In short: search for software to manage holdings and you mostly find tools for corporate groups: shareholder lists, directors, registry deadlines, board meetings. A family office has a different problem. It needs to know what it holds, through which company, against what commitment, at what value on what date, and where the document is that each of those figures came from. That is not a corporate-law problem. It is a register.
Two things with one name
Entity management for a corporate group looks after its own subsidiaries: who the directors are, when the shareholder meeting is, which powers of attorney exist, which registry deadlines are running. There is good specialised software for that, and if that is your problem, you need it.
Holdings management for a family office looks after investments: limited partnership interests in funds, units in co-investment SPVs, direct stakes in companies, SAFEs, convertible notes, options, secondaries. The questions are economic. What is committed, what has been called, what has come back, what is it worth, and how do we know?
Most family offices keep this in a spreadsheet, because the corporate tools do not ask these questions and the portfolio tools are built for listed securities.
What belongs in a holdings register
For every position, whatever the instrument:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Fund LP, SPV, direct stake, SAFE, convertible, option, secondary. Each one calculates differently |
| Holder | Which of the family's companies holds it. Decides the books and the tax |
| Counterparty | Fund and fund family, GP, administrator, portfolio company |
| Commitment and cost | Commitment for a fund, purchase price for a direct stake or secondary |
| Cashflows | Calls, distributions, interest, repayments, each with a date |
| Valuation | Value, date and source: NAV from the statement, a financing round, a market price, your own estimate |
| Documents | Subscription, LPA, statements, notices, agreements, on the position rather than in a folder |
Where the instruments differ
A register that records everything as "a holding with a value" is quick to build and wrong at the first special case.
Fund interests have a commitment that is drawn over years. The value is the NAV from the last capital account statement, which is a quarter old when it arrives. Distributions can be recallable, and then they increase the unfunded commitment again.
Co-investment SPVs look like a fund but hold a single company. To answer "how much do we have in company X", they have to be added to the direct stake in X, or the same company appears twice in the register, separately.
Direct stakes have shares, a cost and a value that only changes with a financing round, a sale or your own estimate. Here the source of the value matters more than the value itself.
SAFEs and convertible notes have no shares yet. They have an amount, a valuation cap or a discount, interest in the case of a note, and they convert at some point. Recorded as shares before then, they distort every metric.
Options have a vesting schedule. What is exercisable today changes every month.
Secondaries are bought at a price that differs from NAV. Use the NAV as cost and you flatter or punish your own returns.
Where a spreadsheet fails
Not on the number of rows. On three things:
- Several holders. As soon as positions sit in more than one company, each needs its own books and the family needs a combined view. That is a fourth spreadsheet that reads from the others.
- The source. A cell says €6.75m. From which statement? Without a reference to the document, an administrator's correction can no longer be traced.
- Several editors. A register two people write to is a database, whether or not anyone installed one.
Our comparison with Excel says honestly when that starts to matter, and when the spreadsheet stays the right answer.
How Zahlenwerk handles it
Wealth Management by Zahlenwerk records every position with its instrument type: fund LP and SPV with commitment, calls and distributions, direct equity, SAFE, convertible, option with vesting schedule, secondary. Each position has a holder, the family company that holds it, and that company has its own books in the same system.
The directory knows the counterparties: funds, fund families, SPVs, portfolio companies and people, enriched with sector, stage and geography and connected to the positions. So you can ask how much sits in one company through a fund, an SPV and directly.
Documents live on the position. Statements and notices become records, and every figure links to the page it came from, with its source type: capital account statement, financing round, market price or manual entry.
What it does not do: Zahlenwerk does not manage the directors, boards and registry deadlines of your own companies. Corporate entity management software is built for that, and if that is your main problem, it is the better choice.