the need for Fund/Partnership accounting within the Family Office. Traditionally, recording data for a fund or partnership and then tracking and reporting on it, starts small and is managed by someone like the office CFO using spreadsheets.  However, the inevitable and incremental growth in the use of this investment type has caused the spreadsheet model to grow in complexity. This has brought to the forefront the inherent limitations of using the spreadsheet model. Spreadsheets, as we know them, have two key limitations. First, they can be the source of mistakes and result in huge error rates. Secondly, they can cause major problems when it comes to audit and compliance concerns. Spreadsheets give the user a lot of flexibility, for example, with allocations. However, all the knowledge about how the spreadsheet model works is typically in an individual’s head and the lack of transparency and the degree of risk makes this model unsustainable. This way of working is now teetering on the edge of the abyss and must change to include systems integration, controls, and best practices so that Fund/Partnership accounting in a family office can be implicitly trusted. It starts by looking at the tools the hard-working staff at a Family Office have at their disposal. The use of spreadsheets and the associated manual processes should be replaced by a state-of-the-art accounting and reporting platform to enable every type of Fund/Partnership to be administered more efficiently, accurately, with less risk, with more security and built-in transparency.

Path to Family Office of the Future

Professionals working in family offices are experiencing significant and increasing complexity. Manual, high-risk work processes such as spreadsheets and point systems erroneously rely on human reconciliation – leading to incomplete, delayed, and inaccurate reporting and the inefficient use of high-value human resources. Moreover, manual calculations inherently lack cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and business continuity processes and skills. How, then, can family offices remain up-to-date in the tools, software, and security to manage UHNW assets? When family offices look to the future, tools that revolve around Natural Language Generation (NLG), automated BOT processes, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) inevitably become part of the conversation on how to get there.  Part of a family office’s challenge is to remain relevant not only in terms of the need for ultra high net worth wealth management, but also in terms of its ability to deliver such services. Use of antiquated data tools and limited flexibility puts a family office that is not focused on the future in the past. Will family offices have to try and make use of such tools developed for larger markets, like investment management, hedge funds and private equity, and try and make them fit their fact pattern?  This is a well-known problem. Which is not a surprise as most of the point applications that family offices are forced to use were created primarily for other markets. The major question to consider when thinking about the Family Office of the Future  is what are the specific challenges family offices now face that could be remedied using technology?

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