Kevin Reed is chief revenue officer of Aquilance, a provider of bookkeeping, bill payment and entity accounting services to family offices. He discusses advances in these services and how they can help family offices:
What types of services do you provide for family offices?
I describe our solution as a spectrum of family CFO services, including bookkeeping and bill pay, capital call management/tracking and investment and entity accounting. Clients can outsource the full spectrum of services or just engage us for a component of the full offering. In any scenario, we deliver data and reports back to the controller or the CFO, or directly to the CEO of the family office.
What kind of reports are helpful for family offices?
One example is cash flow reporting: understanding at a very detailed category level how money is being spent.
There’s a depth of clarity that you get from tracking transactions in your own customized categories. For example, if there’s a $50,000 payment for insurance across several different properties, with many systems, you only see one entry for $50,000. Then, someone has to go in and manually create the reporting to show the $50,000 was actually allocated to three different homes, so you understand the true cost to operate those properties. Really good cash flow reporting gives you visibility on the cost to operate the plane, the yacht, the houses and anything else that the family would own.
Beyond cash flow, family offices need a comprehensive set of reports across all investments and entities. I believe it’s important to have a dashboard that gives a complete overview of all holdings across the family office. You should also be able to easily drill down from the entity level to the individual level. Through this reporting, the family members are able to make better informed investment decisions, and the family office can provide more proactive estate planning advice to the individual family members.
What trends are you seeing for 2025?
As more families are becoming aware of the high cost of staffing a formal family office, we’re starting to see more families debate whether to build out their own virtual family office with a collection of professional firms like Aquilance and maybe a more limited in-house team.
Who coordinates all the professionals involved in a virtual family office?
We’ve seen scenarios where they will hire someone on staff who is just coordinating all the family office services. Others have a financial advisor who is involved with most of the service providers.
On the financial side, Aquilance helps with aspects of coordination because our reporting is shared with the client, their financial advisor, their tax preparer and any other professional they enable us to share the information with. Everyone is getting the same information — everyone is seeing the same consolidated reporting. They’re all getting the tax reporting. So, everyone is operating off of the same sheet of music. Whether they have someone internally coordinating or whether they have their financial advisor coordinating is a matter of preference.
