Enterprise-Level Wealth Management for Your Family Office

Has your family’s portfolio outgrown its Excel shoes? If your family’s business operations and investment portfolio is nearing the level of an official family office operation, the time has come for acquiring more sophisticated solutions.

What you are looking for is:

• Straight-through-processing
• Advanced Reporting capabilities
• Business Analysis
• Task Automation

Why Excel is the Wrong Tool for Wealth Management

Family offices, particularly those that started small and grew with time, find Excel spreadsheets to be a nice and simple tool for managing their portfolio and investment operations. Classically they use Excel to track their trades and positions, calculate profits and losses manually and then post journals in an accounting application to obtain an entity financial statement.

I have witnessed magnificent examples of such spreadsheets with mind-boggling complexity, storing current as well as many years’ historical data, with formulas that include the most sophisticated calculations. I have also heard stories of days and nights effort and work to trace errors and make sense of numbers resulting from corrupted cells.

And yet, when Excel is in the right hands it is a very powerful tool, as most finance specialists know. It must be used with care and only as a tool for reporting, simulation or other data analysis. So, if your data are stored in the Cloud or remotely, how will you cope with connecting it to Excel and the resulting loss in performance due to latency? Read on to find out how the Cloud can empower you to analyse your data in Excel.

The Cloud’s Answer to Power and Efficiency in Analysis and Reporting Through Excel

In the traditional model, users will access data from a remote server and use Excel at the front end on their workstation, PC, etc. In a Cloud or remote server scenario this can become a real problem, because of the latency in exchanging information between a remote database or file and the application. The productivity drops and users become unhappy.

The answer is to run the Excel spreadsheet in the Cloud, on the Server where the data are stored. With solid-state disk technology in virtual machines, the access time of data from a database drops dramatically. Add the fact that Excel runs on a Server class processor with massive memory expansion capacity, and you get the picture.

To the user the process is transparent. Clicking on an Excel icon on a desktop will open the Excel application on the Cloud. The resulting file can be stored on the user’s machine, OneDrive or any other desired location. Connection is of course fully secure and encrypted.

One Point of Access to all the Tools you Need to Manage Your Family Office

Whether your solution is On Premise, in the Cloud or a hybrid solution, you ultimately want to ensure that you have the flexibility to decide which way you want to go, and to which extent you will be relying on localising the bits and pieces of your solutions.

But you must have the choice over which direction you take, independently of the functional satisfaction in your requirements.

The Elysys Solution for Wealth Management and Financial Accounting

At Elysys, we have created a range of end-to-end enterprise management solutions built within Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This approach means we can create software that is tailored specifically to the private wealth management needs of your family.

The functionalities of our ERP range includes:

Straight-Through-Processing (STP): The Elysys Wealth solution is designed to offer enterprise level workflow functionality to connect your front and back office with straight through processing in larger single family offices even if operating in multiple legislative zones with complex consolidation and compliance requirements.

Task Automation: Automated routine tasks, month end closing and other management processes.

Business Analysis Modules: By adding the Elysys BI module to your software library, you get deeper insights into your family’s finances. Use Elysys BI to expand the reporting capabilities of your Elysys solution by getting fast, efficient access to your data. Easily keep your finger on the pulse of your family’s investments and portfolio performance. Not only do you get the granularity of reporting that you would expect across companies, portfolios and custodians, but if you use our ERP for multi family offices, Elysys Wealth, you are also able to segregate your reporting on a client by client basis and share dashboards with them securely.

Here too, the Cloud will empower your solutions. The computation of TWRs (Time-weighted returns), IRR and other performance measures, needs fast access to the data storage, as well as computer processor power. And of course that is what the Cloud will again provide you: the BI engine operating on a machine that gives you access to massive processor and memory capabilities on a usage basis.

Advanced Reporting: With Elysys Wealth you can create reports, visualisations and dashboards to share live data securely with other family office users or analyse them yourself to help you make the decisions you need to with confidence across a range of different financial assets. The accessibility to Data Warehouses, MOLAP (multidimensional online analytical processing) enables you to utilise the best tools you can create to maximise the alpha in your portfolios and minimise the beta across your family office’s investments.

Also when it comes to reporting, the Cloud comes to the rescue. Our Elysys Performance engine running in the Cloud with the Excel front end operated in the Cloud as described earlier, utilising Microsoft SQL Server technology will give you unlimited capabilities. Drag and Drop all the measures and dimensions you have attached to your transactions to create visualisations and reports in seconds, with the ability to distribute and share with colleagues, family beneficiaries and others.

The Benefits of Cloud ERP Solutions

In conclusion the real benefits of the Cloud lie in having the ability to access the virtually unlimited processing power and memory of the virtual servers available there, without having to forego fortunes in infrastructure and server costs and maintenance of systems. This allows you to take advantage of enterprise-class SQL environments without having to employ a team of IT professionals.

Learn More about Cloud Software for your Wealth Management

Are you ready to explore Cloud ERPs as a solution to managing your family’s wealth? Speak to one of our specialists for a no commitment demonstration of a solution for you.