(Note: I am the Vice President of Business Development at Advisor Exchange)
We’ve been hard at work over the past year building out our newest solution – Reconciler. The need for a tool such as the Reconciler is required for any firm looking to pull HTML harvested (screen scraped) data into performance reporting software.
Problem One
Missing ‘Buy’ transactions in the data files - This is most often seen when clients make contributions to retirement accounts. The contribution – a cash deposit – is included the data file, but the second transaction for the purchase of the securities is not available. This is due to the financial institution website layout which will very often “wrap up” the contribution and the buy into a single line transaction. Why do they do this? To make it easier for their account holders to see the activity. But the problem is that HTML harvesting scripts have a hard time breaking this into two separate transaction. And to take that a step further, some accounting systems require three or more transactions for contributions:
- Deposit into cash account
- Sell out of cash
- Buy of securities
The advisor is left with only 1/2 the transaction in the reporting system – a whole bunch of deposits of cash with no buys. This leads to quite a bit of manual data entry on the part of the advisor or staff.
Problem Two
Missing symbol/cusip in the transaction file - The data file includes share amount, price, transaction type, total value, and description but the file does include symbol/cusip to tie the transaction back to a position in the portfolio. You can probably imagine how much manual data entry this leads to if you only have ‘Buy 500 shares at $47.87 for a total of $23,935.’ What was bought?
The Reconciler now allows advisors to create global rules to resolve both issues. The results are dramatic. Advisors are reporting that they are spending 50% – 70% less time reconciling aggregated data from Advisor Exchange as compared to the time spent pre-Reconciler.
Advisor Exchange will be holding demonstrations of the Reconciler over the the next 3 months. I will post the dates as they become available.
