The pages that answer “family office reporting in Excel” mostly end in a platform. Before anything is replaced, the current report can be measured. A measured report shows what to fix. Sometimes it shows the fix is small.
Three failures are the ones a reader cannot see.
- A typed figure is a figure nobody can trace. Once a balance is keyed in, the cell no longer says where it came from.
- A private-fund value rolled forward from an old capital statement is a guess. It may be a good guess. It is still a guess.
- A broken link between workbooks fails silently. The cell keeps its last value. The total still adds up.
How common it is
The surveys agree that reporting by hand is widespread, and that offices know it.
- About a third of family offices do more than half of their reporting manually (Campden Wealth and AlTi Tiedemann, Operational Excellence Report 2025, 146 offices).
- RBC and Campden Wealth’s 2025 report names manual processes and over-reliance on spreadsheets as the most cited operational risk. Automated investment reporting rose from 46% to 69% of offices (RBC and Campden Wealth, 2025 family office report, 317 offices).
- About four in ten use third-party consolidated reporting software (Citi Private Bank, Global Family Office Report 2025, 346 offices).
- BDO lists reliance on QuickBooks and Excel among its ten hidden challenges of running a family office.
The rise to 69% is in investment reporting. It does not say the consolidated family view, the entity accounts or the quarterly pack are automated. Those are often where the hand work remains.
Why reports come to be rebuilt by hand
Nobody designs a report to be rebuilt by hand. It gets that way in three steps.
More entities. A trust is added, then a holding company, then a partnership for one investment. Each one gets its own workbook, and the family view links to all of them. A third of offices manage 50 or more bank accounts (BofA Private Bank, Family Office Study 2025, 335 offices in North America).
More portals. Every bank, custodian and fund administrator has its own login and its own statement format. None of them feeds the workbook. Someone downloads each one and keys it in.
One person who built the workbooks. The links, the tabs and the order of steps live in one person’s head. BDO calls this “when the glue is gone”. The report works because that person knows which cell to check.
A test you can run in an afternoon
Four steps. A pen, the last quarterly report and the workbooks behind it.
- List every step that builds the quarterly report. For each one, write how it is done (by hand, linked or automated) and the hours it takes. Add up the hours.
- Count the figures typed rather than linked. In each workbook, a cell holding a number rather than a formula or a link is typed. Trace each typed figure to the statement it came from. Note any you cannot trace.
- Note the age of every private-fund value. For each fund, write the date of the capital statement the value rests on, and how many quarters old it is on the report date.
- Find the links that would fail without an error. List every link between workbooks. Check which point to a file that has moved, been renamed or been saved over. A link that cannot update keeps its old value and shows no warning.
The result is one page: steps, hours, typed figures, fund ages, and links at risk. That page is the measurement.
A worked example
The office in the Controls Check specimen is fictitious, and so is every figure below. Its quarterly report is assembled by hand from 31 statements across 11 workbooks. It takes about 40 hours a quarter. Six of its figures are typed rather than linked.
| Step | Done how | Hours | Where it can go wrong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Download 31 statements from 9 portals | By hand | 6 | A statement for the wrong month |
| Key balances into 11 workbooks | By hand | 14 | 6 figures typed, not linked |
| Value 7 private funds | Last capital statement, rolled forward | 8 | Statements up to 2 quarters old |
| Consolidate to the family view | Linked workbooks | 7 | A broken link fails silently |
| Format and send | By hand | 5 |
Read the table for where the hours go and where the risk sits. They are not the same place. Keying balances takes the most time, 14 of the 40 hours. But the private-fund values and the links carry the risk nobody sees. A fund value two quarters old looks exactly like a current one on the page. A broken link shows nothing at all.
The six typed figures are the easiest to fix. Each one has a statement behind it, and each can be traced to its line. Left typed, each is a number the report’s reader trusts without being able to see where it came from.
What it would take
The direction is simple to state. Each statement is read once, in one place. Each figure in the report is tied to the line of the statement it came from. Each private-fund value carries the date of the statement behind it.
That can be done in the workbooks the office already has. It can also be done in other tools. Either way, the measurement comes first, because it says which of the 40 hours are worth removing and which figures are worth tracing first.
Frequently asked
Is building the family office report in Excel a problem in itself?
No. A spreadsheet with every figure linked to its statement, and every fund value dated, can be traced. The problems are typed figures, undated values and links that fail without an error.
How long does the afternoon test take?
For an office the size of the specimen, a few hours. The longest step is tracing typed figures, and that depends on how many there are.
Does measuring the report mean replacing the software?
No. The measurement says where the report breaks. What to change, and with which tool, is the office’s decision.