Billing can be time-consuming, error-prone, and stressful, especially if you’re a lean RIA focused on growth. With the Envestnet platform and help from LibertyFi, advisors can configure billing to meet their needs and automate most of the functions, creating a streamlined process that allows advisors, principals, and home office users to focus on attracting prospects and serving clients.
Billing administration, not just billing computation
One of the great advantages of using Envestnet is its powerful billing capability. Unlike other wealth management platforms that offer billing computation, Envestnet provides billing administration.
Envestnet is able to facilitate:
- Alerts to move cash
- Billing clients
- Automatically collecting client fees
- Automatically debiting a single client fee to pay custodians, managers, advisors, and vendors
In contrast, other platforms can only compute bills. Advisors have to send invoices, collect fees, and pay all of the vendors themselves, which takes advisors away from what they do best: meeting with and serving clients.
Automatically capturing account activity for billing
Billing automatically occurs at any account date and for all account-related activity, including:
- Account creation
- Withdrawals
- Contributions
- Fee changes
- Structural changes with third parties like custodians
Any activity that takes place in the account—contribution, withdrawal, or termination—will be picked up during the off‐cycle billing period. This is most helpful during transitions, allowing advisors to be paid more quickly instead of waiting until their first full quarter to receive funds.
Because the platform automatically tracks billable events, advisors can be more confident about billing accuracy.
Ensuring advisors are paid correctly
Many firms use different allocations and splits to pay advisors. These can be complex and difficult to manage.
With the Envestnet platform, allocations can be configured and processed automatically to ensure that everyone receives the fees they’re due. Each advisor, or group of advisors, can have their own personalized fee structures within the same firm.
Firms can support multiple custodians and pay each advisor efficiently and on time.
Configuring billing to meet your firm’s needs
The Envestnet billing system is powerful and highly configurable. With help from LibertyFi, you can customize billing to meet your firm’s specific needs. Working with the firm’s principals, we set up and configure the billing system to support the needs of individual advisors or branches.
To provide principals with insights into the amount each advisor is earning, LibertyFi can create summary reports and ensure that advisors are paid, reducing the need for an outside accountant. Many firms just need a bookkeeper with this arrangement.
In addition to handling on-cycle quarterly billing, LibertyFi will provide monthly off-cycle billing to provide the cash flow that breakaway firms sometimes need. For example, if an account is added on January 20th, it will be billed first in the February off‐cycle from January 20th through March 31st. Its first full-billing cycle will be in Q2 from April 1st to June 30th.
Envestnet also provides easily accessible reports to help advisors ensure cash is available for fee collection. Below is an example of a Billing Debit Report.
For illustrative purposes only. Not based on actual client data.
Summary
Although billing is essential to a successful RIA, not many advisors have the expertise or time to manage a manual billing process, which can be time-consuming, error-prone, and stressful.
With the Envestnet platform and help from LibertyFi, advisors can configure billing to meet their needs and automate most of the functions, creating a streamlined process that allows advisors to focus on what they do best: attracting prospects and serving clients.
LibertyFi has the experience and expertise to configure the Envestnet billing system to meet your needs. For more information, contact Alli Jordan.