Your Family Financial Dashboard: Seeing the Complete Picture

One of the most valuable services a family office provides is comprehensive financial reporting: giving family members a clear, real-time view of their complete financial picture. While ultra-wealthy families often have custom-built dashboards costing tens of thousands of dollars, you don’t need that kind of budget to create an effective financial dashboard for your family.

Why a Financial Dashboard Matters

Most families have their finances scattered across multiple accounts and institutions, making it difficult to see the complete picture. Without a dashboard, you can’t effectively manage what you don’t measure. Regular monitoring helps you stay accountable to your financial goals and plans, while making it easier for spouses and partners to stay on the same page financially. When opportunities or challenges arise, having all your financial information in one place helps you make better decisions. It also simplifies collaboration with your financial advisors, enabling them to provide more integrated advice.

Essential Elements of an Effective Dashboard

A comprehensive family financial dashboard should track your complete net worth: everything you own (assets) minus everything you owe (liabilities). This includes cash and investments, real estate, business interests, personal property, life insurance values, and all forms of debt.

Beyond the balance sheet, your dashboard should monitor cash flow (income and expenses), investment performance (including asset allocation and benchmark comparisons), and progress toward key financial goals like retirement savings or college funds. Important metrics to track include your savings rate, debt-to-income ratio, liquidity ratio, and net worth growth rate.

Choosing Your Dashboard Solution

There are several approaches to creating your financial dashboard, ranging from DIY spreadsheets to sophisticated software. Let’s explore the main options:

Simple but Powerful: Spreadsheet Dashboards

Many families start with Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, which offer complete customization and privacy at no additional cost. While these require manual updates and lack automatic account connections, they’re ideal for those who value control and don’t mind the hands-on approach. It’s a great starting point, but a huge burden to maintain properly.

Modern Financial Management Software

Several excellent tools have emerged to help automate the dashboard process:

Empower (formerly Personal Capital) offers free automatic account aggregation with strong investment tracking and visualizations. While it has limited customization and sometimes pushes advisory services, it’s a solid foundation for many individuals. However, note that Empower doesn’t support multiple user accounts, a significant limitation for families wanting to share access with spouses or advisors.

Monarch Money provides a clean interface with customizable categories, strong privacy features, and support for joint accounts. While it requires a paid subscription and has fewer investment features than Empower, its multi-user support makes it excellent for families. They have a chrome extension that syncs amazon data to better categorize spend with them, and nice reporting features.

Copilot brings AI-powered spending categorization and highly rated iOS/macOS apps to the table. With strong design and privacy focus, it’s compelling despite being subscription-only and limited to Apple devices. It also has an amazon integration to help better categorize the purchases from there, but it will only work for one account.

YNAB (You Need a Budget) excels at proactive money management and has a strong community, though it focuses more on budgeting than investment tracking.

Professional Platforms

For those with more complex needs, platforms like Morningstar Portfolio Manager or Quicken Premier offer sophisticated investment analysis and better handling of complex assets. While these have a steeper learning curve and higher cost, they provide more customization and planning features.

Some families also access dashboards through their financial advisors, getting professional oversight and sophisticated planning tools, though these are typically only available to advisory clients.

Building Your Dashboard: A Practical Approach

For most families this is as simple as:

1. An account with one of the modern financial data aggregators
2. Regular monthly check-ins with family and quarterly deep dives with advisors

To implement this approach, start by setting up your account aggregation tool (e.g. Copilot or Monarch Money) and connecting your financial accounts. Create a supplemental spreadsheet to track any assets or metrics not captured automatically, such as real estate or private investments.

Establish a simple routine: weekly quick checks of balances and transactions, monthly updates of manual values and progress reviews, and quarterly deep dives into investment performance and goal adjustments. Share appropriate access with your spouse/partner, advisor, or accountant to ensure everyone stays informed.

Multi-User Access: A Critical Consideration

When choosing a dashboarding tool, make sure it allows you to add multiple users, such as your spouse, trusted advisors, or adult children, so everyone can access and work from the same up-to-date information.

For example, Empower does not support multiple user accounts (only a single login per household), which can be a major limitation for families or those collaborating with advisors. Monarch Money and some other tools do support multi-user access. Always check for this feature if shared visibility is important to you.

Conclusion: Visibility Creates Opportunity

A well-designed family financial dashboard transforms how you interact with your finances. Instead of scattered accounts and hazy estimates, you gain clarity, confidence, and control. This visibility often reveals opportunities you might otherwise miss: from investment imbalances to spending patterns to tax-saving strategies.

While ultra-wealthy families might have more sophisticated dashboards, the core benefits of financial visibility are available to anyone willing to invest a little time in setting up a basic system. The insights you gain will help you make better decisions, stay accountable to your goals, and ultimately build more wealth for what matters most to your family.

In our next post, we’ll explore how to run effective family financial meetings: another key family office practice that can strengthen your family’s relationship with money and with each other.