Company Profiles
How Creating Financial Order Gives UHNW Clients A "Single Point Of Truth"
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This news service recently spoke to an award-winning US firm that specializes in accounting, bill payment and related financial services. A major theme is the notion of helping clients set the full "balance sheet" of their lives – often hard to do but vital to accomplish.
After rises to interest rates and other changes to the financial
landscape, ultra-wealthy individuals and family offices must
rethink how they invest and spend. They need to look at the whole
“balance sheet.”
That seems obvious, but the hard part of it is understanding what
all the elements on that balance sheet are, where they are held,
who has control of them, and whether assets have gotten mixed up
over the years. To some extent, UHNW individuals require someone
like lifestyle guru Marie Kondo to clear out the clutter, as it
were, and impose order on chaos.
While that simplifies what it does to some extent, creating this
kind of order is a big element to what Aquilance (formerly My
Accountant), does. The firm, which handles financial
administration and accounting, book-keeping, and related
services, was founded in 1987 and is based near New Haven,
Connecticut. It won
an award from Family Wealth Report in 2023 for the
“bill pay” category.
“Assets can be difficult to manage if you don’t even know what’s
there. But once you have everything, then it is great,” Patty
Fitzsimmons, director of partnership accounting at Aquilance,
told this publication. She spoke alongside Joe Farren, president,
and partner at the firm, where he has worked since June 2008.
An important issue for business owners is that when they sell up
and retire, they miss the old infrastructure of a business office
to help them to manage their affairs, Fitzsimmons said.
Sometimes they also lose that legacy knowledge from having
someone manage things for them; that’s why a firm like Aquilance,
she said, helps as all of that knowledge and experience is
maintained.
“Technology is super-important in facilitating the services we
provide,” Fitzsimmons continued. (The firm uses FundCount.)
At the outset, a big task is clients is gathering clients'
information on their liquid, illiquid assets (including
properties, boats, planes, and other “toys”) into a coherent
picture, a “personal balance sheet,” she said. Without
taking such a step, assets can be forgotten by the client and by
advisors.
“I think decentralization is often a major issue here. While
clients usually have a primary advisor, it is not uncommon for
there to be held away assets, illiquid assets, and private equity
that are not “on the books” with that advisor,” Fitzsimmons said.
“It then falls on the client to aggregate and understand their
finances wholistically, which they rarely do.”
“Yes, we often see that deconstructing their assumed situation
and rebuilding their actual situation fixes a great deal of
issues. We often see cash movements comingled from various
entities in a `pay from where we have liquidity’ emergency.
These, technically, should be reconciled as due to/due from
transactions, but they rarely are. This alone can cause legal and
tax liabilities, as well as confuse or misrepresent the financial
positions of multiple parties or entities.”
Fitzsimmons brings experience that she acquired in former
roles in accounting and operations at Lime Rock Partners
(private equity), Edgewood Capital Advisors (real estate
investments and bridge lending) and Commonfund (marketable
securities and alternative investments).
As for Farren, he’s worked at the business since the financial
crisis year of 2008 – a chastening experience when many lessons
had to be learned. Before this, Farren worked for various
architectural firms for a total of 13 years.
A "single point of truth”
Wealthy individuals need to unify their financial lives, Farren
said. As families have developed businesses and investments over
the years, they can create all manner of tax and structuring
complexities. Investments can be mingled in ways that lead to
costly tax bills which, if managed better, would be removed,
or significantly cut, he said. Such clients require a “single
point of truth” of the sort that a firm can provide, he said.
As regularly noted in these pages, UHNW individuals and family
offices have been pushing into alternative investments such as
venture capital, private equity and direct investing. This adds
to the complexity. How does Aquilance approach this?
“It has certainly added to the complexity of their lives, but we
tailored this business exactly to serve those clients,”
Fitzsimmons replied. And while it is `more difficult’ for us as
well, it is not `too difficult’, which it often is for them. Our
systems are designed to bring all this together for them in a
central, comprehensive, true double entry accounting system so
the complexity can be well understood and reported on,” she
replied.
Fitzsimmons agreed with the suggestion that clients can be
misinformed about the amount of financial liquidity they
require.
“Often, yes. We hear from clients after they onboard, and we
provide them accurate reporting, that they had a “rough idea” of
what they spend but are often surprised by where and how. Once we
lay out their annual burn rate in black and white (or red) there
is no ambiguity. That helps with funding ongoing cash needs,”
Fitzsimmons said. “If we are tracking capital calls, we can also
help clarify how much, and when, additional liquidity is needed.
In some cases, we see clients keep excessive amounts of cash
(that could be better utilized) because they are being overly
cautious.”
Fitzsimmons said there are some clients Aquilance won’t take on
board.
“There have been cases where clients have requested accounting
that was `inappropriate’. Not necessarily from a legal
standpoint, but from a best practices point of view. We refuse to
provide information that we cannot stand behind. Just because
someone `would like to see it this way’, doesn’t mean we will
report it that way. We can certainly customize reports and
provide selective data when appropriate (i.e. just someone’s real
estate holdings), but we won’t paint a rosier picture than their
reality warrants,” Fitzsimmons said.
Returning to the issue of “imposing order on
chaos,” Fitzsimmons said people need to see matters in the
round.
“It is important that people do not feel like they need to
get organized themselves to move forward with getting organized.
This type of organizing requires a clean rebuild of their
financial world, so spending excessive time trying to `tidy up’
is not time well spent. As gaps are discovered in the information
that we receive, we can focus the right people on the right
tasks,” she said. “Getting to a state of clarity and
understanding can be a slow, steady, iterative process. Questions
will be asked that lead to more discovery, that lead to more
questions, that eventually lead to building an understanding of
the whole picture. This process can be time consuming but is
critical to get to the right place.”