Nine out of ten family offices we meet run their books on QuickBooks or Excel. QuickBooks forces a separate company file for every entity, so an office with 12 entities maintains 12 files and rebuilds the combined picture in a spreadsheet every month. Past 5 to 10 entities, the manual work takes over the month, and the office starts evaluating a real general ledger.
This guide compares the seven platforms those offices evaluate. SumIt is ours and it goes first. Each entry covers what the platform is, published pricing where it exists, who it fits, and its limits, including ours.
The 7 Best Family Office General Ledger Platforms at a Glance
Platform | Best for | Model |
|---|---|---|
SumIt | Family offices that want a modern, purpose-built multi-entity GL | Accounting-first, integrates with Addepar and Bill.com |
Asset Vantage | Offices that want GL and performance reporting from one ledger | Investment reporting first, with a GL added |
Archway | Offices that want software plus an outsourced back office | All-in-one with managed services |
FundCount | Offices with heavy fund and partnership accounting needs | Integrated portfolio, partnership, and GL accounting |
Sage Intacct | Offices that want a strong generalist mid-market GL | Generalist, marketed to family offices |
NetSuite | Offices anchored by operating businesses already on a corporate ERP | Generalist cloud ERP |
QuickBooks Online | Offices at the very beginning, with few entities | Generalist small-business accounting |
What Makes a Family Office General Ledger Different
Generic accounting software assumes one company, one set of books, and corporate GAAP reporting. A family office runs many legal entities in one operation and carries accounting vocabulary (trusts, partnerships, inter-entity loans, capital accounts) that generic tools do not include.
The reporting is also different. Families ask for a net worth statement and a sources and uses of cash view; generic software produces a corporate cash flow statement, which is why offices keep building the family reports in Excel even after buying software.
Around 86% of our clients keep books for more than one legal entity. Generic accounting software assumes one company per file, so the mismatch starts on day one.
How We Evaluated
Three questions, the same ones we recommend for any software decision:
Does it cover 80 to 90% of your needs? 100% is impossible, so the test is whether it solves the pain points that consume most of your team's time.
Will your team actually adopt it? A system that takes a year to stand up fails before the payoff arrives.
Do the people behind it understand family offices? This work has its own vocabulary and patterns, and generalists learn them on your budget.
1. SumIt
SumIt is our platform: a general ledger built specifically for family office accounting.
Every entity lives in one login, with the ownership structure modeled on an entity map. Inter-entity journal entries book both sides at once and the system refuses to post an entry whose sides do not match; across our multi-entity clients, roughly 97% of inter-entity entries are system-generated from bank feeds and bill payments.
Consolidation runs in one click, in four types (full consolidation with automatic eliminations, simple combine, equity pick-up, and the net worth statement), and every transaction carries a complete audit trail.
Clients also connect Claude or ChatGPT to their books through our MCP connector to query data and build reports.
We keep the scope narrow on purpose. Investment performance analytics belong to Addepar, and SumIt feeds directly from it; bill pay runs through Bill.com.
One limit: SumIt runs in US dollars today, with multi-currency on the roadmap. Implementations run in as early as six weeks, with an onboarding team that maps and cleans your existing charts of accounts.
Best for: single and multi family offices from a handful of entities to several hundred that want the accounting done exceptionally well and best-of-class tools around it.
2. Asset Vantage
Asset Vantage started as a portfolio and performance reporting tool and later added a native double-entry general ledger, so the accounting and the investment reporting come from the same books.
The integrated approach is the alternative to pairing a dedicated general ledger with a reporting platform like Addepar.
Third-party reviews report more than $400 billion tracked across 400+ families, entity-based pricing published from around $30,000 per year, and strong multi-entity and multi-currency handling.
Third-party reviews also report one consistent trade-off: the interface is built for finance teams, and principals or family members without an accounting background find it less approachable than reporting-first tools.
Best for: offices that want GL and performance reporting unified in one platform and have accountants driving it.
3. Archway
The Archway Platform combines accounting, investment data aggregation, partnership accounting, bill payment, reporting, and a client portal, with the option to add outsourced back-office services.
It handles complex structures to institutional reporting standards and carries a long track record with large offices.
The model brings real weight, a substantial platform plus a services component. Offices that want a lean, self-managed stack should scope the implementation effort, the adoption curve, and the total cost against what they actually need from it.
Best for: offices that want one vendor for software and operational services together.
4. FundCount
FundCount comes from the hedge fund world and integrates portfolio accounting, partnership accounting, and the general ledger in one platform, with multi-currency support and deployment options from public cloud to your own hardware.
It publishes starting prices, roughly $24,000 per year for small offices up to $34,000 for the single family office package, with hosting and implementation fees on top, which makes budgeting easier than with quote-only vendors.
Its depth sits in investment and partnership accounting. Before committing, check the family side of the books: the household layer, the bill pay workflows, and the reporting the principals will actually read.
Best for: offices whose complexity concentrates in funds, partnerships, and multi-asset investment accounting.
5. Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct is a strong mid-market cloud GL with real multi-entity capability, dimensions, and consolidation, and Sage actively markets it to family offices.
As a generalist system it brings mature accounting infrastructure and a large partner ecosystem.
Check two things. Intacct's model is corporate, so trusts, personal expenses, net worth reporting, and family-style cash flow take configuration and workarounds.
And prospects who come to us from Sage products consistently describe renewal and consultant costs that climbed steeply over the years, so model the five-year cost with the consultants included.
Best for: offices with corporate-heavy structures and in-house Intacct expertise, or operating businesses already on it.
6. NetSuite
NetSuite is Oracle's cloud ERP, with genuine multi-entity consolidation, multi-currency support, and dimension-based reporting, running some of the most complex corporate structures in the world.
Family offices anchored by significant operating businesses sometimes standardize on it, because the operating side already lives there.
The fit question mirrors Sage Intacct's at a larger scale. The model is corporate, so trusts, personal expenses, net worth statements, and family-style cash reporting take real customization, and implementations run months with consultant budgets to match. An office running NetSuite adapts its processes to the ERP, and that cost lands hardest on small teams.
Best for: offices whose center of gravity is an operating company already running NetSuite.
7. QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks holds the majority of the small-office market. It is inexpensive, every accountant knows it, and for one or two entities it works, which is why most family offices start here.
The limits are structural. QuickBooks runs one company file per entity with no consolidation across files, so a growing office ends up with a login per taxpayer ID and a combined picture rebuilt in Excel every month. Intuit's newer enterprise offering targets multi-entity corporate use. QuickBooks itself was built for small businesses, and the family office vocabulary (trusts, partnerships, net worth statements, inter-entity automation) sits outside it. Past 5 to 10 entities, the workaround costs more than purpose-built software.
Best for: brand-new offices with one or two entities.
How to Choose
Start from your complexity. Count your entities and the loans, fees, and shared expenses moving between them. A structure with a handful of entities and public securities has different needs than one with 30 entities, tiered ownership, and active partnerships.
Run the three evaluation questions against your shortlist, ask every vendor to demo your actual structure, and call references from offices that look like yours.
We also see buyers over-weight checking every feature box. Current capability on your three biggest pain points matters more, and so does the company's trajectory, because every feature is buildable.
If your structure is multi-entity and the books are the problem, schedule a demo and bring two entities that owe each other money. We will show you what the intercompany entries and the consolidation look like when the system does the work.
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