A mandate is only as good as its edges

Most structures at this scale have excellent bookkeeping and no finance function. The difference shows up on the day you need to know, within the hour, whether you can fund a call, service a facility and complete a purchase in the same month without selling something you did not want to sell.

We run the finance function. Budgeting and forecasting across the whole group rather than one entity at a time. Cash and liquidity managed forward, including against uncalled capital commitments, so that a call landing in a thin quarter is a scheduling matter rather than a forced sale. Intercompany funding planned rather than improvised. Treasury and foreign exchange: cash positioned across entities and currencies, with conversions implemented only once you have approved them.

We maintain the two registers most families do not have. A group debt and guarantee register, with every facility, maturity, renewal date, financing term, covenant and outstanding guarantee in one document. A loan account record covering intercompany balances, shareholder loans and prescribed-rate loan interest, so that the expensive surprise is found in January rather than at a reassessment.

Then the unglamorous half: the corporate and personal expense boundary, kept clean while it is still easy to keep clean. A periodic close and entity-level management reporting, so the numbers exist before the moment you need them. Banking administration and signatories. Bill payment, released only under the approval controls set out below.

"External CFO" describes a service function performed for you. It is not an appointment as a director or officer of any of your entities.

Start with the boundary, because it defines the work.

Dunvegan does not provide investment advice and makes no investment recommendations. We do not select, size or source investments, and we do not choose your managers. Those decisions are yours, taken with a registered adviser if you want one. What we do is administer, analyse factually on request, monitor and report. That is a line we hold on purpose, and it is worth asking every firm you speak to where theirs sits.

It removes less than you would think, because most of the cost and most of the errors in a private portfolio live in the administration.

Capital calls and distributions administered against their real deadlines and funded from the right entity on time. The unfunded commitment register: what you have promised, to whom, and when it is plausibly called, modelled against the cash that will actually be available. Investor onboarding, KYC and documentation, including W-8BEN-E, W-9 and FATCA and CRS certifications tracked on an expiry calendar, so that a distribution is never reduced by a form that quietly lapsed. Position-level records for private credit and mortgage positions, reconciled to manager statements, with the administration continuing alongside your counsel if a position goes into workout or enforcement. Manager monitoring and manager calls, with the questions written down beforehand and the answers written down afterwards, so that somebody has read the last four quarterly letters before you take the fifth.

When something new is in front of you, we take it apart factually: terms, fees and the fee waterfall, structure, liquidity and lock-ups, transfer restrictions, tax characteristics, reporting obligations, operational demands, and what one more commitment does to the total you have already promised to fund. You get the mechanics laid out for your decision, without any view on investment merit or suitability.

Owner's representative at operating companies held as investments. Reading the statements and the variance, watching distributions, intercompany balances, debt and covenants, preparing you for board and shareholder meetings and attending as your representative where that is useful. Their accounting, their budgets, their systems and their projects remain theirs. Acting as owner's representative does not make us a director or officer of the company, and we exercise no powers of management.

Tax records matter long before a return is filed. What usually goes wrong is not planning. It is records: a cost base nobody rolled forward, slips that arrived in April and were posted to the wrong entity, a date that came into view eighteen months too late to do anything elegant about.

This is where the two-firm arrangement earns its keep, so the split is explicit.

Kailey McLeod Professional Corporation will perform the annual compilation engagements, the corporate and trust returns, and the personal returns including instalments, foreign tax credits and Form T1135 where the threshold is met, together with professional tax advice within its own engagement, once CPA Ontario grants its Certificate of Authorization.

Dunvegan keeps the books through the year rather than reconstructing them at the deadline. It assembles the annual investment package: the slips a private portfolio generates, T5013, T3, T5, US Schedule K-1 and 1042-S, chased, collected and reconciled, with the supporting investment tax records, the adjusted cost base and the at-risk rollforwards, delivered to the preparer as one organised package rather than a box. It administers the tax calendar, your CRA accounts and correspondence, GST and HST, and the annual returns to the corporate registry, and it coordinates the professional corporation, external tax counsel and any specialist you retain.

On structuring, our role is identification and coordination rather than opinion. We bring things forward in time to act on them: an estate freeze whose preferred shares, redemptions and accruing growth need tracking, a partnership interest whose cost base is heading towards zero, a family trust's twenty-first anniversary that belongs on the table years ahead. That date has never once been the problem. Not knowing it was coming is.

Professional conclusions come from the professional corporation or from external tax counsel. Designing and executing a reorganisation, and formal opinions, are separate engagements.

Most families can answer "how did the fund do" and cannot answer "what do we own, across everything, this morning". The second question is the one that governs decisions.

Consolidated positions and net worth statements across every entity, so that your position is one document rather than an exercise in addition. Group-level performance reporting. Monthly entity-level reporting and cash position, quarterly consolidated reporting with a review already in the diary rather than requested.

The part that changes how decisions get made is the stress testing: what a liquidity event, a cluster of capital calls landing in the same quarter, a valuation decline, a rate movement or a tax event does to the consolidated position, run before the event rather than after it.

Internal valuation of fund positions from capital account statements, and internal valuation analysis of operating company and real estate holdings, including review of the third-party appraisals you receive rather than filing them, as an input to your own evaluation of a transaction.

Internal valuation analysis is prepared for your use. It is not prepared to Chartered Business Valuator standards and is not intended for third-party reliance. Where an independent or professionally qualified valuation is required, it is obtained from someone qualified to give one.

Real estate. Oversight of the property portfolio and coordination with your appointed property manager. Routine tenant and lease administration, property tax, utilities and vendor invoices, instructing leasing agents. Marketing, material disputes, enforcement and representation before the Landlord and Tenant Board sit outside. Where a step turns on legal judgment we coordinate with counsel rather than determining legal rights.

Insurance. The schedule and the renewal calendar maintained, information assembled and put in front of your broker on time, communication kept moving. We do not assess or recommend coverage, limits, exclusions or adequacy. That is your licensed insurance professional's work, and the coverage decision remains yours.

Coordination. One point of contact across counsel, tax counsel, insurance brokers, bankers and lenders, investment managers and registered advisers, property managers and valuators. We hold the list of outstanding matters, chase them, and escalate a gap or a delay when it happens rather than reporting it three months later. Your advisers remain responsible for their own advice, work product, filings and deadlines. What changes is that somebody is watching whether the handoffs between them actually happened, and that somebody is no longer you.

Put it precisely. If you were unreachable for a month, who takes the call from the bank? Who knows which company owns the building? Who has ever seen the consolidated statement?

The common answer is that one adult child could probably work it out, given time, and that nobody has ever been shown the whole picture because there has never been a document that contains the whole picture.

Family meetings prepared, facilitated and recorded, with materials written to be read by people who do not work in finance. Next-generation orientation to the structure, the entities and the obligations, so that participation is possible before it is required.

Provided on a reasonable periodic basis within the retainer. A substantial standalone governance, succession or education project is scoped separately.