• Caution #1: Pre-Paying For Multiple Years For Service: The investment admin industry has felt the negative effects of pre-paying for multiple years for investment admin services that were then never delivered because either the portfolio company had an early exit, was wound down, or the investment administrator went out of business. With Finally you will only pay for the services you receive with our annual pricing model.

• Caution #2: Going After The Lowest Price

If you are searching for the lowest price in the investment admin industry and you find a lower cost service provider than Finally, it will only be because: 

The service provider does not provide all of the investment admin services that you will still need to pay for, so in the end the price will be the same once included. 

The service provider is not including all of your costs in their price quote, as they will segment out “other costs”, often with a “*” or as a small footnote, to appear cheaper, but once you include all of the costs that you will have you will find that the total cost to be the same or higher compared to Finally. The service provider has an unsustainable business model and they will eventually provide terrible service and go out of business unless they continue burn venture capital dollars to keep themselves alive. You will then have to spend additional time and money to transfer to a new investment administrator in the future once you become so annoyed that they don’t effecticely deliver their services or after they go out of business.

The service provider only provides a technology investor portal platform, and does not provide investment admin services. Having an Investor Portal is only one small part of doing investment administration, and in fact in you can investment administration without an investor portal.  The vast majority of investment administration is human services oriented, so either you will have to do it yourself (which is complicated, not fun, and time consuming) or have a service provider like Finally do it for you.  Investor portals are just investor portals and they don’t actually do the investment administration that is needed to be done.  They don’t provide a dedicated client manager which is necessary for managing the creation of legal entities, creating SPV/fund docs, tracking and signing subscription docs, wires to/from investors and portfolio companies, maintaining bookkeeping/reconsiliation, accounting, getting K1s done on time, and responding to admin requests from your investors. 

• Caution #3: Banking

Some investment admin service providers don’t provide a direct relationship to your banking provider, leaving many fund managers and companies unable to access or control their bank accounts. This is especially challenging and freustrating if your investment administrator goes out of business. 

• Caution #4: Tax & Accounting

As fund manager ourselves we have had previous painful experiences using other investment admin service providers which is why created Finally.  Tax and Accounting is where most investment admins dropped the ball. We created Finally by identifying these core challenges that other service providers had and decided to create a new solution for the investment admin industry.

Scale: The service provider did not have a scalable solution for providing tax and accounting services because they used a small in-house tax/accounting team.  While the number of customers grew, the internal tax/accounting team never scaled, and as a result the delivery of services became weak, late, or non-existent.  Finally has designed a scalable business model that scales with customer growth and uses an expert U.S. based tax/accounting partner.   

Communication: As a client you were unable to speak with the specific person who did your tax/accounting. With Finally, you can speak with the specific person that did your tax/accounting. 

Late K1s: The biggest reason for K1s being late is that information was not collected in advance and all of the work was being done during tax season.  Finally has developed an innovative process to ensure all information is collected and tracked in advance to provide a more seamless K1s processing experience.