Family offices are tasked with managing complex financial portfolios, properties, and personal details with a level of efficiency that allows them to report to the principal and family quickly and efficiently when questions or requests arise. However, for many family offices, the tools they rely on—various applications, error-prone spreadsheets, physical document storage, and traditional reporting—fall short of providing streamlined, accurate and stress-free oversight.
Family offices are increasingly moving towards leveraging SaaS wealth aggregation platforms to help them organize and report on family office assets and to provide a comprehensive view of their financial positions. Family Offices can save time and can improve operational efficiencies by using wealth aggregation platforms due to the ability to integrate disparate data sources to provide holistic financial reporting. However, the move to modern software solutions can be viewed as a challenge for family offices that are worried about disrupting their existing business processes and systems. Furthermore, there is a concern with family office members around who will operate the new software platform. There is a natural fear over taking on added responsibilities, especially when the family office is already feeling stretched thin.
To address these concerns, family offices should select a SaaS solution that emphasizes “Service”. This includes a team dedicated to onboarding, integrating the software smoothly with existing systems, accommodating current data formats, and delivering ongoing support, as needed, to help the family office operate the platform.
From our own experience operating the Eleven Family Office (EFO) platform, we have outlined the following essential integration and service elements that a modern family office platform and solution provider must offer to guarantee successful digital transformation without unnecessary complexity or added responsibility.
Support of Existing Solutions
The most important requirement of a family office platform is to support the existing systems and processes that are currently in place and working well for the family office team. The first step should be to evaluate what’s working well for the family office and to find areas where improvements and new tools could be beneficial.
The Eleven Family Office (EFO) platform is designed to sit on top of existing systems to aggregate, consolidate and report on all assets. This includes aggregating data from spreadsheets, business systems, accounting software, investment and bank accounts and even PDF and paper documents. Family Office team members continue to use what they know best and EFO becomes a beautiful reporting layer for the principal and family members.
Support of existing solutions includes:
1. Integrations to Existing Systems
Some Family Offices have made the move to adopt software for specific needs, such as Addepar or Black Diamond for financial reporting and Arch or Canoe for Investments. A modern family office platform should support solutions like these that are in place and working well. It should provide consolidated, rolled-up financial reporting that captures the full picture for UHNW (ultra-high-net-worth) principals and their families, avoids monthly or quarterly manual consolidation efforts, and provides these reports on-demand, in near real-time.
Eleven Family Office (EFO) works in harmony with existing software to collect data across various systems, providing family members with a clear, comprehensive view of their financial standing, investments, and more.
Real-time data feeds and integrations are essential for keeping family offices informed of market fluctuations, investment performance, and more.
Integrations include:
- Bank Account Feeds: Real-time aggregation of bank and trading transactions, balances, and portfolio performance for an up-to-date view of investments.
- Investment Portals: Data feeds to track private equity, venture capital, and real estate fund performance, collecting details about capital calls, distributions, and key events.
- Real Estate Feeds: Property details, valuation data and public record data feeds.
- Accounting Systems Integration: Provides the ability to create budgets and to track actual spending against each budget for a real time understanding of cash flow and spending.
- Market Data Feeds: Integrated feeds for equities, FX rates, and commodities enable comprehensive financial analysis.
- Error Detection: Monitors data feed health, ensuring timely action if a feed fails or is delayed.
2. Spreadsheet Support
Many family offices still depend on spreadsheets to manage key information to track assets, manage budgets, analyze decisions and generate reports. We realized early on with our own family office that spreadsheets are here to stay—we must support them.
A modern family office platform should support seamless spreadsheet ingestion to gather and centralize existing data for easy on-boarding and simplify and secure data management on an on-going basis.
This should include:
- Spreadsheet Upload: Easily upload Excel or CSV files to populate fields in the platform automatically, eliminating the need for manual entry.
- Template Support: Use standardized spreadsheet templates with predefined fields, ensuring consistent uploads.
- Error Detection and Correction: Detect and flag issues, like missing fields, absent data elements or incorrect formats, with suggested corrections for accuracy.
- Automatic Document Scans: Scan for updates made to spreadsheets directly from cloud storage (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, or FTP), saving time and minimizing manual effort.
- Data Validation: Automatically validate data against set criteria (e.g., date ranges, formats) to maintain data quality.
- Automated Data Processing: Automatically process data to trigger follow-up actions, such as updating reports or sending alerts, ensuring timely updates.
3. AI-Powered Document Processing
Sometimes it can be tricky to capture certain data. Not all data can be easily pulled from an integrated system or spreadsheet. Information might be found inside of a PDF document, email account or Word document. Up until recently, this required manual labor to dig for this information and manual input to get this data into the system. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) we are now able to magically parse any type of document that we feed into AI to allow us to find what we need. This can be especially useful when dealing with property and other physical assets, as well as personal, family and estate records.
AI-powered document processing can eliminate the burden, helping you and your team to capture and organize critical information, streamlining records management.
Ways that we have been leveraging AI-powered document processing include:
- Invoice Data Extraction: Extracts vendor details, invoice amounts, dates, and descriptions for efficient payment processing, reducing manual entry and errors.
- Property Data Processing: Organizes property documents, structuring key data in a query-friendly vector database, with AI-assisted prompts for intuitive data retrieval.
- Personal Records Processing: Captures details from personal records, like passports and licenses, and organizes travel plans in a centralized system.
- AI Assistant: Leverages AI-powered data processing and knowledge base to provide instant, context-aware support and actionable insights in real time.
- Onboarding Toolkit: Streamlines user onboarding with tailored guidance and automated processes.
Onboarding and On-Going Services
Onboarding to any software platform can be time consuming and labor intensive. Family offices often run with lean teams, limiting bandwidth for initial setup or ongoing maintenance and support. Thus, a truly transformative platform must offer not just integration features but also comprehensive onboarding, operational, and support services to ensure the system, data, and usage remain optimized
Eleven Systems realized this need and thus offers a dedicated services team to manage the entire platform on behalf of family offices, or provide the specific services needed to empower your team for success.
These services include onboarding, data loading, training, and support, designed to streamline operations across three key family office functions: Financials, Property and Life.
- Financial Services
Essential financial services to ensure seamless, efficient data consolidation, reporting and financial management including:- Account Setup: Simple onboarding of financial and investment accounts using digital data feeds that are fast and easy to set up.
- Budget Management: Integrating to a back end accounting system, assistance with setting up budgets and training staff on the ongoing use of the budget and invoice tools.
- Investment Management: Consolidated tracking of investment data leveraging AI document ingestion, automated data feeds and spreadsheet data that includes details about each investment.
- Financial Reporting: Setup of custom reports for performance, audit trails, travel records, and more.
- Invoice Processing: Effortless invoice ingestion through email forwarding.
- Property Services
Eleven Systems’ property onboarding team assists with getting each property setup and loaded and will work with local teams and resources for ongoing training and support.- Asset Data Loading: Centralized organization of property assets including art, vehicles, valuables, and more.
- Custom Checklist Creation: Customizable checklists for property maintenance and guest preparation.
- Service Provider Onboarding: Vetting and onboarding of service providers for property needs.
- Property Budget Setup: Real-time budget tracking with family office accounting system integration.
- Security Systems Integration: Set up home security systems, including cameras, security systems and door access controls.
- Life Management Services
Assuring proper and secure loading and setup of personal, family, travel, estate and foundation documents, including:- Travel Planning: Automated itinerary creation via AI and integrations with travel services.
- Estate Plan Creation: Comprehensive estate planning support, with documentation managed in collaboration with legal advisors.
- Family Document Management: Assistance in gathering and securely loading vital documents.
- Insurance Coverage Management: Continuous organization of insurance policies, including life, medical, and homeowners.
- Foundation Management: Supports the administration of charitable activities and foundation initiatives.
These turnkey services ensure your team is not burdened with on-boarding and change management, and that proper, optimized setup is accomplished and maintained from day one.
The Bottom Line
Achieving better organization, efficiency, and peace of mind in a family office is no small task, especially when relying on traditional tools like spreadsheets, scattered document stores, and paper records.
While modernization is essential, it’s also crucial to avoid overloading the team with unnecessary changes, cumbersome new processes, rip-and-replace implementations or additional complexity.
The right platform should prioritize integration, data ingestion, and continuity with existing processes. Turnkey onboarding, proactive change management, and ongoing optimization services are the keys to success.
A thoughtfully chosen platform like EFO and service-minded provider like Eleven Systems can turnkey modernize your family office with a streamlined, reliable solution, minimizing the headaches and fire drills of the past, and delivering the peace of mind you need.
