RSMUS.comIn the past, financial management and general accounting at family offices involved seemingly endless amounts of data management, where professionals spent most of their time manually moving numbers from one source to another, then painstakingly checking that nothing was lost in translation.
Thanks to solutions like Sage Intacct, that’s not the case anymore.
Sage Intacct integrates all financial data on the same platform, complete with a full toolkit of accounting, analysis, and reporting features. Sage Intacct also connects with a remarkable number of outside systems and data sources, allowing data to flow in and out of the accounting system of record automatically.
Those strong and seamless integrations unlock countless efficiencies and advantages for family offices, including one, in particular, worth highlighting for anyone responsible for maintaining the company investment book.
Integrating the Investment Book – The Old Way
Integrating the investment book and the accounting book provides a complete financial portrait and must be done to maintain comprehensive, accurate, and actionable records. That said, it has never been simple.
There used to be two imperfect options. One involved manually moving data from the portfolio/custodian system into the ERP/accounting system. The other involved exporting data to Excel and then importing via a CSV file. Either way meant dealing with mapping and translation issues, making an already cumbersome and distracting process even worse. As a result, integrating the investment book was often left to the period close, when it caused delays and stress due to the inefficiency of being the go-between for two critical data sources.
The problem with this process was obvious to anyone involved, and so was the solution: link the investment and accounting books. Now that solution is here.
Integrating the Investment Book – The New Way
As a cloud-based financial management platform designed to synchronize and synthesize accounting with the rest of the organization, Sage Intacct has API integrations with a long list of other business tools. One integration in particular, with a data service called KnowLedger, specifically addresses the issue of getting investment book data into Sage Intacct.
KnowLedger does all the manual work. It pulls data from portfolio accounting systems and custodians, including leading vendors like Addepar, APX, Advent, Black Diamond, and more, plus custodians such as Northern Trust, Morgan, Schwab, and Fidelity, among others. KnowLedger then pushes the data into Sage Intacct, organizing and contextualizing it according to a rules-based engine. Essentially, what used to be a time-, labor-, and error-intensive process now becomes automatic, with myriad benefits including:
- Greater Accuracy – Typos, omissions, and other costly mistakes no longer compromise financial data once manual entries are eliminated.
- Smarter Data – Investment data enters Sage Intacct with rich context, like having multiple child entries from a single parent entry, thanks to the rules KnowLedger applies while transferring data.
- Instant Processing – Accountants can process investment data daily or on-demand instead of weekly or monthly to make faster decisions and streamline the period close.
- Timely Reporting – Nothing stands in the way of timely or ad-hoc reporting when accountants can quickly and easily reconcile the investment and accounting books.
RSM for Sage Intacct – The Better Way
At RSM, we help companies implement Sage Intacct and optimize what it can do by selecting implementations and fine-tuning processes. We’ve worked with KnowLedger, and we’ve helped family offices take full advantage of what it can do to eliminate data entry from accounting and promote smarter decision-making.
That’s one example, but we’ve developed numerous other proven strategies for family offices to get the most from Sage Intacct, to accomplish more with accounting, and to operate more efficiently, strategically, and effectively than ever before.
Contact RSM for help introducing Sage Intacct to your family office.
