Ensure Accurate, Comprehensive Performance Reports in Less Time with Portfolio Services
Portfolio Services is an integrated suite of services designed to help you ensure consistent, accurate, and timely processing of portfolio- and security-level positions, analytics, risk, and returns. This recipe focuses on how to leverage the Returns Reconciliation portion of Portfolio Services. First, we identify the accounts to reconcile. Second, we define accurate account settings. Then, we design the returns process to ensure compatibility with Returns Reconciliation. Finally, we review the initial output and get the data ready for daily checks.
Steps
1IDENTIFY ACCOUNTS TO RECONCILE
2DEFINE ACCOUNT SETTINGS
3DESIGN THE RETURNS RECONCILIATION PROCESS
4REVIEW OUTPUT AND REFINE PROCESS
Ingredients
- FactSet Workstation
- FactSet Portfolio Services
Recipe Details
1IDENTIFY ACCOUNTS TO RECONCILE
First, work with the account team to identify a list of accounts or account composites that are your highest priority for reconciliation and ensure your budget for Portfolio Services covers the number of accounts you want to reconcile.
These are the only accounts that Portfolio Services will run through Returns Reconciliation. Portfolio Services alerts you to a list of problems we find in the underlying data for each account, so prioritizing a list of accounts helps scope recon to ensure you have the bandwidth to fix the highest impact problems. Next, determine if you want Portfolio Services to reconcile Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up returns, in addition to security-level returns. Top-Down vs. Bottom-up reconciliation requires that you provide portfolio-level returns to FactSet, so we can compare that to our bottom-up calculated return and report any discrepancies.
Once completely onboarded, Portfolio Services displays the account list in our Portfolio Health application, showing all accounts and the market value weights of the securities that have failed reconciliation checks, further helping you focus your energy on fixing what matters most.
For more information on the exact checks that occur via Portfolio Services Returns Reconciliation, please reach out to Portfolio Services Specialists.
2DEFINE ACCOUNT SETTINGS
After identifying the high priority accounts to run through Returns Reconciliation, it’s important to work with your account team to ensure each account has the metadata required for accurate reconciliation. The most important piece of metadata is pricing source. The Portfolio Services reconciliation engine requires a pricing source on every account to perform its calculations. Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Returns Reconciliation also requires the Return Net or Return Gross field. Other metadata like calendar, currency, analytical source, and FX rates help the reconciliation team perform research, but are not required to run the process.
Once you define accurate metadata for each account, we need to populate it. You can work with Portfolio Services and your account team to use batched account setting updates to speed up this metadata population.
3DESIGN THE RETURNS RECONCILIATION PROCESS
To schedule the reconciliation process, a process engineering team works with you to ensure that reconciliation workflows run after all data is available. Process engineers document and understand your workflows at a detailed level, and schedule Returns Reconciliation so that it triggers after all holdings and/or transactions are integrated into FactSet, enriched with analytics, and after top-level returns are also loaded (if Top-Down vs. Bottom Up returns checks are in scope). Process Engineers also configure the workflow to run using specific methodologies, processing single day or multi-day returns, based on the parameters of your Portfolio Services agreement.
Once scheduled, process engineers handoff workflow documentation to the reconciliation team so that they are ready to perform analysis on the results, following a documented schedule that we verify with you.
4REVIEW OUTPUT AND REFINE PROCESS
Portfolio Services Returns Reconciliation will run each scheduled day and feed results to Portfolio Health. Portfolio Health is the single place you can understand which high-value accounts have problems that require your attention. Via Portfolio Health, you can also see the overall health of your priority accounts over time, viewing a history of issues we’ve detected and fixed, and the most common problem areas.
Our reconciliation team works to fix issues, but it’s important to understand that the universe of Portfolio Services is not set in stone. You can change the scope of accounts that Returns Reconciliation monitors, adding or removing accounts over time. You can also identify different error types that we should put on high alert or ignore completely. Furthermore, our reconciliation team is a partner to your data teams. We can and will fix a host of common problems ourselves, but some problems like those caused by the input data require your teams to fix the source. Therefore, it is important that your data teams are comfortable working with Portfolio Services communications, so they know how to use them to identify when their feedback or action is required to fix problems we find.
Finally, the overall output of Portfolio Services Returns Reconciliation is something you can tweak to better serve your goals. You can adjust communication frequency and change how we route and send our messages. At any point, we encourage you to reach out to Process Engineering or Portfolio Services Specialists to help evolve and fine-tune your process schedules or configurations.