Consolidated reporting

Consolidated reporting is a single, regular report of everything a family owns, across every bank, custodian, entity and property, valued on the same date and on the same basis. In private wealth it does not mean group accounts consolidation, the accounting exercise that merges a parent company with its subsidiaries; it means one view of a family’s assets wherever they sit. It is the document every other decision about the family’s wealth should start from.

What consolidated reporting covers

A working consolidated report brings together:

• Bank and custody positions from every custodian, mapped to one asset classification.
• Entities: holding companies, trusts and foundations, with what each owns and who owns it.
• Assets no bank reports: property, private company stakes, private equity commitments, loans to family members.
• Liabilities: mortgages, lombard loans, guarantees and capital calls still to come.
• Performance and costs, measured the same way across providers.

The hard part is the data, not the software. Statements arrive in different formats, on different dates, with different asset labels. Someone has to collect them, reconcile them and question the anomalies every month or quarter.

What does consolidated reporting mean for a family’s wealth?

For a family, consolidated reporting means one document that answers what you own, where it sits, what you owe and how it performed, across every bank and entity. Without it, each bank reports only its own slice, and decisions about risk, liquidity, tax or succession are made from an incomplete picture.

Why the bank’s report is not enough

Every private bank offers a portfolio report. What it does not tell you is that the report stops at its own walls. Some banks will add assets held elsewhere, but their incentive is to show what they hold, and they rarely value your property, your company or your entity structure. For a founder with several banks and entities in more than one country, the result is a pile of partial reports and no total.

That is the pattern behind consolidated reporting across multiple banks: several accurate statements, no single balance sheet. PWA designs and runs the operating layer around private wealth, and consolidated reporting is usually the first thing it builds, through administration and back office, then read against the investment policy in investment and wealth architecture. The family owns the data and the model, not the software vendor.

If you receive several bank reports and still cannot state your net worth with confidence, a written second opinion will show what is missing and what it would take to fill the gap.

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This entry is part of PWA’s plain-language glossary of terms used in modern family office architecture.