Summary
Challenge: QuickBooks was no longer sufficient for Ieomia’s accounting team, as managing its multiple entities led to constant logging in and out, fragmented data, and manual processes.
Solution: Ieomia migrated to SumIt to consolidate multi-entity accounting in one place. They found SumIt, with its spreadsheet importing capabilities to accelerate data entry, and quickly gained cross-company visibility through reporting, registers, and side-by-side trial balance views.
Result: With SumIt, Ieomia considerably reduced manual work through reusable spreadsheet templates. Consistency across entities improved greatly, and the time it takes for the team to review and correct transactions across companies has dramatically decreased.
Customer Overview
Ieomia is a family office responsible for accounting and reporting across a portfolio of entities and structures, including participated investments and an increasing number of trusts.
The Ieomia team balances day-to-day transaction processing, e.g., wires, subdocs, and reconciliations, alongside quarterly and annual close workflows that require accurate multi-entity reporting and audit support.
Challenges
As Ieomia grew, QuickBooks became increasingly inefficient. The team described the experience as fragmented, with the system requiring repeated logins across companies and making routine tasks take far longer than they should.
“Everything was just so fragmented with QuickBooks,” Jennifer Kanold, CFO at Ieomia, told the SumIt team. “It was so inefficient for us to go company to company and have to log on a million times.”
Ieomia had previously cycled through multiple accounting systems, including PeachTree (now Sage 50 Accounting) and, eventually, landed on QuickBooks as their best option for the time being. The team felt that generic SMB accounting software struggled to support the structures and reporting needs common in family offices — especially participated investments and household-style cash flow visibility.
QuickBooks, having worked well for other companies, was a natural choice given its advertised robust capabilities. However, it just wasn’t working for what the Ieomia team needed.
“A lot of the softwares have never been able to serve us as a family office,” Jennifer explained, and as inefficiencies compounded, the team saw a clear fork in the road. They could add headcount, upgrade their systems, or both. They chose to prioritize technology.
Evaluation Process
Ieomia evaluated alternatives, including Sage, and briefly considered all-in-one platforms like Archway, but their existing investment platform (Addepar) made an all-in-one less compelling.
Ieomia ultimately chose SumIt for two core reasons:
Purpose-built for family offices (not a repackaged general ledger)
Usability — The team found it more intuitive day-to-day than alternatives
“SumIt was just much more user-friendly… It was definitely built for a family office, while other softwares are just adapted to a family office.” — Jennifer Kanold, CFO at Ieomia
Solution
After moving from QuickBooks to SumIt, Ieomia leaned heavily into two capabilities. The first was spreadsheet imports for bank transactions and journal entries. Marta Millero-Quincoses, Ieomia’s accounting manager, cites this as a huge time-saver, especially for things like month-end valuations and brokerage accounts.
Many of these journal entries span 10 or more lines, particularly for participated investments that need to be allocated across multiple entities. Entering those transactions directly into an accounting interface was time-consuming and error-prone, making spreadsheet-based uploads a far more efficient and reliable workflow for the team.
Marta can now build templates once, then reuse them monthly/quarterly, especially for participated investments and valuation workflows. Using spreadsheet templates, the team can upload ~20 journal entries in a single import instead of entering them individually. Additionally, the spreadsheet drag-and-drop feature, in particular, has "changed their lives,” Marta quoted.
Specific use cases that Ieomia highlighted are:
Month-end and quarter-end valuation entries (including brokerage and investment updates)
Capital call and distribution allocations across multiple entities
Recurring invoicing templates for certain entities
Bank transaction uploads for banks without feeds
The second capability Ieomia leverages the most is cross-company reporting and register views to compare, validate, and standardize entries across entities. The team emphasized how SumIt made it easier to validate that participated investments were booked consistently across the investing entity and participating entities.
“I love that I can look across companies very easily — we couldn’t do that before. Now, we can just look at all the companies side by side and make sure they’re all being booked the same.” — Jennifer Kanold, CFO at Ieomia
Further, by using registers and cross-company views, the team could spot inconsistencies and update entries quickly across entities. What used to be a slow, entity-by-entity cleanup process has now turned into a rapid standardization workflow.
Key Results
Ieomia has significantly reduced repetitive manual entry by using SumIt’s reusable spreadsheet templates for recurring journal entry patterns. From entering many entries entity-by-entity, the team can now update a template once and import across companies in bulk.
Additionally, SumIt helps Ieomia compare companies side-by-side and quickly validate alignment across participated investments. What previously took substantial time and effort for the team has now been reduced to minutes.
Ieomia also noted that family office stakeholders often care most about inflows/outflows and clarity at the individual level — views that were previously manual to assemble. As Jennifer explained, she used to have to prepare these reports by hand, but now, it’s easy for the stakeholders to see the inflows and outflows of cash themselves.
As Ieomia collaborated with another family office environment, the team further highlighted the value of being able to switch between instances without repeated logins.
Advice To Other Family Offices
Ieomia expects trust complexity to increase and sees the trust and partnership-style accounting approach that SumIt takes as the most valuable next step.
“It’s only going to get more complicated,” the Ieomia team emphasized. “So if we can get that under control now, I think it’ll be easier in the long run.”
The team looks forward to continuing to partner with SumIt as its technology solution, especially as participation structures, roll-ups, and reporting as the environment grows more complex.
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