Choosing Financial Performance Reporting Software That Works for Your RIA

When evaluating performance reporting, it's tempting to focus primarily on what the client sees. But the experience behind the report matters just as much.

Think about the full path the information takes, from your custodian and portfolio management system to your team and eventually your client.

Data and calculations

You need to be able to trust the numbers before you can build a good client experience around them. Depending on your practice, that could mean looking for:

• Automated reconciliation with custodian feeds
• Support for time-weighted return and money-weighted return calculations
• Flexible benchmarks across accounts, households, or strategies
• Clear processes for identifying and correcting errors
• Audit trails and change logs

If you already have a reporting platform, this is also a good place to look for unnecessary manual work. Where is your team still checking, transferring, or reconciling information by hand? And does your existing technology have functionality that could take some of that work off their plate?

The client experience

Clients don't necessarily need every piece of data you have. They need the information that's relevant to the decisions and conversations you're having together.

Look at your reports from their perspective.

Can they understand what they're looking at without you translating every chart? Does the information connect back to their goals and financial plan? Does householding reflect how they think about their financial life?

Depending on your client base, you may also want to consider:

• Client portal and mobile access
• Authentication and security
• Customizable report templates
• Goal and planning context alongside investment performance
• Household-level reporting

And this doesn't have to mean creating a completely different reporting experience for every client. A few thoughtful templates tailored to the types of clients you serve can provide consistency while keeping the information relevant.

Your team's workflow

This is where good technology can quietly make a big difference.

Think through what happens each time your team prepares reports, calculates fees, prepares for a review meeting, or updates client information. If there are five manual steps between your systems that could reasonably be reduced to two, that's worth investigating.

Features that may help include:

• Automated reporting and batch delivery
• Integrated billing
• CRM tasking and workflows
• Integrations with financial planning and trading tools
• Application programming interfaces (APIs) for practices that need more flexibility

If you're already using a reporting platform, I'd spend some time here before assuming you need another tool. You may find that an integration, workflow change, or feature you haven't implemented yet solves the problem you're trying to fix.

Think about the practice you're building, too

Your technology needs today aren't necessarily the ones you'll have in three years.

That doesn't mean you need to buy software for a hypothetical future version of your practice. But it's worth understanding where your current platform gives you room to grow and where you may eventually hit limitations.

Depending on your practice, that could include:

• Model portfolios and sleeves
• Composite or strategy-level reporting
• Multiple custodians
• Additional team members and permission levels
• More complex household structures
• Role-based access to personally identifiable information (PII)

The goal isn't to find a platform with the longest feature list. It's about understanding which capabilities matter for the practice you're running and which could become important as it evolves.

What are some of the options?

There's no shortage of performance reporting technology available to registered investment advisors (RIAs), and the right fit will depend on your practice, clients, investment approach, and existing tech stack.

A few options you may come across include:

• Orion: Portfolio accounting, performance reporting, billing, trading, and wealth management technology
• Envestnet | Tamarac: Portfolio management, reporting, trading, rebalancing, and client portal tools
• Black Diamond: Portfolio management and performance reporting with client communication and data aggregation capabilities
• Advyzon: An integrated wealth management platform that includes portfolio management, performance reporting, billing, CRM, and a client portal
• Morningstar Office: Investment research, portfolio management, reporting, and practice management tools
• Addepar: Data aggregation, portfolio analysis, and reporting, particularly for more complex investment portfolios

You don't necessarily need the platform that does the most. You need the one that fits the work you're asking it to do.

Remember, don't treat compliance as the final review

Performance reporting and compliance are closely connected, so compliance considerations should be part of how you build your reporting process, not something added after your templates are finished.

This is an area where your compliance professional should be part of the conversation, particularly when you're deciding how performance information will be presented, advertised, documented, and retained.

Depending on how you're using performance information, considerations may include:

• Gross and net performance presentation
• Applicable performance periods
• Related, extracted, hypothetical, or predecessor performance
• Benchmark and calculation disclosures
• Documentation supporting performance calculations
• Recordkeeping for advertisements and their distribution

If your practice claims compliance with the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS), you'll also want to make sure your technology and processes support the applicable composite construction and disclosure requirements.

For Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)-registered RIAs, performance advertising falls under the SEC Marketing Rule, Rule 206(4)-1. State-registered RIAs may be subject to different requirements, so your specific obligations will depend on your registration and jurisdiction.

The technology can make these processes easier to manage, but it doesn't replace the policies and compliance review behind them.

Evaluating a new platform? Start with your actual workflow

A polished demo can make almost any piece of software look like the answer.

Before you start scheduling demos, write down what you actually need the technology to accomplish.

Start with the questions your reports need to answer for clients. Then map the systems the reporting platform needs to communicate with, including your custodian, customer relationship management (CRM) system, financial planning software, rebalancing tools, and billing process.

From there, separate your requirements into two groups: what you need and what would simply be nice to have.

Your non-negotiables might include calculation transparency, reconciliation support, particular integrations, audit trails, client portal functionality, or specific compliance controls. Another practice's list may look completely different.

Once you know what matters, you can evaluate a smaller group of platforms against the same criteria instead of getting distracted by whichever demo has the most features.

And don't underestimate peer feedback. Other advisors can tell you things a feature page can't, like how implementation went, how responsive support has been, or which features they thought they'd use but didn't. The XYPN community can be especially useful for understanding how different tools work inside real independent RIAs.

Already have a platform? Audit how you're using it

You don't need to be shopping for new technology to go through this exercise.

In fact, one of the most useful things you can do is periodically evaluate the technology you already pay for.

Ask your team where manual work still exists. Look at which reports clients use and which ones rarely come up in conversation. Review your integrations. Find out whether new features have been released that could replace an existing workaround.

You can also look at your templates. Over time, it's easy for reports to accumulate charts, pages, disclosures, and data simply because they've always been there. That doesn't mean all of it is still serving a purpose.

A few questions worth asking:

• What are we still doing manually?
• Which reports or data points consistently lead to useful client conversations?
• Which parts of our reporting process create the most work for our team?
• Are we using the integrations available to us?
• Are there features we're paying for but haven't implemented?
• Has the way we serve clients changed since we originally configured the platform?

You may walk away realizing your current system still fits perfectly. You may identify a few relatively small changes that make it work better. Or you may uncover limitations that are worth keeping in mind the next time you evaluate your tech stack.

All three are useful outcomes.

If you're making a change, give yourself room to test it

Changing a core piece of technology rarely ends when you sign the contract.

Your data needs to move. Your team needs to learn a new workflow. Reports and disclosures need to be configured. Integrations need to work the way you expected.

That's why I'd treat implementation as part of the technology decision itself.

A rollout might include:

1. Clean up your data. Review account names, registrations, tax status, and known cost-basis issues before moving information into a new system
2. Reconcile the old and new systems. Running both systems alongside one another for an appropriate period can give your team time to identify and investigate differences before fully transitioning
3. Build your reporting standards. Decide which reports you'll use for different client groups and establish consistent naming conventions and disclosures
4. Train around roles. Your operations team may need deeper training on reconciliation and billing, while advisors may need more support around meeting preparation and walking clients through a new portal
5. Prepare clients for the change. If their portal or reporting experience is changing, give them a clear explanation of what's new and what, if anything, they need to do

You don't need to make the transition unnecessarily complicated. But building in time to test, reconcile, and adjust can save your team from trying to solve every issue after you've already gone live.

Sometimes, look beyond the subscription price

Software pricing matters, but the number on the invoice isn't the full cost of a platform.

When you're comparing options, consider the time and resources required to operate them too.

That could include:

• Staff and advisor licenses
• Data feeds and market data
• Implementation or customization
• Reconciliation and exception management
• Training
• Ongoing system maintenance
• Switching costs if your needs change later

Then consider what the platform gives back.

If stronger integrations save your team hours of manual work every quarter, that's part of the value. If better reporting makes meeting preparation easier, that's part of the value too.

Viewing your technology as a connected system rather than a collection of individual subscriptions can make these trade-offs much easier to see.

Always remember your reporting should support the advice

There's no universal reporting setup that every independent RIA should be using.

And that's a good thing.

The technology should fit how you serve clients, how your team works, and the practice you're building. Sometimes that means finding a new platform. Sometimes it means getting more from the one you already have.

Either way, I'd come back to the same question: Is our reporting making it easier for clients to understand their financial picture and easier for our team to deliver great advice?

If the answer is yes, keep building on what's working. If there are places where the process feels heavier than it needs to be, that's where I'd start looking for opportunities to optimize.

At XYPN, we're big believers in building your RIA your way. Your tech stack should support that, too.