RSMUS.comThe most important thing that family offices do is also the most difficult: reporting. Reports encompass all the work the family does and therefore serve as a reflection of that work – for better or for worse. Family offices that can’t effectively illustrate the work they do on behalf of clients won’t keep those clients for long. Unfortunately, generating reports is also a pain point for many family offices.
Particularly those with multiple software packages and data silos holding data relevant for reporting. This disjointed approach requires someone to find, integrate, organize, analyze, and visualize the data through a largely manual process. It turns reporting into a time and labor-intensive effort. As a result, the quality, consistency, and timeliness of reports may suffer, putting client relationships in jeopardy.
All family offices need and want to excel at reporting. The obstacle has been a lack of tools powerful enough for the complexity and scale of family offices yet also tailored to their unique requirements, both to themselves and to clients. A proliferation of underwhelming and inappropriate tools did little to solve the reporting problem, locking family offices into resource-intensive reporting cycles.
A true solution has emerged for the first time: a pair of technologies that together transform not just reporting but the entire family office.
Sage Intacct for family office
Sage Intacct brings a cloud-based financial management platform endorsed by the AICPA to family offices with complicated and expansive accounting requirements. In addition to refining money management and financial decision-making in countless ways, Sage Intacct has robust reporting capabilities designed to accelerate and optimize how family offices generate these reports.
To start, Sage Intacct has a dimensional accounting structure where transactions are “tagged” with information about the account, project, team, location, etc rather than hard-coded. This makes it exceedingly easy to search and segment data for reporting purposes. Powerful reporting tools further streamline the process so much that individuals can generate reports almost on-demand, needing neither time nor technical expertise to produce a polished product. And with the aid of data dashboards populated with KPIs that update in real-time, reporting isn’t the only way to get critical insights.
Many things make Sage Intacct a strong choice for family offices – but perhaps none more so than the reporting capabilities.
FamilySight for family office
FamilySight, a proprietary solution developed by the team at RSM, integrates with Sage Intacct through an open API and automatically pulls financial data into an environment designed specifically for family offices.
Once inside that environment, data can be used for multiple purposes. FamilySight builds on the already impressive reporting capabilities in Sage Intacct to enable comprehensive reporting, both within a client’s portfolio and across the entire family office. It can also build interactive financial statements that are impressive to see and instructive to use despite being easier to prepare than before. FamilySight improves visibility into data in countless ways. It frees decision-makers to spend more time exploring and leveraging that data by automating things like tax preparation and many other important but distracting workflows.
The same RSM team that designed the family office-specific features in FamilySight also helps each client customize the system to their preferences and take full advantage of what it can do. The mission of that team is bigger than technology; they work to transform how family offices manage finances to perform better in every way.
A Partner That Understands Family Offices
The combination of Sage Intacct and FamilySight presents the best possible solution for reporting: one that not only streamlines even complex and large-scale reporting requirements but also improves upon the results presented in those reports thanks to smart, strategic financial management on the part of the family office.
RSM understands the challenges, opportunities, and changes facing family offices right now. It’s why we developed FamilySight in the first place. And it’s what distinguishes our team from other consultants. Discover how the right team and technology could transform your family office – contact RSM.
By: Christy Richardson and John Szuberla
