Personal Bookkeeper or Daily Money Manager

These are two terms that I use almost interchangeably and as the DMM industry matures, it is beginning to seem that they mean different things. I wanted to talk about the differences as I see them to and hopefully move the discussion in a positive direction.

Personal Bookkeeper:
This is a term that is not used too much but seems to go along with the high net worth individual and their need for someone to manage their daily finances. The average high net worth client has much more complex demands obviously than most individual clients. At PPS, our clients that fall in the high net worth category typically have mutliple homes, numerous invesment accounts, rental or investment properties, they care for and pay bills for family members, they have extremely detailed reporting needs and often have more complex tax payment and preparation requirements. The reason why personal bookkeeper applies well here is because the complexity of their finances is not too much unlike a small to medium business. Though the tasks are not too dissimilar from what the typical daily money manager can provide I feel that a personal bookkeeper is going to be providing much more in depth services across a more complex range of possible entities with the client.

Daily Money Manager:
If you go to www.aadmm.org and search for members of the main DMM association, you might notice a trend towards servicing mainly seniors. This is what I noticed in the early years of the association. While many DMM firms do work primarily with seniors the services offered I believe are more clearly defined by their simplicity and also by their consultative nature. Besides assisting with the basics of managing an individuals daily finances (bill payment, expense tracking, account reconciliation, mail sorting, etc) the average daily money manager is typically assisting the client with making daily financial decisions or creating a better process the client can follow for managing their own finances.

These are just some thoughts off the top of my head (heh, its a blog after all!) but I hope the conversation can be continued. At PPS, our team members are strong believers in the idea that by helping our clients better manage their daily finances, we can help them achieve greater long term financial success. This is a simple belief but it seems many Americans overlook this idea. Our services are tailored towards helping clients better manage their daily finances themselves and in many cases managing aspects of it for them. A key area however for the daily money management industry is education and that starts with the term itself. How do we educate on our services better and mainly the importance of having some sort of daily money management plan?

I look forward to some posts on this to get a conversation started, for the benefit of the industry and the consumers. I can't imagine I am the only DMM struggling with educating their clients with what it is we do and how it differs from other financial services.

Thanks for the help!

Wells Fargo Global Payments Conference

One of our technology and service partners, Wells Fargo, is hosting a global payments conference and I was asked to be a panel speaker at the event. We have had a great experience working with Wells and have found the foray into payment processing to be relatively straight forward and much simpler than I thought. It will be interesting to see what the conference has that I can share on this blog. More to follow....

Patents Pending!

At PPS, we recently wrapped up our non-provisional patent filings and are very excited to begin the long review process. We have worked hard for over a year to continue to develop our technology and feel we are making great strides. Each day we talk with prospective clients who describe scenarios that fit perfectly with why we developed our technology capabilities. They talk about the need to work with their daily money manager remotely, to see documents and payment reports in a secure online environment and to access historical data easily. Our staff is constantly bringing to our attention ways that they feel they could better communicate with clients, more accurately manage accounts, reduce the possibility for errors and improve our security and account management.

All of this went into our technology (PPS 2.0) and our patent filing and we will continue to work to be the technology leader in the daily money management industry.