Recommendations on Portfolio Accounting Software?

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bchad

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Anyone have some portfolio accounting/portfolio management software that they can recommend for an RIA who’s setting up to run managed accounts? Mostly we need to track positions, cash flows, and P/L statements for compliance and performance analysis purposes.
Currently, we are tracking stuff on Excel spreadsheets for each account, with a new one created and archived every day. This is clearly a non-scaleable solution, and so I’ve been trying to find something that works before the obvious problems with this setup become pressing.
Anyone here have recommendations or experience with this stuff?
Since we’re doing tactical asset allocation and discretionary macro, we mostly trade ETFs, Futures, and options on both, as well as spot FX, so it would need to handle those assets.
Hopefully not outrageously expensive.
Downloading data from custodians would be very nice too.
It seems that Captools is popular, but I can’t really get a good view of its capabilities.
Anyone else have suggestions, products they like or don’t like, or other ideas? I’m open to outsourcing, to the extent that it is safe from 1) our clients’ perspective, and 2) intellectual property perspective (i.e. not taking that data and trying to reverse engineer our process or piggyback trades on it).
 
Advent - fairly expensive, biggest marketshare
Portfolio Center - cheapest but I think only uses USD
Black Diamond - expensive outsourcing solution
Morningstar Office - relatively new, but might be worth looking into
 
I’ve worked with Advent and their products from both sides - used as 3rd party outsourced solution and in-house solution. They have good products and perhaps more importantly good service.
They do run the range of products though (and it’s all pretty customizable), so it’s important to specify what you need. If you want a contact there, let me know.
 
You can also check out SimCorp. They’re a Danish company and compete with Advent. They’re advantage is that they handle multiple currencies very well, and platform is very scalable.
 
My firm uses Advent and I hate it. I wish we would have gone portfoliocenter from the beginning.
 
Thanks guys. Advent and Black Diamond were on my radar, but it’s helpful to know about some of the others.
 
We use Black Diamond, very much like it. Outsourcing is very nice for us…small shop, don’t want to hire a full time person just to run portfolio accounting. It is safe from a client privacy perspective, just make sure your privacy policy is written to allow for it and comply with Reg S-P. Also, wouldn’t worry at all about prop information.
FX may force to do Advent though, they may be the only system that handles it, don’t quote me on that though. Have never heard rave review of Advent, even from firms that use it and would never change.
Portfolio Center is decent, have not used it but our decision came down to PC or BD…chose BD obviously.
M* Office is still a new kid, we have a subscription to it for other reasons, don’t use the portfolio accounting but it looks a little cumbersome.
 
sjv1030 Wrote:
——————————————————-
> You can also check out SimCorp. They’re a Danish
> company and compete with Advent. They’re advantage
> is that they handle multiple currencies very well,
> and platform is very scalable.
My firm uses SimCorp as does many other insurance companies, both smaller and larger ones. It can do all of the (few) things you list there, and all of the instruments you mention. You can find info on simcorp’s web site, it’s a .com address. You should ask about the Model Portfolio concept as well (tactical allocation). Advent is one of their competitors. I haven’t heard of Captool before. You might want to outsource the running of the servers though (you’d would want to hook up with a DBA to take care of the underlying Oracle database).
 
Bump…how much does Black Diamond and SimCorp cost on a yearly basis? I cannot find the prices. We’re looking to download accounts from custodians, along with comparing asset allocations to model portfolios etc. We use PCenter currently though, but are looking for other options.
 
Palantir Wrote:
——————————————————-
> Bump…how much does Black Diamond and SimCorp
> cost on a yearly basis? I cannot find the prices.
> We’re looking to download accounts from
> custodians, along with comparing asset allocations
> to model portfolios etc. We use PCenter currently
> though, but are looking for other options.
May I ask why you are looking to change from PC? We are looking at going to PC right now (from Advent).
 
PC is not bad, and we are not necessarily looking to change out of it. It’s just that in order to interface with multiple custodians it costs roughly 1k to add each interface. So we are just looking around to see what else is there. I believe though that Morningstar can interface with multiple custodians for no charge.
 
Palantir Wrote:
——————————————————-
> Bump…how much does Black Diamond and SimCorp
> cost on a yearly basis? I cannot find the prices.
> We’re looking to download accounts from
> custodians, along with comparing asset allocations
> to model portfolios etc. We use PCenter currently
> though, but are looking for other options.
No one seems to publish prices, as far as I can tell. You just call them up and they ask you a bunch of questions and try to figure out how much they can squeeze out of you.
I did see that Black Diamond had a program for small RIAs that seemed very reasonable, but I can’t remember the details and am too lazy to go look it up right now.
 
Black Diamond is asset-based; we pay 1.8 bps for assets that we report on. Remember that also includes their daily reconcilation, support, etc…
 
The.Unit.Root Wrote:
——————————————————-
> Black Diamond is asset-based; we pay 1.8 bps for
> assets that we report on. Remember that also
> includes their daily reconcilation, support,
> etc…
They have to have a min then, which I am sure I won’t qualify for.
 
We will be implementing BD beginning 3rd week of may and would be interested in knowing some of the best practices to avoid pitfalls and get it done right. Are any of you involved in implementing BD from scratch and have any lessons learned shared?
 
We use Portfolio Center at my work for $1.5B in mutual funds.
Personally, I really dont like it. I guess if we had 12 clients and I had all day to tinker around it would be fine. Its interface is extremely poor too. I just don’t have enough reports/info at my finger-tips.
We’re thinking about going to Orion Advisor Services. Check them out as well. I should start looking at BD and Advent too.
I have no clue what we pay for PC. We do outsource our back office support which cost nearly $200k/year… they do a horrible job too.
 
bchadwick, looks like you have to use SSG for custodian to get the deal and probably only on accounts at SSG.
Are you importing history astuteinv? Go through it with a fine tooth comb, it will save a lot of time later. Also, just ask questions, if you want something specific its probably possible but the set-up person won’t necessarily “speak your language”. We moved 3 years ago to BD, maybe they front-end has gotten better. Our service contact now has been great. We get feeds in from Fidelity without any problems. We have some feeds from DST that we’ll catch transactions missed (not BD’s fault, DST’s fault). The data is clean, the client interface is great. ByAll is great 75% of the time. Let me know if you have any specific questions.
 
I’ve been really impressed with Black Diamond. I was responsible for selecting our performance reporting/portfolio reconciliation provider when my firm went independent about a year ago (We used to be housed under a corporate RIA through our old broker dealer).
Advent seemed too “out of the box” and I wasn’t really that impressed with their interfaces and performance reporting capabilities. I also liked the feel of their smaller business.
Bchad, I think I still have a lot of their information in my email somewhere including pricing, sample reports, asset classification schemas, etc… I want to say that BD has a hard billable of $15,000-$20,000 or 1.8 bps of assets, whichever is greater.
Even the Advent rep I spoke to admitted that BD was the “slickest” product out there.
 
Chuckrosx8, I’d love to see that info, since I’d like to check them out without having a sales rep calling back every 30 seconds to push the product. I have a positive impression from much of what I’ve read so far (both here and elsewhere).
My email is [email protected] if you can send them. I promise to use them only for my own information and research, since presumably BD wants to customize everything to each client.
As for our immediate problem, it looks like our solution has been to negotiate with another wealth manager to share marketing and back office resources, but that can still fall through and I wouldn’t mind completing that research in any case.
 
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