Family Offices
The allocation is endowment grade. The operations behind it are a spreadsheet.
Forty managers reporting quarterly and in arrears, capital calls arriving by email, and one workbook that only one person can open. We put commitments, calls, liquidity and look-through exposure in one place and keep it current, so the office is something you control rather than something you chase.
Typical issues a family office faces
Not a portfolio company's problems. A family office is small, private, and holds things of very different shapes, and these four follow directly from that.
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Committed, called and owned are three numbers
They live in three documents, they rarely agree, and which of them matters depends entirely on the question being asked. Most of the time nobody is certain which one they are looking at.
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The quarterly pack is somebody's week
Rebuilt from the beginning every quarter, out of statements that arrive late and in every format, by the person in the office you would least like doing assembly.
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Access was granted once and never reviewed
Advisors, former staff, an old accountant, a lawyer's assistant. Nobody holds a list. For a family whose privacy is the point, this is the exposure that actually matters.
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All of it sits with one person
How the numbers are built, where the documents are, who to call. None of it written down, and none of that their fault.
The endowment model, and what it costs to run
Permanent capital, a long horizon and a heavy weighting to private markets. It is the right model for a family and it is most of why the office exists at all. It also produces an operating problem nobody signed up for, and it gets worse with every manager added.
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Your position is always in arrears
Managers report quarterly and late. The number in front of you describes a world that has already moved, and everyone in the room knows it while they discuss it.
How current each manager's position is
- Manager, buyout in arrears
- Manager, venture in arrears
- Manager, real assets chasing
- Manager, credit current
- Direct holdings current
How much of the book is reported to date
The meeting discusses the reported third. The other two thirds are the part that moved.
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Liquidity is the binding constraint
You have to fund calls whose timing you do not control, out of a portfolio deliberately built to be illiquid. That is a forecasting problem, and it is being solved in a spreadsheet.
Across every manager
Liquidity runway against expected calls
- Manager, buyout ahead of schedule
- Manager, venture on schedule
- Manager, real assets chased
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Look-through is a research project
What the family actually owns by geography, sector and overlapping manager takes a fortnight to assemble and is out of date on the day it lands.
What the family owns, by geography
By sector, across funds and direct holdings
Where you are holding the same thing twice
- One operating company overlap
- One sector overlap
- One geography reviewed
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The paperwork scales with the allocation
Every additional manager is another set of statements, another call schedule and another format. The strategy scales beautifully. The administration does not scale at all."
What arrives, per manager, per quarter
- Capital account statements read
- Call notices read
- Distribution notices read
- Valuations read
- Side letters and amendments indexed
Where the week goes
Every line above the last one is work a system should be doing. The allocation grows; this should not grow with it.
What it runs on
Six layers, and our engineers have configured systems in all of them on real lines. The names are what a plant actually has, not a wish list.
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Portfolio and accounting
- Addepar
- Xero
- Sage Intacct
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Property and operations
- Yardi
- MRI Software
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Reporting
- Power BI
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Documents and collaboration
- Microsoft 365
- SharePoint
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Security and identity
- Entra ID
- Microsoft Defender
Third-party names are listed so you can see what we work in. They are the property of their respective owners and imply no endorsement.
What we do about it
In this order, because a consolidated view built on access nobody has reviewed is a worse position than having no consolidated view.
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Settle the access question first
Who can reach what, across every system and every document, and what should be removed. Then keep it reviewed rather than assumed.
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Read the statements once
Capital accounts, valuations and call notices turned into data as they arrive, so nobody is retyping a PDF into a workbook again.
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Put commitments and liquidity on one screen
Committed, called, uncalled and distributed, against what the office can actually fund and when.
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Write down how it works
So the office does not stop when one person is away, and does not have to be reconstructed when they leave.
There are six of you and no IT department. That is the right shape.
A family office is deliberately small, and nobody is going to hire an IT function for it. What is missing is not headcount. It is somebody accountable for the parts that currently belong to nobody.
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There is no IT department to ask
There is whoever set the laptops up, and they bill by the hour for exactly what they are asked to do.
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Your CFO is the reporting layer
The pack is their spreadsheet. It is usually excellent, and it stops when they do.
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Advisors own their slice and no more
Each administrator reports accurately on their part. The join between them was never anybody's job.
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Small and private is precisely the target
High value, informal process, few controls. Attackers understand the shape of a family office as well as we do.
What has changed, and why now
All of the above used to be a staffing problem. A small office could hire people to assemble the picture, or accept not having it, and most sensibly accepted not having it. That is the part that is no longer true.
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Statements read themselves
A capital account statement is a document with structure. Forty of them a quarter become a table without anybody typing, and the extraction shows its working so it can be checked.
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The question is asked directly
The principal asks, and the answer comes back with the source under it. No analyst in the middle, and no waiting for a cycle to close.
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Watching is continuous
A late statement, an early call, a valuation that moved further than its peers. Raised when it happens rather than found at the quarter.
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Small no longer means under-served
The office keeps the size that makes it a family office and gets the reporting of one several times larger.
Which of ours fit
Two of ours suit the office itself. Two suit what the family owns, and only if it owns that kind of business.
- For the office AI Platform The layer over everything: holdings, commitments, liquidity and documents, asked in plain English.
- For the office Staff Vetting The household and the office both. The people closest to a family are the ones whose checks nobody revisits.
- For a holding Employee Performance If the family owns an operating business where people are the product.
- For a holding Dynamic Pricing If the family owns a consumer or distribution business with a catalogue.
What it is worth to the office
Not a return, and not something to be realised later. Four things that change how the office runs from the quarter it goes in.
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A week of the quarter back
The pack is checked rather than built, by the person whose time is worth the most in the building.
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One view of everything owned
Whatever shape it is, on one screen, without asking anybody and without waiting for a cycle to close.
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Privacy you can evidence
Who has access to what, reviewed on a schedule, and removed when it should be. Assumption is not a control.
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It survives a change of people
The next generation, and the next person in the chair, inherit a system rather than a spreadsheet and somebody's memory.
Neurotic AI Platform, across the family's holdings
The same product every company we work with gets, carrying the screens a family office opens and nobody else does. Asked in the words the family would use.
Ask What is uncalled against next year's expected calls?
Covered, though two managers are drawing ahead of schedule.
- Private funds uncalled tracked
- Florida property occupancy held
- Manufacturing business audit due
- Public markets reported
Uncalled against expected calls
Liquidity runway
The change is that a question about a holding stops being a request. It gets asked at the moment somebody thinks of it, and the answer arrives with the source underneath it rather than three days later in an email from somebody who had to go and look.
AI intelligent dashboards
We build these quickly, and to your business: dashboards that let you see holdings, commitments and look-through exposure in one view, and know what is being called before it lands — with the alerts and notifications that go with them, so a number that moves finds you rather than waiting to be found.
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Holdings
Everything owned, whatever shape it is, on one definition and one screen.
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Commitments and calls
Committed, called, uncalled and distributed, by manager and by vintage, with what is expected next.
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Liquidity
What the office can fund and when, against the calls it does not control the timing of.
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Look-through exposure
What the family actually owns by geography, sector and overlapping manager, kept current.
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Property
Occupancy, maintenance and the lines that are actually moving, asset by asset.
These are the five a family office asks for first. The screens are built to the family, not chosen from a menu, so a screen you need and cannot find anywhere on this list is the ordinary case rather than a special one.
Where to start
A two week audit. One document. No obligation.
Fixed scope, fixed price. It reads your systems and tells you what is wrong, what each fix costs, and what to do first. You keep the report either way.
What it turns up
- Licences paid for and not used
- Firewall rules nobody has reviewed since install
- Administrator accounts with no owner
- Reports built on a source that stopped updating
- An integration failing quietly, nobody alerted
What it reads live
- Licences, systems and what they cost waiting
- Network, remote access and segmentation waiting
- Cloud tenant, identity and admin rights waiting
- Core systems and how they connect waiting
- Reporting, data quality and access waiting
One document: what is wrong, what it costs to fix, and what to fix first.