Summary
Challenge: Compleet Family Office Solutions was spending excessive hours manually consolidating financials across complex family structures. QuickBooks lacked multi-entity visibility, forcing exports to Excel and costly manual work. Reporting delays created tax planning uncertainty and inefficiencies that clients were reluctant to pay for.
Solution: Compleet implemented SumIt to centralize entity reporting, streamline consolidations, and improve visibility across structures. With SumIt’s intelligent and intuitive system designed for family offices, the Compleet Family Office team onboarded its most complex client — a 22-entity family structure — into a single system.
Result: The firm significantly reduced manual spreadsheet work, which, in turn, accelerated reporting turnaround and delivered proactive tax planning for the first time in four years. Compleet is now positioned to scale additional family relationships without adding disproportionate overhead.
Customer Overview
Compleet Family Office Solutions LLC is a multi-entity advisory firm for ultra-high-net-worth families with complex entity structures, trusts, and operating businesses.
Led by Ed Drake, MSFP, AEP, CFP, and supported by CPA Lisa Moss, Compleet provides consolidated reporting, tax coordination, cash flow oversight, and partnership accounting support for families operating across multiple trusts, LLCs, real estate entities, and development businesses.
In describing the typical environment that Compleet operated in previously, Ed referenced family structures that included as many as 12 trusts and numerous related entities — but nobody dedicated to doing books. With limited consolidated visibility across the structure, it was difficult for the team to confidently assess overall accuracy or completeness across the entire family enterprise.
This is a common challenge for family office accounting teams managing multi-entity structures without a purpose-built general ledger — and one that SumIt was specifically designed to solve.
For family offices managing complex multi-entity structures, consolidated financial reporting remains one of the most time-consuming and error-prone workflows in the industry. Because Compleet Family Office Solutions serves families with up to 22 entities and multiple operating businesses, neither QuickBooks nor enterprise solutions like Sage could solve its problem without significant trade-offs.
This is how they implemented SumIt, a purpose-built family office accounting software, to consolidate reporting, eliminate Excel-based workflows, and deliver proactive tax planning for the first time in four years.
Challenges
Compleet’s primary pain point was the time required to prepare consolidated financial statements across multiple entities.
“The amount of hours that goes into doing a consolidated financial statement across entities was just killing us,” Ed described. That frustration ultimately triggered Ed and the rest of the team to begin searching for a better solution.
From the accounting side, Lisa Moss saw the same issue play out in day-to-day reporting workflows. QuickBooks, she explained, was not built to provide a comprehensive, multi-entity view, which meant routine reporting required extensive manual work outside the system.
“The inability of QuickBooks to have an overarching view of multiple entities at the same time to do any kind of reporting is super cumbersome. We would have to export everything into Excel and go through a process there.” — Lisa Moss, CPA, Accountant at Compleet Family Office Solutions LLC
With QuickBooks lacking true multi-entity reporting, the team had to go through the following manual steps — and more — to produce consolidated views:
Export each entity individually
Rebuild consolidated views in Excel
Manually eliminate intercompany transactions
Reformat reports for client presentation
As Ed noted: “Nobody wants to pay for people to manually do what technology should be able to do.”
Further, when Compleet evaluated enterprise solutions such as Sage, the team ran into more complications. For starters, the estimated cost was roughly 8x higher than SumIt for basic licensing and also required dedicated personnel to manage.
While enterprise solutions offered robust features, the team estimated that they would use only about 10% of the available functionalities. So, while QuickBooks didn’t go far enough, products like Sage went too far beyond what Compleet’s team needed.
At the same time, the limitations of their existing systems were becoming increasingly clear in another critical area: investment performance reporting.
For one family’s real estate portfolio — spanning multiple development projects and operating entities — Compleet needed a reliable way to calculate internal rates of return (IRR) and evaluate overall project performance. Without a system designed to support that analysis, the firm engaged accountants to build a custom spreadsheet model.
The result was significant: tens of thousands of dollars in development costs, as well as ongoing manual updates to maintain accuracy.
At the family level, these inconsistent or incomplete reporting views caused disputes and tension. Ultimately, what began as a workaround became a costly and time-intensive reporting infrastructure built entirely outside the accounting system.
Evaluation Process
Ultimately, Ed and the Compleet team considered three paths forward.
The first option was to remain on QuickBooks and continue managing consolidations manually. While this required no system change, it meant accepting ongoing exports to Excel, manual eliminations, duplicated effort, and more.
The second option was to adopt an enterprise-level accounting platform such as Sage. Though the systems come with robust multi-entity capabilities, the team would have to accept paying high costs for features they would never use.
The third and final option was to implement a purpose-built solution designed specifically to address complex entity consolidation without introducing unnecessary overhead. This approach would need to bridge the gap between underpowered small-business accounting software and overbuilt enterprise systems. That’s where SumIt came in.
SumIt emerged as the right fit because its technology:
Solved the core problem of multi-entity consolidation
Provided intuitive workflows similar to tools the team already understood
Matched the firm’s scale and pricing requirements
Eliminated the need to hire additional staff to operate the system
Rather than forcing Compleet to adapt to enterprise-level infrastructure, SumIt aligned with how the firm actually operates.
Solution
The Compleet Family Office Solutions team was excited to see the significant impact SumIt has made in such a short time.
1. The first fully prepared tax meeting in 4 years
During a recent quarterly meeting, Compleet received financial data at the last minute, requiring a weekend turnaround.
Using SumIt, reporting was completed on Sunday, accountants arrived prepared on Monday, and tax liabilities were calculated proactively.
“This is the first time in four years we didn’t know what to do with ourselves because the meeting went too smoothly,” Ed joked. Previously, all tax discussions had relied on estimates due to incomplete data.
2. Consolidated reporting for $10+ million in loan collateral
Further, one family structure required consolidated reporting tied to $10+ million in loan collateral.
With SumIt, Compleet can now generate consolidated reports annually (and more frequently as needed) without rebuilding them manually.
3. Enhanced visibility into large-scale wealth structures
Compleet works with families whose book values do not always reflect current market realities. In one instance, a comprehensive mark-to-market review showed that a family’s true net worth was nearly 3x greater than previously estimated.
Having centralized, structured financial data allows Compleet to better support estate planning and strategic decision-making. Ultimately, they’re able to position themselves as a highly accurate, detailed firm.
4. Positioned for growth
Excitingly, Compleet is currently:
Onboarding two additional families
Potentially adding ~10 executive-family relationships
Supporting structures involving up to 12 trusts
With manual Excel-based processes, scaling would require substantial additional staffing. With SumIt, Compleet can grow more efficiently.
“Having SumIt is going to be such a godsend for us as far as the amount of time we’re spending.” — Lisa Moss, CPA, Accountant at Compleet Family Office Solutions LLC
Key Results
With a centralized reporting foundation now in place, Compleet Family Office Solutions LLC is focused on deepening the analytical capabilities layered on top of that infrastructure.
As the firm continues onboarding additional families, the team sees an opportunity in enhanced dashboard functionality that surfaces real-time balances, upcoming obligations, and aggregated net worth views across complex structures. Greater flexibility between cash and accrual reporting would further support proactive tax planning, while expanded partnership accounting and profit-sharing capabilities would streamline calculations that are currently performed manually.
For Compleet’s team, mark-to-market visibility alongside book and tax values remains a strategic priority, particularly for estate planning and bank reporting purposes. Over time, Compleet also anticipates the need for more robust internal rate of return (IRR) and investment performance tracking within the platform.
With core consolidation now solved, the firm is positioned to evolve from simply assembling financial data to delivering deeper performance insight — without returning to costly spreadsheets or overbuilt enterprise systems.
Why Family Offices Choose SumIt Over QuickBooks and Sage
Compleet’s evaluation mirrors a pattern SumIt sees across the family office space: QuickBooks lacks true multi-entity consolidation, while enterprise platforms like Sage are overbuilt and require dedicated personnel. SumIt fills the gap as the only multi-entity general ledger built specifically for both single and multi family offices like Compleet.
If your firm is managing consolidations manually across trusts, LLCs, and operating entities, see how SumIt works.
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