Summary
Challenge: Oceana Blue Family Office had outgrown QuickBooks as its entity count grew to over 40 legal entities across multiple jurisdictions. The firm had no consolidated view across entities through its previous solution of QuickBooks + Excel, with limited record-keeping infrastructure and no formal accounting function. The team needed a purpose-built solution to support the family's growing complexity and next-generation transition planning.
Solution: After evaluating several platforms, Oceana Blue selected SumIt for its family office origins and intuitive multi-entity architecture. The platform's flexibility accommodated the firm's unique cross-border structures and non-standard ownership arrangements.
Result: The team now produces formal financial statements across all entities for the first time, with a single accountant owning the platform end-to-end. What once required hours to compile across siloed systems can now be done in minutes, and the firm can now confidently support consolidations, next-generation reporting, and continued growth.
Customer Overview
Oceana Blue is a single-family office based in Central America, serving a multigenerational Latin American family with investment activity spanning private equity, hedge funds, real estate, and private companies across multiple currencies and jurisdictions. The office manages approximately 42 legal entities and operates a US presence out of Coral Gables, Florida.
Sara, the firm's CFO, joined the family enterprise roughly 15 years ago as its first dedicated hire. Today, the team has grown to five employees, with a Chief Investment Officer, an in-house accountant, and a financial analyst. The firm has evolved from purely investment-focused work into a more holistic family enterprise, taking on governance, estate planning, corporate structure, and next-generation succession planning.
Challenges
For much of the family office's history, accounting and investment reporting were treated as roughly the same function. Addepar handled investment performance reporting, and QuickBooks managed whatever bookkeeping existed. As Sara explains, this distinction — between investment reporting and proper accounting — is one that the broader family office world often underestimates.
"Reporting and accounting are two different things," Sara noted. "We have an obligation for transparency and record-keeping across all entities that goes beyond the value of an investment."
The gap became increasingly difficult to manage. Entities were siloed in QuickBooks with no ability to consolidate, and some were tracked in Excel altogether. With over 40 legal entities and cross-border investment activity, the patchwork approach couldn't keep pace.
Making matters more complex, the family had historically pooled multiple members into shared investment entities — a structure that created near-partnership-level complexity within each vehicle.
Beyond operational strain, the longer-term stakes were rising. Several next-generation family members are US-based, and Sara was acutely aware of what that would eventually require: proper cost basis tracking, step-up documentation, and a full accounting record.
Evaluation Process
Peer input carried significant weight for Sara and the team during the software evaluation process. Through a referral from a fellow family office operator she trusted — who had already explored SumIt — and after attending a demo at a Family Office Exchange (FOX) event in Chicago, SumIt quickly rose to the top of the list.
The firm evaluated two or three platforms in total. One competitor, she recalled, gave the impression of being a corporate accounting solution retrofitted for family office use. SumIt stood apart precisely because of where it came from.
"SumIt came out of a family office. The difference is that what fills the needs of a corporation doesn't necessarily fill the needs of a family office, and SumIt does." — Sara, CFO, Oceana Blue
The ease of navigating transactions across multiple entities was also immediately apparent. Coming from QuickBooks, where each entity was a silo, the ability to update transactions, apply account codes, and tag data across entities in a single workflow was a meaningful differentiator.
Solution
Implementation at Oceania Blue was slightly complicated, as the office had opened its Coral Gables location just a year earlier. The team also hired a dedicated in-house accountant, and the hiring process paused rollout for a period as that hire was onboarded. When the accountant came on board roughly ten months ago, the implementation resumed in earnest.
Further, the firm has a historical pooled-investment model, where multiple family members co-invested through shared entities with individualized ownership stakes. This required careful thought around how to set up the chart of accounts, tagging layers, and entity architecture. Sara credits SumIt's team for staying the course and finding the best solution for the team.
"The complexities that we had would make almost anybody walk away [from helping us implement the software]. But we felt extremely supported by SumIt. There was a lot of hand-holding," she credited.
The team is now fully operational, with the in-house accountant serving as the primary SumIt owner. Sara noted that the accountant — who came from a QuickBooks background — took to the platform immediately. "Her words were: 'This is so much better.'"
One structural decision Sara made in parallel with the implementation has already simplified accounting significantly: in 2025, the family transitioned from pooled investment entities to individual investment vehicles for each family member. While it meant more subscription documents and wire transfers, the payoff in accounting clarity was immediate.
Key Results
Sara and the team have noticed four considerable results from implementing SumIt and using it in their daily operations.
First, the firm has formal financial statements for the first time ever. Several entities that had previously been tracked in Excel or not formally accounted for at all now have proper balance sheets, income statements, and trial balances produced from a true ledger.
Additionally, multi-entity data is now retrievable in minutes, not hours. Cross-entity queries that once required manual compilation across QuickBooks files and spreadsheets can now be completed almost instantly using SumIt. As one example, Sara described pulling all corporate agent fees paid across every entity:
"Getting that information from QuickBooks and Excel before would have taken hours. With SumIt, you search by account code or tag, and they all come up across all entities. You can export to Excel, and you're done in two minutes." — Sara, CFO, Oceana Blue
The third result has been a fast, smooth team adoption. The in-house accountant adopted SumIt with minimal friction despite transitioning from QuickBooks. The platform's usability made onboarding straightforward for a lean team. The team is also noticing a substantial difference with its newfound reconciliation-ready architecture, thanks to SumIt.
Finally, and most importantly for family members, the firm is now able to set the foundation for next-generation planning. With proper accounting records now in place across entities, the family office has the infrastructure needed to support step-up basis documentation and the more complex US tax planning that next-generation family members will eventually require.
Looking Toward the Future
Oceania Blue is still early in its SumIt journey. The firm, with increasing international exposure, is particularly looking forward to helping SumIt co-develop multicurrency capabilities, as Oceania Blue continues to add foreign currencies to its existing portfolio.
More broadly, as the family continues to expand — new holding companies are already being discussed — and the team grows alongside it, SumIt will serve as the accounting backbone for whatever that structure becomes.
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