FAQs

We have a secure messaging system by which we send encrypted files to you or your advisors whenever needed.

At startup, we review the complexity of your financial situation and determine a fee commensurate with the complexity of your needs. We do not charge commissions or other fees except for overnight or certified mail. Some onboarding of complex entities and highly specialized reporting is performed at an hourly rate.

While we sign an engagement letter that runs for one year and renews automatically, you are free to cancel the service at any time. Having said that, we have quite a number of clients who have used our services for over 25 years.

In most cases, we change the mailing and/or email address on your bills so they come directly to us. That speeds things up considerably. We also provide you with postage-paid envelopes to send us any additional bills that arrive by mail.

At the end of every month, we send you a package containing all the paid bills along with a cover sheet summarizing everything. We also digitally import every bill that comes to our office into our system, so some clients opt to have the bills sent to storage or even destroyed, knowing that the scans are always available.

No, you have the opportunity to review every payment and can access your accounts directly at any time. You may even feel more in control, because our cash flow reports give you a better understanding of where your money goes.

Most bills just have to be paid in full (your utilities, mortgage payments, car leases, etc.). Where there is discretion, we get your approval prior to payment.

Because your bills come to us directly, you don’t have to worry about mail going where you’re not. And because you let us know where you will be at any given time, we can send reports, paid bills, etc. to you there.

We provide accounting services primarily for personal asset, and investment-related entities specific to family offices, and ultra-high-net-worth families. These include: LLCs, corporations, foundations, trusts, Special Purpose Vehicles, and other similar structures.  We have the capability to provide accounting for both single-member and multi-member entities, including multi-tier entity relationships, and allocate earnings and capital activity in accordance with your entity operating documents and your needs. Hurdles, waterfall arrangements, and differently allocated investments within entities are all within our extensive capabilities. What we generally do not provide services to are non-investment operating businesses with any significant scale.

We provide you detailed and transparent accounting information in a manner that allows you to understand your entities and investments, providing you with the tools to make informed decisions. We tailor our accounting services to the specific needs of your family, taking into consideration the underlying characteristics of your investment or investments. This involves gaining an understanding of the deal structure, economics, and entity operating agreements so that we can provide you a clear and true picture of your financial results. We offer accounting services for personal assets, marketable securities, real estate investments, private loans, direct private equity investments and their structured entities, as well as many other investment types.

Our goal is to create a seamless onboarding process that is accurate, efficient, and timely. We believe it is critical to focus on the upfront conversion of information into our systems as this will serve as the foundation for a long-term, effective relationship. We have found that the best way to achieve this is by gaining a clear understanding of the investment entity objectives by obtaining, organizing, and reviewing all the relevant partnership documents. We will ask you to share the entity formation documents, recent financial statements, bank and brokerage statements, closing statements, and any other documentation that is important to the understanding of the entity. We will agree on a conversion start date and begin a parallel process to ensure that we establish necessary processes and procedures for your unique requirements.

We will discuss your reporting requirements during our onboarding phase and agree on the deliverables and timing. We can provide financial reporting to you and/or your advisors on a monthly, quarterly, annual, or otherwise mutually agreed upon basis. We understand that each family has unique needs, so we create a process to capture information to accommodate your customized reporting requests.

Our services are focused on the accounting for investment entities only. However, we will work with your tax advisors by providing them financial reports and supplemental schedules relating to your accounts.

There is an inherent conflict in preparing financial statements and auditing them, so we have chosen to only provide the accounting services necessary to create “audit-ready” financial information. We will work with your third-party auditors to ensure a smooth audit process.

We leverage commercially available software that integrates the general ledger and investment analysis solutions specifically designed for investment partnership accounting.

We can deliver reports electronically, which is our preferred method, or via hardcopy. The electronic delivery can be done through our client portal, via an encrypted email, or through our proprietary, secure, file share system.

Consolidated Investment Performance Reporting is often provided as an adjunct service to Entity Accounting. Having fully reconciled cash accounts and cash flow along with investment performance can significantly help families when they make investment decisions. Either service can also be provided individually, tailored to your needs.

Many families have offices or advisors who fulfill their investment reporting needs. We work in a symbiotic relationship with those SFOs, MFOs, and investment advisors who need additional information to understand the complete, consolidated picture. We can provide performance reporting on assets and investments not managed by your primary advisor, perhaps direct investments or private equity not on their platform. With your permission, we can provide information to or from your advisor, and one or the other can provide complete consolidated information.

Additionally, when we manage the accounting, again with your permission, we can provide your advisor with information allowing them to more easily understand your family’s cash flow, and thereby enable them to make more informed investment decisions.

Our goal is to create a seamless onboarding process that is accurate, efficient, and timely. We engage in a candid upfront conversation about your general investment activities, the assets and investments that are in the mix, and the scope of investments upon which we will report. We will ask you to share the investment data, including the history when IRR is a desired metric. That base data will be entered or imported into our system, and we will ask permission to receive updated investment data going forward. We will also ask your permission to receive a direct feed for assets custodied at financial institutions. After agreeing on a start date for reporting (often this is the beginning of a calendar year), we bring in relevant data and check to ensure that calculations agree with what is expected. We can then update the asset data on the schedule that makes sense for each asset. For liquid assets with electronic feeds, that is usually daily, and other asset classes are often monthly, quarterly, or even annually.

All asset classes, from private investments or loans to friends and family to help with a new business, to large stock and bond portfolios with significant activity, and anything in between, can be included and reported upon. Many of the families we work with have multiple asset classes that comprise personal assets such as art collections, vehicles, and real estate, and on top of that they layer investment partnerships, real estate holding companies, direct investments in companies, precious metals, private equity funds, hedge funds, and professionally managed portfolios.

• We have relationships with many advisors who provide high quality investment reporting services. If your investment advisor provides it for you, we won’t perform this service without their knowledge and involvement.
• Our capabilities are essentially “fund administration,” however, professional funds are not our market. We service entities and reporting that fall within the sphere of a family.
• We do not currently provide “property management” reporting services for real estate investors. We do, however, often receive the summary output from such software and incorporate that data into real estate portfolio investment performance.

Nearly anything a sophisticated investor would think to ask for, we can provide. Time-weighted. Benchmarks. IRR. You name it. If we have the data in our system, we can report on it.

An ILIT is an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust. ILITs are established as a means by which to minimize the impact of estate and gift taxes through the use of a life insurance policy that is owned and controlled by a trust.

• There must be a distinct trust established for the purpose of maintaining the life insurance policy. The grantor typically creates and funds the trust, a trustee manages the trust, and beneficiaries are designated that will receive distributions from the trust.
• There must be a unique bank account in the name of the trust.
• The life insurance policy must not be paid by personal funds. It must be paid for directly by the trust, on time, to ensure continuation of the policy. We ensure that those payments are made.
• The trust must be funded in a timely manner each year. A minimum of 30 days’ notice must be given to the beneficiaries (a Crummey Notice), before the funds can be used to pay the policy, to ensure that estate and gift taxes are properly mitigated. We take care of this process for you.

• It can provide immediate cash to pay estate taxes and other expenses after the death of the insured.
• Proceeds are kept out of probate and are exempt from income and estate taxes.
• Through the instructions given to the trustee, it offers maximum control over how future proceeds are used.
• It can provide lifetime income to a spouse without those proceeds becoming part of the spouse’s estate.
• It prevents a court from controlling the insurance proceeds if a beneficiary becomes incapacitated.

You lose your tax benefits! In order to retain the tax benefits of an ILIT, it is imperative that all the administrative steps be handled and documented correctly. If not managed properly, it is likely that the insured will be deemed to have “incidents of ownership” and the proceeds from the policy will be included in your taxable estate.