A new kind of financial freedom.
Far too many wealthy families don’t have an accurate answer to a simple question: “How much did we spend last year, and what did we spend it on?” That’s because complex financial lives have complex spending patterns.
Payment information is generally scattered across multiple accounts, multiple financial institutions, and even distinct physical locations. Lacking clear, detailed, and well-organized cash reports makes it nearly impossible to make truly informed personal spending decisions. To further complicate matters, the demands on your time increase and it becomes more complex to keep up with the bills as you acquire vacation homes, art collections, vehicles, yachts, aircraft, and the staff to maintain them.
Our Personal Bookkeeping and Billpay Service is designed for people like you. Aquilance aggregates all your spending and payment information into one set of comprehensive books. That includes checks and debit card charges from your personal account, every one of your credit card transactions, and any other payment accounts you have. That invaluable information provides you — and if you wish it, your wealth advisor — with a clear picture of your liquidity needs and allows you to make concrete financial decisions.
How the process works:
- We create a P.O. Box and a personalized email address here, just for your family.
- We arrange to have regular monthly bills sent directly to us and provide you with postage-paid envelopes to send us any other paper bills that show up. We use our custom-built, secure system to build a database of your expected bills.
- In our system, we also enter a schedule of payments for bills that do not occur monthly, such as estimated taxes, real estate taxes, or tuition bills.
- After a thorough review of all bills and invoices, for all anticipated invoices within an expected dollar range, we make the payments for you, automatically. For specified vendors, those invoices over a defined dollar amount, or invoices that are unexpected or exceed their expected range, we reach out to you for approval. For an additional fee, we can prepare checks and send them to you to sign and mail. For clients who elect this latter option, stamps are on the envelopes, and everything is ready to drop in the mail.
- We post all activity through the end of each month, including payments made and all credit card charges at the transaction level.
- Each month, a concise schedule of spending is prepared and sent to you.
- Each quarter, we send you a cash-flow report that summarizes your income and expenses for the period, combined with aggregated reporting by quarter, across all accounts.
- At year-end, we prepare a detailed report listing all income and expenses, broken down by category (e.g. salary, taxes, groceries, clothing, travel, dining, charitable contributions, etc.) for you, across all accounts. Your tax advisors can receive a subset of the report containing tax-relevant information.
Delegate the tasks, gain the clarity.
Affluent families usually have organizational configurations that go beyond just personal family checking and savings accounts.
There are multiple entities in different forms, with different ownership structures that have been created within each family group. Families may have affiliated Trusts, both Revocable and Irrevocable for liability and asset protection, or to assist with estate planning. To protect assets, single-purpose holding companies may have been created. Investment holding entities with multiple investors, foundations, or even an overall family office business entity are also frequently under the control or influence of a family.
Accurate oversight and management of many entities, each with their own special requirements, governance, or formation restrictions, is important to ensure that the family’s plans are appropriately enacted, to ensure adherence to formation documents, and that timely information is provided to tax and legal compliance specialists.
Our Entity and Partnership Accounting solutions expand beyond the personal to help you to understand your family’s overall financial picture, reported in a clear, concise manner.
- The financial reporting requirements of multiple family entities — including trusts, family limited partnerships, investment companies, and personal entities — can all be managed in their entirety.
- Investment partnerships with complex waterfalls, investment hurdle rates, or other intricate investment strategies are accounted for and reported on efficiently by our team.
- Key financial statements are prepared such as Balance Sheet, Statement of Operations, Capital Reporting, and Statement of Cash Flows. These can be consolidated or separated according to your needs and the structure of your entities, via our integrated software solution that combines true double-entry accounting with full historical performance metrics, all prepared on a schedule of your choosing,
- Other reporting is highly customized to your needs — by entity, investor, consolidated all in one, or broken out as you desire — with full look-through and look-across capabilities.
Our core services may include:
- Maintaining complete entity books and records.
- Creating and maintaining the Ownership Schedule and the respective capital commitments.
- Administering the capital call and capital distribution process, including monitoring and recording associated cash receipts and disbursements.
- Recording all cash transactions and reconciling entity custodial accounts.
- Full investment accounting, and related performance metrics.
- Complete tracking of each entity’s expenses, accruals, and intercompany activity, plus monitoring the sufficiency of cash balances for anticipated payments.
- Calculation of management fees and coordination of collection and payment.
- Capital accounting at a member or partner level, including contributions, distributions, allocation of earnings, special allocations, carried interest, and GP/LP splits.
Understand Your Returns
Sophisticated ultra-high net worth investors and their family offices may hold scores of direct, private equity, and publicly traded investments in dozens of trusts, limited partnerships, brokerage accounts, and other entities.
As these investments proliferate, it becomes increasingly difficult to gain a clear understanding of overall performance and concentration risks. If fact, some exceptionally affluent investors would be hard pressed to say exactly how wealthy they are on any given day.
Our Consolidated Investment Performance Reporting goes beyond more basic services to incorporate investment data that spans marketable and non-marketable securities, captures all accounts, and provides a clear picture of liquidity. This data is recorded in a true double-entry general ledger integrated with investment performance reporting, so you always have a clear understanding of what you are holding and what you are spending. You and your advisors can easily assess the overall performance of your portfolio and the individual performance of each investment.
Reports are provided based on the needs of your family, and the portfolio of investments, and may include:
- Investment allocations
- Returns: against benchmarks; over time; by class; weighted; targets; other
- Unrealized vs. Realized
- Long-term vs. Short-term
- Active vs. Passive
- Liquidity
- Correlation metrics and other analytics
- Other as requested
You and your advisors can use this information to:
- Evaluate performance across all of your investments in any asset class
- Understand investment exposure across entities, family members, managers, and classes
- Make asset allocation adjustments designed to improve risk reward characteristics
- Understand capital invested including deployed and committed
- Present clear and organized information to tax preparers
In addition to our core services, we offer an extensive suite of personal financial administration services, which can be used in any combination to create the single integrated solution that best addresses your needs.
Irrevocable Life Insurance (ILIT) Administration
Irrevocable Life Insurance (ILIT) Administration
Domestic Payroll Services
Domestic Payroll Services
Customized Reporting
Customized Reporting
Medical Claims Processing
Medical Claims Processing
Statement of Assets
Statement of Assets
Document Storage
Document Storage
Family Office Consulting and Structuring
Family Office Consulting and Structuring
