Module 12, Family Office
Every other module in the toolkit serves your business. This one serves the family your business supports: a living model of everything you own, owe, guarantee and expect to pass on, recalculated from the current record every time you open it rather than once a year at a review meeting. It answers the question most plans never ask out loud: if everything risky went wrong at once, what life is still safe?
The business gets monthly statements, a budget, a bank relationship, and an accountant who knows it well. The family that owns the business gets an annual RRSP conversation, a will signed years ago, an insurance policy nobody has re-read, and a personal guarantee sitting quietly behind the operating line.
Nobody is wrong. The lawyer did the will. The accountant did the return. The advisor did the portfolio. The broker placed the policy. Each one did their piece competently and none of them was hired to hold the whole picture, so the questions that live between the pieces never get asked. Does the estate have the cash to pay its own tax bill, or does it sell the building? Is the lifestyle the family actually leads dependent on the business staying healthy? If the founder died on a bad day in the market, would the plan still work?
Families with a few hundred million dollars solve this by hiring a staffed family office whose only job is to hold the whole picture. Families with two to twenty-five million get the fragments and pay for the coordination in a different currency: the decisions nobody made, discovered later.
Capital Toolkit Family Office is the coordinating function, built as software, standing on the same CPA-reviewed numbers your business modules already produce. One model, recomputed every time it is opened, with a professional behind it.
The core measure
Most wealth reporting answers “how much do I have?” That number moves every day and tells the family very little. The Protected Future answers a harder question: how much of the life you actually want is funded by things that cannot be taken away by a bad market or a bad year in the business?
Guaranteed income counts: CPP, OAS, defined-benefit pensions, annuities. A deliberately conservative draw on your most secure capital counts. The operating company does not. The growth portfolio does not. The building you would have to sell does not.
The result is usually uncomfortable the first time an owner sees it, and that is the point. A family that learns half its intended lifestyle rests on the business continuing to perform can do something about it while there is still time to choose. A family that finds out during the bad year cannot.
The essential lifestyle gets protected before any capital is asked to take risk. Only genuine surplus carries exposure. That ordering is the architecture, not a preference.
A published priority ladder answers where new money goes: unprotected essentials, then an unfunded estate bill, then open red risks, then the best quantified opportunity, then growth.
A pressure-free runway figure: how many years the family could fund its life from liquid assets alone if every risky income stream stopped, before anything has to be sold in a hurry.
Participation by choice
Traditional advice offers one dial with two settings: do it yourself, or hand it over. Owners are rarely either. They want the corporate bookkeeping to disappear and they want to be in the room for the succession conversation.
So every service function carries its own participation setting, chosen by you and changeable whenever you like: Delegate (handle it, tell me the outcome), Informed (tell me before it happens), Collaborate (work it with me), or Lead (I drive, you support).
A second, separate dial governs how much the office may do on its own before it comes back to you, from observe-only through to execute. The two dials are independent by design: choosing to be informed about something is not the same as authorizing the office to act on it, and no setting ever quietly grants more authority than it was given.
All 114 functions across 12 disciplines carry their own setting, with a family default and per-person overrides. Your spouse can be informed on the whole estate discipline while an adult child collaborates on the KPI dashboard.
Recommendation, rationale, the do-nothing alternative, who decided, and when, all written to an append-only ledger. Deferrals can carry a revisit date that brings the question back automatically.
You can always proceed against the recommendation. The ledger will not accept the override until the acknowledgment names the specific risk in your own words, so a departure is documented as a choice, never buried as an oversight.
Every model change, disposition, and dial movement writes to an audit trail enforced at the database. It is append-only: it cannot be edited or deleted by the family, by an advisor, or by us.
Real time by architecture
These run against the live model every time anyone opens it. Green is silent by design. The family hears about something when the dollars justify hearing about it, and each finding can be promoted to an owned risk with a disposition and a name against it.
The projected tax and probate bill at death against the cash and insurance actually available to pay it, and the same calculation re-run as if death landed during a severe market decline.
Exposures that look diversified on paper but share one underlying risk: the business, the region, the credit cycle, the single tenant behind three of the properties.
Family members with none on record, and wills more than five years old. It reports what is missing or aged; whether a document is valid stays a lawyer's judgment, and the module never pretends otherwise.
Registered accounts and policies with no beneficiary recorded. It is the quiet defect that routes money through the estate, and through probate, when it never needed to.
A freshness limit per asset type, because a four-year-old number on the operating company is not a number. Conclusions built on stale inputs are flagged as such rather than presented as current.
Monthly revenue, earnings and cash per corporation, with sustained declines surfaced in dollars, plus what a Bank of Canada rate move costs the family's floating-rate debt each year.
How it works
The corporations, the holdco, the trust, the properties, the policies, the guarantees. Legal ownership and economic exposure are modelled separately, because they are different things and only one of them shows up on a personal statement.
What the family actually spends, what it must never fall below, and how involved each person wants to be on each function. The Protected Future is computed from that the moment it is entered.
Every check runs against the live model each time the office is opened, never against a report prepared weeks ago. When something material has changed, the consequence appears in family-specific dollars, not a percentage on a chart nobody reads.
A prepared agenda is waiting with the position, the recommendations and their numbers, and what is overdue, so the meeting is spent deciding rather than discovering. Every answer lands in the ledger.
What's inside
Who it's for
Most of your net worth is in something you cannot sell this week, and a personal guarantee ties the rest of it to the same outcome. You want to know what is genuinely safe, what the estate would owe, and where the next dollar does the most good, without assembling that picture yourself every time you want it.
A spouse who should not be learning the structure for the first time in an emergency. Adult children who can be given exactly the view that concerns them and nothing more. Participation is per person, so involvement can grow at the pace the family actually wants.
Your lawyer, banker, insurance advisor and tax specialist, each scoped to the matters they are working on. They stop reconstructing the same facts from scratch, and their work lands in a record the family keeps rather than a file the family never sees.
Honest status
It is CPA-led today. Engagements start with a conversation, not a signup form. Owner self-serve access is switching on module by module across the toolkit and this one is not on yet.
It is not investment management. The module holds no assets, executes no trades, takes no custody, recommends no securities, and earns no commission or referral fee on any product placed by anyone. It is not a substitute for a licensed investment advisor, and it does not replace your lawyer or your tax specialist. It is what lets all of them work from the same current numbers.
The estate figure is a planning estimate. It applies published Ontario rates, dated and cited inside the model, to the assets whose tax treatment has been recorded. It excludes and names what it cannot assess rather than guessing. Corporate-held wealth needs corporate-level analysis the estimate deliberately refuses to fake. Professional review is required before any decision relies on it.
The engines are deterministic. Every figure and every recommendation on the platform is produced by explicit, auditable rules working on your recorded facts, not generated prose. If the model cannot justify a recommendation in dollars, it does not make one. Where an input is stale or missing, the answer says so instead of quietly filling the gap.
Around this module
The family's picture is only as good as the business data underneath it. These modules feed it, and it feeds them back.
Clean, reconciled corporate books are the foundation. Without them, every downstream number inherits the doubt.
See module →Budgets, forecasts and KPI history: the business performance the family's protected income ultimately depends on.
See module →A defensible number for the operating company, which is usually the largest single line on the family's estate bill.
See module →The liquidity event that changes everything about the family's position. Best modelled before it happens, not after.
See module →Bring the structure as it actually is: the corporations, the holdco, the properties, the policies, the guarantee you signed and would rather not think about. The first session turns it into a model you can see, and the Protected Future number comes out of it the same day.
No custody, no trades, no product commissions. Advice you pay for directly is the only kind whose incentives you can actually check.
