The purpose of a family office is to organize and centralize the management of a family’s personal and business financial affairs, and to maintain the financial house in as good an order as that of a well-run public company.
The origin of the family office concept came from extremely wealthy families, with net worth in today’s money of more than $250 million. The family office was often a separate entity, with employees ranging from a CEO or CFO and a chief investment officer, to a staff of bookkeepers and personal assistants that could do everything from monthly financial statements through booking travel and personal care appointments.
In a traditional family office, no service or calling is beyond the scope of the office’s services. Employees may be called upon to pick up a car from the auto dealership or bail out a troubled family member facing a precarious situation.
Many of these wealthy families have made their money from success in business. The family office staff is separate from the business financial staff and will not be involved in the operations or even the accounting for the business.
They will, however, be extremely familiar with the business as it relates to the family. The family office will stay on top of business matters as they directly relate to family wealth, with issues such as loan guarantees, cash management, timely reporting to shareholders and the family office, dealing with tax planning or other benefit planning as it relates to family members, obtaining current valuations of the company and ensuring that the value of the business is enhanced by smart family and succession planning. The family office may also assist with acquisitions and sales of various business entities via the lens of the family estate plan, capital resources, investment objectives and the best use of talent and resources.
Answering the eternal questions
Clients, no matter how wealthy, always want to know the answer to this question: “How am I doing”? The right family office set up can answer that question from a financial and a personal perspective. What’s surprising to me, however, is that many entrepreneurs cannot really tell you the IRR or CAGR of their closely held business interests. To me, this is an important benchmark that a family office should provide.
The family lawyer or accountant may be suitable to sit in the chair of the executive of the family office. Clearly it is a role for an educated, well-versed financial executive, and not a salesperson. This person should be knowledgeable in many areas, including accounting and recordkeeping systems, law, finance, markets, taxes and risk management.
EMIR KLEPO/Myvisuals – stock.adobe.com
In addition to their own personal experience and knowledge, this person should be able to build a team of subject matter experts in any area to support the family’s needs. For example, some family offices own property, businesses, alternative investments or investment accounts overseas. The traditional family office may or may not actually manage the financial assets. It is worth noting that asset oversight is different from asset management. Oversight typically involves coordination and working with investment advisors and money managers, and not actually selecting individual investments. The family office may perform due diligence on investment managers and consultants, but not oversee the actual day-to-day management of the assets. The family office plays a vital role in the independent calculations and evaluation of performance — for each portfolio individually and for the entire portfolio collectively.
Family offices that do get involved with day-to-day asset management are typically those whose fortunes were built by managing investments and those that are so large (typically north of $1 billion) that they have built or acquired their own investment management staff.
The common tasks that a family office may oversee include:
Comprehensive oversight of family assets.
Contemporaneous recordkeeping of all financial assets.
Daily management of property and other real asset holdings.
Preparation of financial reports showing cash flow, income, gains, losses and statement of assets and liabilities.
Coordination of the advice and services received from all the clients other professionals.
Being responsible for implementation and ongoing management for each matter under oversight.
Offering personal concierge services to the family members for personal or business matters.
Family and entity governance and carrying out the wishes of the family matriarch or patriarch.
Oversight of philanthropic activities, foundations or gift trust accounts.
Each family has its own set of unique issues, and each family wants to delegate some or all these matters. But in the traditional family office, where the entity is owned and controlled by the family, there are typically no conflicts of interests or other profit-making activities. The entity’s sole purpose is service to the family. All in the families
The type of family office services that could be provided by a CPA firm is known as the multifamily office. The MFO is a professional services firm that delivers family office services for more than one family. The origin of the multifamily office comes from traditional family offices where the family decided to use their team to help others for a fee. But beyond a traditional family office that decides to serve others, many for-profit private enterprises have flourished in the multifamily office model, including progressive law and CPA firms.
The multifamily office frequently serves families less wealthy than the single family office, but performs many of the same critical functions with respect to the financial side of family life. For the CPA firm with clients whose net worth exceeds $50 million or so, this model offers the opportunity to deliver a very personal and important service for the right CPA firm. The right firm is likely to be already deeply involved in many families’ financial matters and often has a strong personal relationship with the founding or senior members of the family who may have created the wealth.
Of course, the accounting firms that serve these types of clients are frequently larger firms with old-school partners who want nothing to do with matters beyond accounting and tax. This is another matter that falls into the practice management category. But fortunately, as aging partners retire, the younger generation sees the benefit of delivering elevated levels of service to the firm’s better clients.
A multifamily office is intended to be a for-profit entity. And as such, before you as an individual or CPA firm decide to offer these services, you must carefully document your services, compensation methods and the required licenses, if any. You would also want to be sure that your E&O insurance policy provides adequate protection.
Smaller firms also service clients whose net worth exceeds $50 million, yet most seem “too busy” to elevate their services to the level of family office for their best clients. This is a lost opportunity to serve one of the firm’s best clients at the highest level, and deepen the relationship like no other service. If you still do not want in, at least help your client find a firm that is already set up to serve in this capacity.
Getting paid — and licensed
Many CPA firms are still tied to the hours and rates economy and will track their time and simply send bills each month based on the time spent. While this can work, it is not the most common method of compensation. More common than hourly would be flat fees for a list of covered services.
Some firms will also add fees for assets under management or oversight and help to interview and select the actual asset manager. If your firm also intends to offer asset management, consider segregating your fees for AUM versus traditional family office services. If the asset management division becomes significant, a separate entity may also make sense.
Be careful with the asset management part. You do not want to detract from the significant role of the basic family office and drag the relationship down to the less personal and significant commoditized services of asset management.
Whether your family office fees are based on hours or flat-fee billing, the issue of licensing will still apply. CPAs can avoid registration as an investment advisor if their investment advice or financial planning advice is merely incidental to the practice of public accounting, and not advisory in nature.
Naturally, this is a very subjective standard and many CPAs that I talk to do not register. For many firms, however, they could be dancing on the edge of a highly regulated industry and should seek professional counsel as to whether registration as an investment advisor would make sense.
Do not let the name “registered investment advisor” fool you: The registered investment advisor license and registration is the same license that covers all financial planners. You may be deemed by regulators to be practicing investment advice and financial planning to the extent that you get involved in matters such as shaping goals and objectives and providing advice that is more than incidental to the practice of accounting for the family wealth.
Registration as an investment advisor will also subject you to the same rules about compensation, marketing and audit as other financial services firms registered as RIAs, requiring a compliance professional or consultant. To the extent that you can move client money, have logins to financial accounts or have check-signing authority, your registration level will need to be upgraded to that of a custodian.
Some multifamily offices do oversee or manage assets for their family office clients. Offering these services is easier if you are already a larger investment advisory firm with experienced asset managers on staff. This often is not the profile of the typical CPA financial planning shop, and these are not the types of clients where you should be cutting your teeth in the investment advisory business. A model that makes sense here is to use your intelligence to oversee other managers and critically evaluate their offerings in terms of the criteria that you are looking to fill.
Whether your CPA firm has a vibrant wealth management division or not is irrelevant when it comes to offering family office services. The family office role for a CPA firm is just like outsourced CFO work, except for a family rather than an entity. Call it CAS for the wealthy family entity. As that outsourced CFO, you will also rely on other outside subject matter experts and coordinate their efforts so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Should you choose to work with another firm that calls itself a multifamily office, be careful. In my experience, I have seen many financial advisors — from the largest well-known name firms down to small shops who want to move upmarket — simply call themselves a family office without the experience, desire or services to warrant that title.
The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.
The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.
In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.
President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings.
Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.
Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.
Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed.
The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.
Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition.
Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time.
“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said.
One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load.
“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai.
Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies.
“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.
However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area.
“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai.
As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales.
“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai.
While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves.
“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”