A family office wears multiple hats and is called upon to act in many different roles. Besides investment services, many family offices also provide tax planning, charitable giving advice, property management, immigration assistance, and other services — (this one even offers a money camp for kids.) By offering a personalized approach and catering to the specific needs of their clients, family offices are able to differentiate themselves from private equity and wealth management firms.
However, all those varied activities also complicate the accounting and financial responsibilities of a family office.
How can cloud-based accounting software help your family office be more competitive, while streamlining its financial operations and delivering valuable results to its families? Sage Intacct, the accounting solution built for multi-family offices, brings the answers home.
Automating multi-entity consolidations
Multi-entity accounting is part and parcel of family office operations. Even single-family firms contend with multiple entities and the complexities involved in their consolidation at month end. If you’re trying to use an application like QuickBooks to manage multi-entity consolidations, you’re certainly also using spreadsheets, performing a lot of manual data entry, and wasting valuable time.
Sage Intacct was purposely built for multi-entity companies with family offices in mind. Sage Intacct automates financial consolidation activities and streamlines AUM accounting, including currency conversions, inter-entity transactions, local tax reporting and more. You’ll be able to consolidate hundreds of entities in minutes, not days, and close your books 25-75% faster than before.
Streamlining inter-entity transactions
Connecting your multi-entity organization is a complex web of inter-entity relationships. Untangling that web and getting a clear, centralized view of the organization is a formidable task with most accounting applications.
Sage Intacct was specifically designed to make inter-entity transactions as easy as possible. It automates inter-entity journal transactions, saving you time and eliminating manual work. You can even automate inter-entity journal transactions across multiple base currencies as necessary for any multi-national entities. It’s easy to set up both recurring and one-time transactions from a centralized inter-entity set up page. Sage Intacct can automate elimination entries as well, with validation rules that give you confidence in the accuracy of your subset consolidations.
Dimensional accounting
Most accounting applications use a hard-code structure for the chart of accounts. With this kind of structure, you must create an original account code to represent each location, department, and project, for example —bloating your chart of accounts and adding hours of extra work when a new location, department, or project is added.
Sage Intacct combines robust multi-entity capabilities with a dimensional chart of accounts. This keeps things simple—you only need to set up your primary account codes. As your family office changes, there’s no need to add hard-coded segment combinations. Simply put, dimensional accounting is the tagging of transactions with dimension values, which can be things like location, asset class, employee, or project.
Sage Intacct includes eight dimensions, with the ability to add as many more as you need. You can easily relabel and repurpose dimensions to fit the way your family office does business. Dimensions prove their worth during reporting and analysis tasks to fit the way your family office does business. Dimensions prove their worth during reporting and analysis tasks.
Flexible reporting, dashboards and KPIs
Family offices face increased pressure and greater challenges from the families they serve. Clients are mobile, multi-generational, technologically savvy, and geographically scattered. Their needs and interests can quickly change. Family offices have a responsibility to provide clients with clear and concise financial data yet assembling that data and presenting it in the desired formats is challenging.
Sage Intacct’s dimensions provide insight into your business in a way that once took a great deal of work or a bloated chart of accounts. They allow family offices and their clients to see information about their business in a way that simply isn’t possible with most accounting applications. With Sage Intacct’s financial reports, you get the agility and flexibility to quickly slice-and-dice the details that matter to all stakeholders. And when you have new questions, dive deeper with custom reports, dashboards, or visualizations. Sage Intacct’s Dashboard analytics and KPIs deliver instant shared access to actionable data within and across entities, financial data, and key metrics.
Flex your agility
One thing successful family offices have in common is an abundance of flexibility and agility. Choosing financial management software that includes similar flexibility means that you’re better equipped to respond to your clients’ requests, grow and monitor their assets, and outperform competitive wealth management firms.
Sage Intacct is an ideal family office software solution, and when combined with a business partner that knows the business, it makes for one big happy family. Choosing the right Sage implementation partner, one with deep experience working with family offices, ups your advantage by speeding your firm’s ROI and ensuring you’re leveraging the power of Sage Intacct for maximum gain.
We’d love to answer your questions and help you understand how we can help your organization make the best decisions about family office software. Call us at (847) 205-5015.
