How technology can help you gain more control of your investment portfolio

Jessica Else Partner, Cloud Finance, PwC Canada

Having clear and accurate financial information is critical for investors, like family offices and wealth owners, with complex portfolios. Increasingly, investors need timely reporting and tracking of accounting activities in their portfolios and the tax impacts they create.

But manual processes can make it hard for investors to track portfolio performance and value efficiently. Some of the challenges include:

not being able to get information when you want it;
complex processes that require more people and resources than should be necessary;
having to request information from multiple sources to try to build a holistic view of your investments; and
data errors due to manual practices.

Timeliness is critical. Information often comes too late for your accountant to do anything other than preparing your tax return. Because of this, you may be missing out on opportunities to incorporate deeper insights and analysis that lead to better tax planning.

As a wealth owner, you need to go beyond tax compliance and bring all of your holdings together into a consolidated view so you can better monitor what’s happening across the entire portfolio. This is also key to uncovering insights that can identify tax opportunities, risks, concentrations in your portfolio and underperforming assets.

The good news is the investment accounting process doesn’t have to be so hard. This is where technology and new tools that streamline and improve the timeliness of the process can help.

Drive better decisions with automated investment reporting

By adopting tools that automate investment reporting, investors can more easily process monthly portfolio statements from investment managers. Automated workflows can help investors seamlessly track holdings, monitor transactional activities and assess any foreign exchange implications.

Using cloud-based platforms, investors can access prepared, consolidated and succinct reporting, giving them more control and insight into their portfolios. And because these tools can be automated to run an analysis monthly or several times a year, investors will benefit from more timely reporting and tracking. This is essential to staying on top of the tax planning for investments. Through earlier access to this information, ahead of your year-end compliance deadlines, your tax teams can assess and plan for tax impacts and prepare your filings more quickly and accurately.

An opportunity to refocus on insights and strategy

Besides helping you grow your portfolio in a tax-efficient way, automated reporting tools will give you key insights to better evaluate investment performance across your holdings. With improved visibility, you can focus on interpreting what the insights mean to you now and in the future, all while reducing the administrative burden of processing data.

Embracing tools that combine human ingenuity and technological innovation will give you a more complete picture of your assets that will ultimately lead to even better outcomes for your portfolio, including:

your people will be able to shift away from data entry and spend more time looking for opportunities and analyzing your information;
quicker access to clear and actionable information will help you make more timely decisions about your portfolio; and
by integrating your services, your tax, investment and accounting advisors will be able to work together more effectively to optimize your portfolio from a tax perspective.