When I went from managing money professionally in my own hedge fund to managing my own capital in my private company I was surprised by how difficult the administration was and how few tools were available. First, I wanted to be able to visualize and analyse all my holdings in one single place and keep track of my various investment themes no matter which brokers/custodians I was using. Second, I wanted all the tax reporting taken care of for me so that I did not have to keep track of my acquisition values and profit/loss reporting manually.
If you are a private investor and only use one online broker, generally there is enough functionality to take care of your tax reporting but if you are acting through a company then you are on your own.
When analysing my holdings I have always been frustrated with the fact that the online brokers that I have been using do not display my returns for positions including paid out dividends. I like to invest in dividend generating instruments like preference shares but each time I get my dividend the performance of the position drops and I need to keep track of the paid out dividends in relationship to my investment and my acquisition values myself.
Another source of frustration has been currency exchange rates, with the tools that I have been using I have always had to update and manage exchange rates myself.
A lot of tools also lack the required transactional granularity, many work with just balance based accounts where you simply can see your current holdings. This might be fine if you have very low requirements but it does not work for companies since you need the transactional granularity to be able to configure your accounting rules that will take care of the automated accounting exports for you.
Ever since we created the fantastic enterprise wealth management core system that Bricknode is I have been dreaming of the day when we could take all this power and package it as a new application that could be used by corporate investors to manage their assets and liabilities together with the automated accounting.
Today I am so incredibly proud that we can open the doors for early sign up to Bricknode Investment Manager, the tool that will be the home for everyone who conducts investing through a company structure.
