What 65% of family offices wish they could automate (but haven't yet)
By Shivani Kaul, Content Marketing Advisor
Here's something that might surprise you: when the North America Family Office Report 2025 asked family offices about their biggest operational concerns, cybersecurity didn't top the list—despite the fact that 71% of them experienced some form of cyber-attack in the past year. Instead, the number one operational worry keeping family office executives up at night is something far more mundane, and yet in many ways far more insidious: the proliferation of manual processes and their close cousin, the over-reliance on spreadsheets.
According to the comprehensive study by Campden Wealth and RBC, 36% of family offices report being genuinely concerned about having too many manual processes, while 33% express similar anxiety about their dependence on spreadsheets. These might seem like quaint, almost old-fashioned problems in an era of artificial intelligence and automated everything, but the reality is that for the organizations managing some of North America's largest private fortunes, the humble spreadsheet remains both an indispensable tool and a persistent source of operational risk.
The Paradox of Partial Automation
What makes this situation particularly frustrating is that family offices aren't ignoring technology—quite the opposite. The adoption rate for automated investment reporting and wealth aggregation platforms has surged to 69%, up dramatically from just 46% the previous year. Cloud-based data storage has achieved universal adoption, and document management systems are present in 85% of family offices. So why, with all this technology in place, are manual processes and spreadsheets still causing so much concern?
The answer lies in the inherent complexity of what family offices are trying to accomplish. As one chief investment officer from Massachusetts explained in the report, "Even though many family offices have wealth aggregation and automated investment reporting, a considerable amount of manual processing is still required. This doesn't seem to make much sense, except when you realize that these systems can only do part of the job."
The challenge is that family office portfolios are extraordinarily diverse, spanning everything from public equities and bonds to private equity funds, venture capital investments, real estate holdings, and sometimes even lifestyle assets like art collections or classic cars. Each of these asset classes comes with its own reporting format, its own timing, and its own quirks. Private equity managers alone might use 20 or 30 different portals for their reporting, and getting all that data into a unified system remains stubbornly manual for many organizations.
The Daily Grind of Data Entry
One family office president from Florida captured the reality perfectly: "The bane of most family offices' existence is the manual work reporting and record-keeping for private equity and alternative assets. A day doesn't go by without receiving a capital account or general partner statement. Taking that data and getting it into our record-keeping systems is manual."
This isn't just an inconvenience—it's a genuine operational risk.
Every time someone manually keys data into a spreadsheet, there's an opportunity for error. Every time a figure is transcribed from a PDF statement into an accounting system, there's a chance for a decimal point to migrate or a number to be transposed. For organizations managing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, these small errors can compound into significant problems, affecting everything from performance reporting to tax calculations to investment decision-making.
The Cost Equation That Doesn't Add Up
The obvious solution would seem to be investing in better technology, and indeed the report shows that automated investment reporting systems and wealth aggregation platforms are the most sought-after pieces of technology among family offices. These platforms can provide a comprehensive real-time view of an organization's financial position by consolidating data from multiple sources, and participants describe them as the "source of truth" within their families.
But here's where the economics get complicated. Leading platforms like Addepar, Eton, or Orion come with six-figure annual price tags, which would add materially to the IT budgets of small and midsize family offices. For context, small family offices (those with $100-250 million in AUM) spend an average of just $100,000 annually on IT—about 11% of their total operating costs. Adding a sophisticated wealth aggregation platform could effectively double or triple that technology spend.
The report suggests that unless a single family office has more than $500 million of AUM, the outsourcing option often makes more economic sense than building in-house technology capabilities. Multi-family offices and wealth managers can spread the cost of these technology solutions across their entire client base, achieving economies of scale that single family offices simply cannot match on their own.
The AI Light at the End of the Tunnel
There is, however, genuine reason for optimism. The report reveals that family offices are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence as the solution to their manual processing woes. A striking 63% say they would like to use AI as an aid in investment reporting, while 74% want to deploy it as a risk management tool. Already, 29% are using AI to assist with investment reporting, and 30% are using it to manage and research text from news, social media, and transcripts.
The promise is tantalizing: AI-enabled systems that can scan, read, and interpret investment performance reports automatically, eliminating the need for manual data entry entirely. As one CFO from Illinois put it, "The day of hard-keying data into a spreadsheet is drawing to a close." These tools are beginning to emerge, and they offer the potential to transform what has been a labor-intensive, error-prone process into something seamless and reliable.
The Path Forward
For family offices still wrestling with spreadsheet dependency, the report suggests several paths forward. Those with sufficient scale can invest in comprehensive technology platforms that, while expensive, can dramatically reduce manual processing and the associated risks. Smaller organizations might find that outsourcing to multi-family offices or wealth managers—who have already made these technology investments—offers a more cost-effective solution.
And for everyone, the rapid advancement of AI-enabled tools offers hope that the fundamental problem—the gap between the diverse formats in which financial data arrives and the unified view that family offices need—may finally be closing. The 36% who are concerned about their manual processes today may find that within a few years, those concerns have become a distant memory.
The spreadsheet isn't going away entirely, of course. It remains one of the most flexible and powerful tools ever created for financial analysis. But its role is shifting from a repository of manually entered data to a tool for analysis and decision-making, fed by automated systems that handle the tedious work of data collection and consolidation. For family offices willing to make the investment—whether in technology, outsourcing relationships, or AI-enabled tools—the era of drowning in spreadsheets may finally be coming to an end.
What's Your Spreadsheet Costing You?
If your family office spends just 10 hours per week on manual data entry and reporting, that's 520 hours per year—time your team could spend on strategic decisions, not copying numbers from PDFs.
DwellFi's AI does the heavy lifting:
- Automatically ingests data from PE/VC statements
- Consolidates multi-asset portfolios in real-time
- Generates investor-ready reports in minutes, not days
The best part? You don't need a $2.1M IT budget to get enterprise-grade automation.