Dunvegan Family Office Services
Designed to be examined.
No custody. No discretionary authority. Every payment released only on your approval. Show this page to your lawyer.
Arrange a conversationToo rich for an accountant. Too poor for a single-family office.
Nobody sets out to run a finance department from a home office. It accumulates. A holding company, then a second one for the real estate. A trust settled in a year you would have to look up. Four funds, then nine. A US partnership that sends its slip in September. A line of credit at one bank, a mortgage at another, and a guarantee signed years ago against a property you no longer think about.
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Every individual piece is handled by someone excellent. The pieces are not the problem. The problem is the space between them, and the space between them is you. A good accountant files what already happened. A single-family office costs more than it returns until the structure is very large indeed. In between is a long stretch where the affairs have outgrown the arrangement that built them, and the work still has to be done by somebody.
So the capital call schedule lives in one inbox, the facility maturities live in another, and the trust's deemed disposition date lives in a memo from four years ago. The only place the three of them meet is in your head, on a Sunday, in a spreadsheet nobody else can read.
It is not a job anyone gave you. It is the job left over.
What we do
A dedicated partner for your family's financial life.
Our servicesExternal CFO
Budgeting, cash and liquidity, treasury, the debt register, and payments under approval controls.
Investment administration
Capital calls, the commitment register, manager monitoring and position-level records.
Tax and compliance
Bookkeeping through the year, the investment package, the calendar, tax-authority accounts.
Consolidated reporting
One position across every entity, with internal valuation and scenario analysis.
Adviser coordination
Property and insurance administration, and one point of contact across your advisers.
Family governance
Family meetings, and the education that lets the next generation take part.
Start with what we will not do.
We take custody of nothing. Your assets stay where they are, with your own custodians, in your own name, on authorisations you can revoke in an afternoon.
We hold no discretionary authority and no trading authority. We do not advise on investments, recommend them, source them, size them, or select your managers. We are not registered as an adviser or a dealer, and we do not hold ourselves out as one. Investment decisions are yours, taken with a registered adviser if you want one.
We sell no product. Our compensation is the retainer you agree, paid by you. If a third party ever offers us anything in connection with your affairs, you will read about it in writing before we answer them.
Read that list again as a description of incentives rather than as a disclaimer. There is nothing we can earn by moving your money.
Six things that fall between mandates.
None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary consequences of owning something that grew one good decision at a time.
The distribution that was really a return of capital.
Cash comes back from a limited partnership every year. Part of it is income and part of it reduces your cost base. If nobody carries the rollforward between filings, the year the base goes below zero generally produces a gain without a sale. It is visible a year ahead to anyone who is looking. Usually nobody is.
Three capital calls in the same six weeks.
Commitments are signed one at a time and called all at once. Without a register of what is committed and not yet funded, held against the cash you can actually reach in thirty days, a routine call becomes a scramble: a line drawn at the wrong moment, or a liquid position sold because it was the easy one to sell.
The certification that quietly expired.
A W-8BEN-E is generally valid until the end of the third calendar year after it is signed, and sooner if your circumstances change. Nobody sends a reminder. The first sign is a distribution that arrives short, because withholding has reverted to the statutory rate.
Slips that arrive after the deadline.
A US Schedule K-1 and a 1042-S do not run on the Canadian calendar. Somebody has to decide, before the filing date rather than after it, which returns go on estimates and which wait, and then make sure the amendments actually happen. Left alone, that decision gets made by default, in June.
The twenty-first anniversary.
A family trust generally faces a deemed disposition on the twenty-first anniversary of the day it was settled. That date has been knowable since the day it was settled. The window to plan around it has not.
A guarantee nobody has read since it was signed.
Guarantees, covenants, renewal dates, and prescribed-rate loans with an annual interest payment date that does not move. These sit in four drawers at four institutions. Either one register is kept current, or it is six phone calls in the week the bank asks.
None of these is anyone's failure. Each one sits in the gap between two mandates that are both being performed properly. Owning the gap is the service.
The same work, structured differently.
There are three sensible alternatives to this, and it is worth being plain about what each one gives you.
Explore the alternatives
Siloed advisers, no owner. Each professional is excellent inside their own mandate and responsible for nothing outside it. The work that falls between mandates is not neglected by anyone in particular. It is simply nobody's.
Retail product in family-office dress. A standardised offering re-badged for the segment, priced as a percentage of your assets, with the senior person present at the pitch and rarely on the file afterwards.
Multi-family offices built for other scale. Layered teams and rotating associates, where the order in which things get done follows account size. When priority follows account size, somebody is fourth in the queue, and nobody is ever told where they sit.
None of these is a bad business. They are simply not the job that needs doing. Five things are built differently here.
Priced to complexity, not to assets.
A percentage fee charges more in a year when the portfolio rose and the work did not change. Entities, trusts, funds, currencies and jurisdictions are what create the work, so that is what the retainer is set against.
Tax owned through the year, not referred out in March.
The bookkeeping, the slips, the cost base rollforwards and the calendar are held all twelve months, and the returns will be prepared by the professional corporation that has been watching them.
Two senior principals, not a rotation.
The people you meet are the people on the file. There is no associate layer for you to be handed down to.
Monthly consolidated reporting across every entity.
One position for the whole structure, instead of a quarterly pile of custodian statements you are expected to add up yourself.
Conflicts disclosed in writing, not embedded in a product.
There is nothing to disclose today, which is precisely why the commitment costs us nothing to make, and why it is worth asking every other firm you meet to match it.
Two firms. One number. And a payment cannot leave without you.
Who you contract with.
Dunvegan Family Office Services Inc. is the family office: the finance function, the administration, the reporting, the coordination. Kailey McLeod Professional Corporation is a professional corporation incorporated in Ontario. The compilation engagements and the corporate, trust and personal returns will be done there, under its own engagement letter and the professional standards and obligations CPA Ontario imposes on its licensed firms, once CPA Ontario grants its Certificate of Authorization. There is no ownership link between the two corporations.
You agree one combined monthly retainer. How the firms allocate it between themselves can change. What you pay does not.
Most arrangements ask you to accept that the professional accounting and the administration sit inside the same box, on the same terms, reviewed by the same people. This one does not, and you can see the seam. Your lawyer will want to know who is contracting for what, and the answer is on the first page of each engagement letter.
How money moves.
Preparation and approval are different people. Nothing leaves an account until you have approved it. Above a threshold you set, two authorisations are required rather than one.
Before any new payee is paid, and before any change to the banking details of an existing one, we verify by independent callback to a number we already hold, never to the number on the instruction. That control exists because the fraud that reaches families like yours is rarely a hacked account. It is a plausible email changing the bank details on an invoice you were already expecting.
We do not initiate a payment to ourselves beyond the retainer you have agreed and out-of-scope work you have approved in writing. Anything outside the retainer is scoped and quoted in writing before it begins, with a not-to-exceed cap where the work is genuinely open ended. Nothing commences, and nothing is billed, that you have not approved in advance.
If you leave.
Your records stay yours. On termination you receive a complete export: positions, valuation history, adjusted cost base, the document library, in a usable format, at no charge. There is no version of this arrangement where your own data is the thing that keeps you.
A first conversation
Ask the hard questions first.
A small number of families. Senior principals, every file. The practice is built to stay small, because there is a limit to how many structures two people can hold properly in their heads, and the honest consequence is that we would rather decline early than staff around it.
How we begin
Dunvegan is a newly formed firm. We would rather you verify that than assume it. Ask for any of the above in writing before you decide anything.
The first conversation is a conversation, not a presentation. Bring your accountant, or your lawyer, or both. Bring your lawyer's list of objections: that is the conversation we want to have, and none of it is easier for us with them out of the room. At the end we will tell you plainly whether this is a job we should be doing, whether it is work your existing advisers should be doing, or whether it is work that does not need doing yet.
If you would rather send the questions before you send yourself, send the questions.
Get in touch
We would be glad to hear from you.
New enquiries are read and answered by a principal. We reply within one business day.
A first conversation may cover
- What your structure actually looks like today
- Where work is currently falling between advisers
- How we would run it, and what we would not touch
- Whether this is a job we should be doing at all
Bring your accountant, or your lawyer, or both. Nothing you send before an engagement is agreed in writing is treated as confidential.