Bookkeeping & Accounting Services
A family typically receives financial statements for its business and monthly brokerage statements for its marketable personal investments. Personal financial statements, however, are often not prepared, and personal financial statements that consolidate all of a family’s personal and business holdings are rarely available. We will prepare quarterly, semi-annual or annual financial statements in accordance with a client’s goals and objectives. The financial statements usually include a detailed cash flow prepared on a month-to-month basis, an annual budget, both a fair market value and cost basis balance sheet, and a consolidated cash flow and balance sheet.
The detailed cash flow statements will include a comparison to the applicable budgeted amounts and provide year-to-date variances. In addition, we will separately report each home as its own cost center with its own separate support schedule that flows into the overall cash flow. This provides each family with the information necessary to understand and manage its assets and cash flow effectively. In addition, we can prepare long-term cash flow projections designed as an implementation and monitoring tool for the family to achieve their long-term goals and objectives.
The balance sheets are prepared on a comparative basis on both a single-entity and consolidated basis. This allows each family to not only review their overall net worth on a periodic basis, but also to track the growth of their assets and liabilities. Without consolidated financial reporting, many families only have the ability to review the performance of certain accounts with no way to effectively integrate that information into their family’s overall net worth and financial plan.
In addition to being an extremely useful management tool for the family, the personal financial statements often provide valuable information to a family’s advisory team. It is not uncommon for income tax, estate tax and insurance strategies to be developed and created in a vacuum without the requisite knowledge needed to determine whether the family has the cash flow or ability to implement and support the strategies on a long-term basis. The personal financial statements will give the family and its advisors the information they need to steer clear of certain strategies and only focus time and resources on those strategies that best fit into a family’s overall cash flow and financial picture.
We can also assist with the maintenance of partnership and LLC capital accounts, the administration of trusts, the preparation and filing of Forms 1099, and the administration of private foundations including the tracking of expenditure responsibility.