The AdvisorEngine Portfolio Management Suite contains a robust billing engine that allows you to set broad billing settings to your firm’s preferences while fine tuning the billing settings for any client or account as needed. Calculations are made automatically at the intervals you specify, invoices generated easily when a period ends, and extracts can be easily sent to your custodian in bulk for the actual billing amount debiting. In this article, we’ll take a high-level look at the whole of the billing process with links to more detailed explanations of each section.
The billing engine begins with the base level settings of things like the length of the billing period, whether you bill in advance or arrears, average balance or period end balance, and what types of fees you charge. If different advisors or groups of advisors in your firm bill differently, it’s possible to create Billing Groups so all accounts under certain advisors have their own settings.
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Fee schedules tell the billing engine how much to bill each account over the course of a billing period. Fees can be flat or they can be BPS calculated in either a cliff or blended tier setup. Typically, one Fee Schedule is created to be the firm-wide default and beyond that, override schedules can be created that apply only to accounts under specific advisor(s) or only to specific accounts.
When using a cliff or blended tier fee schedule, accounts can be grouped together into a Billing Household which then uses the sum of the household’s value for determining which tier all the accounts in the household will be billed at.
You can also create percentage-based fee splits if the revenue from any one rep code should be allocated to two or more different advisors.
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Beyond setting your billing options and fees above, you can create special exclusions and discounts for any account or group of accounts as needed. Exclusions, furthermore, can be set to specified securities or security types so they are exempt from billing regardless of which account they may be in. If needed, you can also override billing start or end dates for any given account and also add lock points. (See the article linked below if you are unfamiliar with the use of lock points.)
Lastly, if you are billing in advance, the billing engine will follow your settings for billing adjustments and automatically apply credits or debits as needed for the difference between what was billed in advance and the actual period outcome.
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Once you have all the pieces above in place, billing is ready to be run regularly. At the end of the billing period, all of the above are tied together in the end-of-period calculations that the billing engine runs. Settings determine when and how the calculations happen, fee schedules and overrides are compared against account start and end dates and any discounts and exclusions are applied. The total amount to be billed is then recorded in the Revenue dashboard. At this point, you can check the totals if needed and make any last-minute period adjustments.
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After you have determined that the period billing is accurate, you can lock the period to prevent any further changes. Once locked the system will assist you in submitting the correct information to your custodian so the accounts can be actually debited for the invoiced amount.
If needed, you can override the debit account for any billed account as a standing setting. For example, in a household of four accounts, you may specify to have the fees for all four be taken out of one of the accounts so you only need to make sure one account has the appropriate cash level.
Once the period is locked and you are prepared to submit the transactions to the custodian, you can also preview and then generate the fee billing invoices for your clients. If you are using the Client Portal, these invoices are automatically posted to the portal’s document section for your clients to view.
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