Penny – It Works, the award-winning investor accounting package, has proven its meddle by automating fund provisions thought to be too complex for off-the shef software.
Ingenious Initiatives continues to expand the client base of Penny-it Works, their flagship software, by tackling the nuances of partnership and shareholder accounting that are beyond other systems. Says founder Ron Kashden, “While our competitors claim to support complex fees and income allocation provisions, they often can’t live up to the sales hype. For example, other systems struggle just to calculate a fee with tiers. Our system not only accomodates tiers, but can handle performance fees with over-perform provisions that are based on derived compounded interest rates (which we automatically calculate from market indexes).”
The company has successfully implemented funds that bedeviled competitive systems such as Advent Partner’s World Investor and SunGard’s Investier. Art Shulman, CEO of Ingenious Initiatives, says that “A big challenge of ours is providing reassurance to our prospects that our system can actually ‘walk the walk’. More than once we’ve had to act as almost an accounting therapist for our clients who have had less than satisfactory experiences trying to accurately handle the complex structures and fees that are routine in our industry in other system.” Once they’ve been burned, Shulman continues, “clients have a hard time believing that any system can handle the ins-and-outs of their structures.’ Only after we’ve shown them a proof-of-concept, do new clients get that when we say “Penny – It Works” we mean it.”
Shulman explains that “for many financial software firms, portfolio accounting is their bread and butter. They “do” investor accounting as a sideline or sometimes even as a loss leader – and it shows. For us, partnership and shareholder accounting isn’t an afterthought. It is what we do, all day, every day.”
Outsourcing the investor accounting to administrators doesn’t solve the problem. “We’re getting more interest from administrators that are concerned about the operational risks of performing monthly processing of their largest clients on spreadsheets,” says Kashden. “By combining unprecedented flexibility with a controlled auditable environment, Penny has had tremendous success at bringing a complete answer to fund administration.”
In the end, tackling real-world problems has its advantages. Sue Walsh, Managing Director at Ingenious Initiatives, says “I’m proud that all of our clients are on our reference list. They help us spread the news that Penny is up to the task. In this industry it’s really exceptional to have happy people.”
