Asora vs Excel: Which Platform Serves Family Offices Better?

Introduction

Excel has been the backbone of family office reporting for decades. It’s familiar, flexible, and requires no additional software investment. For many single family offices, Excel spreadsheets have provided the foundation for tracking investments, generating reports, and managing family wealth across multiple entities.

But as portfolios grow in complexity and alternative investments become more prevalent, the limitations of spreadsheet-based reporting become increasingly cumbersome. Manual data entry, version control issues, and security service concerns are pushing family offices toward specialized investment management software designed specifically for their unique needs.

Below, we’ll look at the real-world trade-offs between continuing with Excel versus adopting Asora, a modern family office platform built for today’s complex wealth management requirements.

Excel’s Role in Family Office Reporting

Excel became the default choice for family offices because it offered unprecedented flexibility at minimal cost. Financial advisors and family office professionals could create custom formulas, build complex models, and generate reports without requiring specialized technology training or significant software investments.

For smaller, simpler portfolio management, Excel continues to be an adequate solution. A single family office or individual wealth owner managing primarily public securities across a few accounts can often manage their reporting needs with well-designed spreadsheets. The software provides complete control over calculations, formatting, and data presentation.

Excel also integrates well with other systems through CSV exports and basic data imports, making it a natural choice for family offices that need to compile information from multiple sources into unified reports for family members and wealth managers.

The Limitations of Excel for Modern Family Offices

1. Manual Data Entry and Consolidation: Team members must log into multiple custodian portals each month, download statements, and manually input data into spreadsheets. This time consuming process creates opportunities for errors that can impact investment decisions, while multi family offices face exponentially more complex data aggregation as client numbers grow.
2. High Error Risk and Version Control Issues: Excel’s flexibility becomes a liability when multiple users work with different copies of spreadsheets, leading to conflicting reports and confusion about current data. A single misplaced decimal point or incorrect formula can cascade through complex spreadsheets, producing reports that fundamentally misrepresent portfolio performance.
3. Lack of Integration with Custodians and Banks: Excel can’t automatically connect to banks and investment platforms to retrieve real-time data, forcing manual downloads and reconciliation from dozens of sources. This creates significant delays in consolidated reporting cycles, often making information outdated by the time reports are generated.
4. Weak Security and Compliance: Excel offers basic security features like encryption and version history, but it is not designed for managing sensitive family financial data at scale. In practice, spreadsheets are often shared via email or stored across multiple devices, leaving no central control over access, distribution, or updates. This creates risks around data leakage, compliance, and governance — especially for families managing complex, multi-generational wealth.
5. Single-User Limitations and Key Person Risk: Excel files are typically owned and maintained by individual team members, creating significant key person risk when that person is unavailable. The single-user nature limits collaboration and prevents multiple people from simultaneously working on the same file without version control problems.

How Asora Addresses These Pain Points

Asora is the natural evolution of family office reporting. It’s management software for family offices that’s designed specifically to address the limitations that emerge as families scale beyond what Excel spreadsheets can effectively manage.

Automated Data Aggregation

Asora’s data aggregation capabilities eliminate manual data entry by connecting directly to banks, custodians, and investment platforms. The software guarantees connections to any bank or financial institution that provides data feeds, automatically updating portfolio information in real-time.

This automation transforms reporting cycles from weeks of manual compilation to immediate access to current information. Family management teams can generate accurate reports on demand rather than waiting for quarterly data compilation processes.

Real-Time Multi Entity Performance Reporting

Performance reporting in Asora provides real-time visibility across entities and asset classes. Unlike Excel (which requires manual calculations and updates), Asora automatically calculates performance metrics and maintains historical data for trend analysis.

The software handles complex structures, providing consolidated reporting that accurately reflects the full scope of family wealth across trusts, holding companies, and direct investments.

Alternative and Private Asset Tracking

One of Excel’s biggest limitations is handling alternative investments and private equity. Asora’s private asset tracking capabilities standardize reporting across public securities, multi-currencies, private equity, real estate, direct investments, and other asset classes.

The platform tracks capital calls, distributions, accounting, and valuations for alternative investments, providing comprehensive portfolio management visibility that would require dozens of interconnected spreadsheets to achieve in Excel.

Secure Document Management

Asora centralizes all family and investment documents in one secure platform, reducing the risks of files being scattered across emails or devices. With the built-in request document feature, families and advisors can easily collect documents from stakeholders directly into Asora, ensuring nothing is missed. Custom tags make it simple to organize and quickly retrieve documents, giving families confidence that sensitive information is both protected and accessible when needed.

Workflow Support and Mobile Access

Asora’s workflow capabilities and mobile access enable members of the family, advisors, and asset managers to stay connected to portfolio information anywhere, anytime. The platform supports collaborative workflows that eliminate the key person risk associated with Excel-based reporting.

Mobile access ensures that principals and families can access current portfolio management information without waiting for scheduled reports or requiring assistance from office staff.

User Permissioning and Scalability

Asora’s user permission system enables offices to grant appropriate access to different stakeholders while maintaining security solutions and confidentiality. Excel provides limited access control options, but Asora enables granular permissions that can be customized for each user’s role and responsibilities.

The platform scales as family offices add new clients, users, or data sources. This scalability eliminates the exponential complexity growth that occurs when managing multiple Excel files across growing family office operations.

Excel vs. Asora: Side-by-Side Comparison

Real-World Outcomes from Switching to Modern Platforms

Bardfour Family Office exemplifies the transformation possible when family offices move beyond Excel limitations. The Pennsylvania-based single family office needed full visibility over complex wealth structures following a real estate liquidity event.

Rather than attempting to manage this complexity in Excel spreadsheets, Bardfour implemented Asora and achieved full wealth structure mapping within four weeks. The platform’s Wealth Map visualization provides immediate clarity on ownership structures that would require dozens of interconnected spreadsheets to represent in Excel.

The transformation enabled faster decision-making, more accurate tracking of asset allocation within the family’s ownership and wealth structure, and the ability to assess new investments in their proper context. Most importantly, it eliminated the operational burden of maintaining complex Excel models, freeing the team to focus on strategic wealth management activities rather than administrative tasks.

Making the Shift from Excel to Asora

Excel’s role in family office reporting is evolving. While it remains useful for specific calculations and analysis, it’s no longer sufficient as the primary platform for modern family office operations managing complex, multi-asset portfolios across multiple entities.

Asora delivers the automation, security, and operational efficiency that family offices need to serve today’s sophisticated family clients effectively. The platform eliminates the manual processes and security solution limitations that constrain Excel-based operations while providing the real-time visibility, investment analytics, and reporting capabilities that modern family offices require.

The question isn’t whether family offices should continue using Excel for everything—it’s whether they’re ready to embrace specialized technology that enables them to operate more efficiently and serve their clients more effectively.

Request a demo to see how Asora can transform your family office operations from manual spreadsheet management to automated, secure, and scalable wealth management.