How Family Offices Use the Archway Platform℠ to Create Bespoke Client Reports

Every family office professional understands the necessity of balance sheets and income statements: They serve a fundamental purpose in understanding an individual’s financial position. And, fortunately, there are many family office software and service providers that can produce them.

But conventional financial statements rarely provide the level of insight needed to fully satisfy bespoke client requests.

As you’ve likely encountered, assembling non-traditional reports often requires unique attributes or classifications, custom data groupings, and client-specific data points. Moreover, if the request involves uncommon assets or personalized investment frameworks, compiling the data can require a heavy lift.

In our 20+ years working with family offices and advisors to high-net-worth families, we’ve received plenty of unique reporting requests, and we know how important it is to present complex—sometimes irregular—investment data in a simple, yet meaningful report.

Combining the robustness of the Archway Platform’s reporting engine with the flexibility of its user-defined data attributes and classifications, we’ve had the opportunity to help our clients harness the power of the platform to craft creative, tailored reporting outputs for their end-clients.

Whether you’re interested in building a report that compares household expenses across multiple properties, analyzes clean energy investments, or summarizes artwork valuations, the Archway Platform’s 200+ standard reports and multi-pronged reporting capabilities can help you quickly produce an easy-to-consume report.

Here are five unique reports, built using the Archway Platform, that break the boundaries of traditional family office reporting and deliver creative, tailored financial insights.

Inspiration #1. Paintings by historical era.

While it’s well known that artwork is a commonly held asset amongst family offices, the asset type tends to lack influence and inclusion in the development of family office technology and reporting standards. But given its prominence in high-net-worth investment portfolios, artwork—like any other asset—deserves specialized reporting.

Using the Archway Platform’s flexible, parameter-driven reporting templates, users can customize the view to see purchase price, change in market value, and unrealized gains / losses across the owner’s fine art collection. Perhaps more importantly, they can create custom attributes such as artist, historical era, region of origin, or art consultant—ultimately, allowing family offices to create a wholly unique way to consume artwork-related financial insights.

Inspiration #2. Profit comparison by horse.

Perhaps not as widely held as fine art, thoroughbred racing talent still requires an impressive amount of asset management. Leveraging the Archway Platform’s ability to create a fully customized general ledger, family offices can categorize and group expenses, measure their costs against equestrian-generated income, and compare profits across horses with simplicity and ease.

Inspiration #3. Primary residence expenses.

When you operate multiple households or properties, it can be difficult to compile the various expenses associated with each location. Spanning across utility and tax bills to insurance, property upkeep, and household staff payroll costs, it’s critical to know how much money is being spent on each property.

Using custom general ledger accounts and flexible reporting templates, family offices can succinctly compare property ownership costs across multi-level, user-defined expense categories.

Inspiration #4. Rental property income.

Like personal properties, many family offices hold a variety of rental properties. As a result, from time to time, you may be asked how much rental income is being generated—and which property is earning the most.

Using a combination of customized general ledger accounts and property-based portfolios, the Archway Platform’s reporting suite allows users to quickly produce a consolidated net income report that displays revenue and general operating expenses by individual rental property.

Inspiration #5. Impact report.

New investment frameworks—whether generally accepted or internally developed—are routinely popping up in the family office arena. Having the flexibility to infinitely tag assets with unique attributes gives family office professionals the opportunity to slice-and-dice data in line with the overarching investment strategy.

Using the Archway Platform’s multi-level grouping mechanisms, you can take multiple frameworks, such as foreign investment allocation laid over the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, to present a unique view of investment impact across regions, areas of development, and environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

To learn more about how the Archway Platform’s powerful reporting engine can help your family office deliver tailored financial insights, check out a demo or schedule a call with a member of the Archway Family Office Services team.

Evaluating Family Office Platforms for Specialty, Efficiency, and Connectivity

As a family office software provider, we talk about technology evaluations, well, a lot.

And when we talk about technology evaluations, it’s important to note that the conversation isn’t limited to prospective users and industry consultants trying to better understand our offering.

In fact, the most constant tech evaluation the team here at Archway Family Office Services participates in is the one we conduct ourselves: an ongoing assessment of how we can improve the Archway Platform and the private wealth management operations it supports.

But if you aren’t a technology provider to hundreds of family offices and financial institutions, this may not be a routine activity for you, which likely has you asking the question, “When should I reevaluate my family office technology?”

Here are three signs that it may be time to revisit your family office tech strategy.

Your technology is designed for the masses, but not for family offices.

Out-of-the-box general ledger, portfolio management, and performance reporting solutions work extremely well for out-of-the-box scenarios—scenarios of which family offices rarely encounter.

Common pain points family offices may experience with non-specialized technology include:

• Entity consolidations
• Partnership accounting
• Nested ownership calculations
• Centralized disbursements and bill payment
• Enhanced investment analytics
• Complex, multi-pronged transactions
• Net worth and financial report creation

If your family office has found itself experiencing one of the above challenges, it may be a good time to research purpose-built family office solutions—or, at the very least, engage with a consultant that can point you in the right direction.

If your family office has found itself experiencing many of the above challenges, it’s an even better time.

Despite having a technology solution in place, you still predominately rely on manual processes.

Ideally, when you implement a technology platform, your family office will see a negative correlation in manual work: More automation, less human intervention.

But when the solution in place is non-specialized, or simply ill equipped to handle the nuances of ultra-high-net-worth wealth, family office professionals may find themselves doing a significant portion of work outside of the system.

A few manual tasks here and there certainly isn’t enough to move the needle, but if you find that you are routinely performing manual rework in other applications, moving data to spreadsheets, writing physical checks, or building financial reports using presentation slides, it may be time to ask yourself if your current technology solution is serving its intended purpose—or if it’s just collecting digital dust.

Your current technology platform doesn’t connect with outside data providers or third-party systems.

Across industries, it’s generally accepted that technology silos can cause a variety of problems. Aside from clouding transparency and stunting collaboration, technology silos can prove to be a massive drain on efficiency. Often requiring duplicative data entry, technology silos at best waste resources, and at worst open the door to data discrepancies and risk across systems.

But technology silos and multiple systems don’t need to be synonymous. There can be immense value in selecting modern family office platforms that are able to communicate by securely passing relevant data to and from one another—whether through automated data feeds, APIs, or customizable data extracts and queries.

To that end, if your current family office tech stack lacks the ability to automatically collect data from multiple sources, integrate data across multiple systems, or produce comprehensive reporting, it may be worth reviewing the technology solutions that are preventing your family office from breaking down those verticals.

If your family office has seen the signs and is interested in revisiting your current tech stack, check out our simple wealthtech strategy evaluation to help you think through and build your organization’s long-term technology strategy.

A Look at 4 Key Areas of Strategic Focus Expected in 2023

As the end of the year looms near, so do project deadlines, final data reviews, and annual reporting deliverables. With family offices bogged down by the mechanics of reconciliations and closing the year-end books, strategic planning can unintentionally get pushed to the bottom of the pile.

But whether strategy is top of mind or not, the family office space is in flux—changing now more than ever—which warrants consideration of several key focus areas.

Outsourcing

Continuing a multi-year conversation, outsourcing has been a trending topic in the market for some time now. With more family offices reviewing internal operations and a growing appetite amongst financial institutions to offer a more holistic set of services to its ultra-high-net-worth clients, we at Archway Family Office Services believe outsourcing will continue to be the centerfold in the ongoing assessment of operations and resources.

Employed as a long-term strategy or as a trusted stopgap during unanticipated events, outsourced services can create meaningful capacity within family offices. Although family office outsourcing is often synonymous with professional services like tax and regulatory compliance or cybersecurity, it can also be impactful in core operational areas like data aggregation and reconciliation, partnership administration, and routine reporting.

Process automation

When the Archway Platform℠ was introduced in the early 2000s, it offered family offices the opportunity to automate the manual ticking and tying of prior decades. It offered automated data aggregation and the creation of financial statements and client reports. It offered automated partnership allocations, investment performance calculations, bill payment, and more. And all of this automation offered family offices something they’d long been after: Time.

Now 20 years later, countless technology solutions have been introduced to automate family office functions from A to Z, each offering a new layer of efficiency—and potentially adding hours back into the work week for family office professionals.

Enhanced analytics

Ultra-high-net-worth investors and next gen wealth owners are clamoring for data. They want more transparency, deeper insights, and a higher probability of success. For family office professionals, this translates into looking beyond traditional performance measurements and delivering enhanced analysis across a variety of metrics and results like attribution, benchmarking, value-at-risk, stress testing, exposure mapping, and what-if scenarios.

Entity and tax restructuring

While most family offices don’t endeavor to restructure every single year, certain events can lead to this conversation taking a front row seat during annual strategic planning. Impending tax laws, new regulations, and political posturing can all lead to an evaluation of a family office’s structure. But so can major changes to the nuclear family like deaths, births, divorces, or marriages.

As family offices and their tax attorneys consider tax advantages and implications, entity restructuring can help families weather the changes—political, social, environmental, or personal.

At Archway Family Office Services, we can’t overstate the importance of having the right family office software in place to manage the restructure, automate asset transfers, define new ownership, and validate the changes through reporting. With the help of the right tools, family offices can make the restructuring process feel nearly seamless—or at least as seamless as restructuring goes.

While it’s likely that your to-do list is long and the countdown to the New Year is short, we encourage family offices and advisors to high-net-worth clients to spend some time reviewing the outcomes of the past year and strategizing for the next.

Debunking common family office software misconceptions

There are plenty of opinions when it comes to family office technology: Integrated versus best of breed, non-specialized versus purpose-built, in-house versus outsourced, IBOR (Investment Book or Records) versus ABOR (Accounting Book of Records). The list goes on.

And given the sheer number of opinions out there, occasionally a mistruth is bound to emerge. To help separate fact from fiction, here are three well-circulated myths about family office technology, and what you can expect instead.

Myth #1: You have to go it alone.

Selecting, implementing, and operating a technology platform can feel like an oversized task for family offices with limited staffing and capacity. Fearing that more sophisticated, purpose-built family office tools will compound resource constraints, it’s not uncommon for family offices to stick with non-specialized, seemingly low-maintenance software.

From their vantage point, without the internal infrastructure or headcount to support the ongoing maintenance of a new system, the likelihood of adoption is low.

Here’s the truth:

Utilizing generic software packages for general ledger, investment data aggregation, partnership accounting, bill payment, and client reporting can actually hinder efficiency. Burdened with manual processes and disconnected technologies that beckon duplicative work, this approach can ultimately require more time to manage than enterprise-level family office software.

On the other hand, it is true that dedicated family office tools are often accompanied by a bit of a learning curve, but the long-term gains in efficiency, dependability, and accuracy can be tremendous.

Technology doesn’t need to be exclusively managed by an organization’s in-house staff.

In many cases, technology vendors offer outsourced services that family offices can leverage to supplement their own staffing. Similarly, family offices can partner with consultants and contractors to assist with upfront technology implementations and offload recurring, resource-heavy operations, like portfolio reconciliation, partnership accounting, and monthly reporting.

By working alongside external teams with operational or technology-specific expertise, family offices can reap the benefits of dedicated family office technology, while lightening the operational load associated with day-to-day data management.

Myth #2: Siloed technology and specialized technology are one in the same.

The wealthtech boom over the past decade introduced a variety of solutions that are hyper focused on specific family office functions—areas like alternative assets, portfolio intelligence, risk analysis, manager due diligence, bill payment, data aggregation, and benchmarking.

With so many options, family offices may find themselves leveraging two, three, five, and sometimes more disparate solutions. Hence the myth that these solutions must live in mutually exclusive silos.

Here’s the truth:

Today’s family office tech stacks are indeed more sophisticated than ever. But family office technology is also displaying unprecedented levels of interconnectivity. From strategic partnerships across firms, like the recently expanded relationship between Archway’s Archway Platform℠ and Canoe Intelligence, to the widespread adoption of APIs, file exchanges, and data warehouses, family offices have an increasingly wide array of options when it comes to integrating their financial data hub.

Myth #3: Technology is an expense, not an investment.

Family office or not, industry-specific technology rarely comes cheap. Built according to the nuanced operations and unique data structures of its user base, purpose-built family office technology comes with a commensurate price tag. But simply because modern wealthtech costs more than legacy systems and spreadsheets, doesn’t mean it’s not worth the price.

Here’s the truth:

Like most things in business, you get what you pay for. And while adopting family office-specific tools comes with a cost, using non-specialized software does too.

Oftentimes undetected, these costs may not come in the form of a price tag on a license agreement, but make no mistake, your family office could be paying in manual rework, duplicative efforts, multi-step data entry, time-consuming consolidations, and labor-intensive reporting.

Meanwhile, investing in purpose-built, process-driven family office solutions can introduce automation, native workflows, validation systems, increased data accuracy, and enhanced reporting, all of which can pay dividends in terms of time and resources.

Which begs the question: What’s that worth to your family office?

Originally authored by Archway for publication on Family Office Exchange.

The Importance of a Family Office Software User Community

At Archway Family Office Services, we have always prided ourselves on our ability to understand the nuances of our ultra-high-net-worth clients. Our teams have extensive experience working through complex issues and one-off scenarios that are unique to family offices and private wealth management organizations. We are, by all accounts, well suited for the job.

We’ve helped hundreds of family offices leverage the Archway Platform to support critical facets of their operations like central disbursement entities, multi-layered ownership structures, complex equity transfers, and family member-specific reporting requirements.

But even our most tenured team members will tell you: There is no substitute for the opportunity to problem solve amongst your peers.

As mentioned in our blog discussing the what, where, who, and why of Archway’s exclusive Archway Platform User Conference, IMMERSION, the leading request from our clients is access to other members of our family office user community.

So what exactly can family offices who share a common wealthtech solution—say, the Archway Platform—learn from one another?

1. How family offices are using the Archway Platform to solve complex issues.

The evolution of family offices and the development of family office software are undeniably intertwined. As the needs of family offices have shifted over the years, so has the Archway Platform’s suite of tools.

With each product upgrade, we’ve introduced new functionality, built efficiencies and automation into the application, and enhanced the capabilities of our existing tools. As a result, our users have found that there’s often more than one way to do the same thing in the system.

And while we offer release notes, product documentation, and system training, sometimes the easiest way to learn something is to hear from someone else that’s already using it.

Common in-app operations that our clients discuss with one another include:

• How to transfer ownership based on different scenarios, and which Archway Platform tool is most suitable for the desired outcome
• Best practices when using the Archway Platform’s reconciliation tools
• Usage of alternative asset-specific tools to track activity and report on investments
• Accounts payable processes best practices
• Creating ad hoc reports and recurring family member report packages
• Archway Client Portal use cases and adoption strategies for family members and outside stakeholders

2. What Archway Platform tools they could be utilizing, but aren’t today.

When a client begins discussing how they’re using the Archway Platform to solve complex issues, this often leads to another user saying, “We hadn’t thought of doing it that way!”

The fact of the matter is, it’s our human nature to create routines and processes. If a process works, we don’t necessarily go out looking for another way to do it. But, when a step in the process changes, it presents an inflection point: Is there a better way to do this?

And when it’s time for our clients to find that answer, Archway Family Office Services offers multiple channels:

• Reach out to the Archway Family Office Services Client Relations team for product support
• Engage with the Archway Platform Training team for consulting on a new process
• Pose that exact question to other Archway Platform users through a variety of forums and idea exchanges in our secure, online client support portal

Although it’s widely accepted that each family office has its own unique way of operating, we frequently find that there are common threads that tie them together. While our clients’ experiences may not be identical, users may have experienced similar scenarios that can nonetheless lead to the adoption of new tools and the implementation of new processes.

3. Which reports they can use to answer challenging financial questions.

Reporting is the pinnacle of family office wealthtech. It is, after all, how family offices and the family members they advise render and make sense of the data that’s been collected, entered, and validated in the technology. So it’s no surprise that reporting is one of the most comprehensive functions that exists in the Archway Platform.

With a suite of tools consisting of an extensive report library, raw data queries, dashboards, and a client reporting portal, users of the Archway Platform have a variety of options when it comes to reporting on their financial data.

That said, in a perfect world, family office professionals would have plenty of free time to explore the report library, try out new queries, and customize reporting dashboards. But day-to-day responsibilities often prevent that.

So what’s a quick and easy way to discover new reporting ideas? Clever report configurations? Unique data classifications and groupings?

Enter: The Archway Platform user community.

By inquiring with other users to learn what reports they’re using, which metrics they’re leveraging, and how they’re applying parameters and data groupings, family offices can quickly identify the right combination of reports, data points, and formats to get the output they desire—straight from the individuals that have walked the same path.

4. How family offices are handling situations that have nothing to do with the software.

Perhaps the most important thing family offices can learn from one another has nothing to do with technology or operations at all.

As anyone who works in the family office arena knows, it can be excruciatingly difficult for family offices to connect with other family offices. And while there are a variety of family office membership organizations and events that can help, family offices are, generally speaking, incredibly private and confidential, making networking and communicating with one another challenging.

Understanding that gap and recognizing the commonality of our client base, we created a trusted community in which all of the members share a unifying theme: Usage of the Archway Platform.

Sustained through national and regional user conferences, virtual peer dialogues, online user forums, and brokered introductions, our family office software user community presents our clients with the unique opportunity to connect and build relationships with other family office professionals.

Through their expanded network, our clients have gone on to create a variety of breakout peer groups that frequently get together to discuss the issues they face as family offices—whether it pertains to the Archway Platform or not.

These peer groups, though born out of their common usage of the Archway Platform, have grown across a much wider spectrum, where family office professionals can discuss trust law, tax planning, family office restructuring, burgeoning investment strategies, talent acquisition, process documentation and new hire training, and so much more. The community has flourished.

To learn more about joining the Archway Platform user community, schedule a call with a member of our team to discover how other family offices and private wealth management firms are using Archway’s purpose-built wealth management solutions.

Everything you need to know about IMMERSION: Archway’s Platform^SM User Conference

When we ask our clients what would help them become even more successful, we get plenty of answers: Specialized functionality, new reports, more hours in the day. But time and time again, the answer that we hear most often—the one that is echoed over and over by family offices, regardless of location, size, or tenure—is the opportunity to connect with other family offices.

And so, nearly a decade ago, the IMMERSION User Conference was born.

Let’s take a look at the history of IMMERSION: What it is, where it happens, who attends, and why it’s become a mainstay in the Archway Family Office Services training program.

What is IMMERSION?

The IMMERSION User Conference is a multi-day training and networking event hosted by Archway Family Office Services. We invite our family clients from across the globe to join us for a three day immersive experience (see what we did there?), where they’re given the opportunity to:

• Receive firsthand training from our team of experts
• Preview new Archway Platform enhancements
• Join roundtables discussing family office best practices
• Hear from strategic partners about additional family office solutions
• Build their network of family office professionals

While at IMMERSION, attendees can choose from a menu of expertly curated, CPE-accredited sessions. Focusing on key functional areas of our family office software platform, these sessions deliver best practices, tips, and tricks in areas like troubleshooting system issues, completing reconciliations, managing accounts payable, tracking alternative investments, measuring performance, and producing family office reporting.

In 2016, we introduced our first-ever New User Workshop, giving new clients the opportunity to get up to speed prior to the more advanced sessions at the main conference. Not surprisingly, the New User Workshop has become a cornerstone of our event and has expanded to include not only new users, but existing users simply looking for a refresher on Archway Platform blocking and tackling.

Where does IMMERSION take place?

Since the inaugural IMMERSION was hosted in our hometown of Indianapolis, IN, in 2014, we’ve had the chance to collect plenty of feedback over the course of several events, allowing us to evolve the format of the event, the topics we cover, how we deliver the content, and even where we host the conference.

Following our first IMMERSION User Conference, we decided that we would alternate between the large global conference in even-numbered years and smaller, regional user conferences in odd-numbered years.

We followed this cadence through 2019, hosting two additional IMMERSION User Conferences in Indianapolis and a dozen regional user conferences across the country, from New York to Dallas to San Francisco—and many more in between.

But like most firms, Archway Family Office Services took IMMERSION virtual in 2020 and 2021 as we adjusted to the world around us. Broadcasting live from a pop-up studio in our Indianapolis office and powered by a newsroom-worthy studio crew, we were able to carry on the IMMERSION tradition despite the obstacles that inherently come with transitioning a typically in-person event to being fully online.

And now, in October 2022, we are back in-person and we’ve moved. This year, our global conference is being hosted in Austin, TX.

Who goes to IMMERSION?

IMMERSION is an exclusive, invitation-only event for our family office and private wealth clients. By bringing together a group of family office professional that all share a common usage of the Archway Platform, we create an intimate, secure environment where users can connect, share ideas, collaborate, and learn together.

Today, IMMERSION has become a core tenant of the Archway Family Office Services training program. Outside of its discernible popularity amongst clients, the event has grown be so much more than a training exercise for users.

IMMERSION is an opportunity for our team to connect with one another, to put faces to names, and build lasting relationships with our clients. Sure, we spend a lot of time talking about partnership accounting, performance validation, and data management.

But we spend an equal amount of time talking about the things that happen in our lives outside of the four walls we work within. IMMERSION is about discovery and learning and bringing people together: Some of the most human elements we all possess.

After 20 years working with family offices, the team at Archway Family Office Services understands how critical your technology partner—and the people who comprise it—is to your success. Which is why we invite our clients to come together for a day—or three—every year so that we can continue to grow together.

Discover the many ways Archway Family Office Services connects with our family office clients through education, support, and training in our mini ebook, Our Commitment to Exceptional Client Service.