The accounting department has long been viewed as custodian and curator of financial data. However, whether it’s bringing the data together or distributing the financial results broadly, the financial reporting process has long been an onerous drudgery of information assembly, validation, and reporting. The Family Office monthly reporting process for many is sometimes measured in weeks, and rarely measured in days.
This fact is magnified in many of these Family Office organizations as a direct result of the dated technology currently in place. With the complex and varied reporting requirements of the Family Office environment, the monthly process becomes even more burdensome. The reporting requirements of C-Suite Executives is at times much different from those of the stakeholders themselves. Fair Market Value, Assets Under Management, Net Asset Value…there is a complex array of data that must be considered when preparing the reporting for the various audiences.
The need to export data from the existing financial system coupled with the requirement to then manipulate or slice and dice it (mostly in MS Excel) and then present it in a meaningful and professional manner, is inarguably a recipe for data errors, leading to incorrect and potentially misleading financial results. Furthermore the inability of many ERP systems to natively generate much needed KPIs further compounds the manual and error prone process currently in place.
Black River Technologies will be at the Single Family Office Summit next week (February 17, 2017) to further explore these issues with family office organizations.
I encourage you to drop by and chat with us about the specific pain points you are experiencing in your organization. We will be happy to discuss our solutions with you. Solutions that will allow you to get back to the business of making meaningful and agile decisions for the betterment of you organization and leave the heavy lifting in Excel behind.
