Balance Cash Management

New Name! PPS is now Balance Financial

2009-05-17T20:50:00.002-07:00

Premier Payment Services is now…

BALANCE FINANCIAL
Daily Money Management for Families & Small Businesses

Managed Services / Consulting Services

In 5 years we have risen to become one of the largest dedicated daily money management firms in the country and are continuing to grow every month. Our services have helped improve the financial lives for both consumers and businesses in over 30 states.

In these last 5 years, we have worked to build PPS into a service and technology leader capable of managing our clients daily finances for them. Our team of professionals pay bills, tracks expenses, manages cash flow, balances checkbooks, and provides a full range of business bookkeeping.

Our patent pending Concierge Bill Pay technology platform allows our staff to track and manage bill pay for clients. Our unique services are designed to allow our clients to depend on PPS to track and maintain their daily finances giving them the ability to make better long term financial decisions.

The Premier Payment Services name and brand has always been something that we worked to better define and align with the services we provide.
As we continue to bring innovation to the world of Daily Money Management and with the current struggles in the financial services market, we can see that more consumers and small businesses are looking for daily financial help. They are less concerned with managing for the long term and are more eager to improve control of their finances day to day and month to month. They realize that long term financial success is based on having a solid daily financial management structure.

If you feel your finances are out of balance, give us a call and we will work to get you back on the right path.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates and new products from Balance Financial.

New Consulting Services

2009-05-17T20:50:00.001-07:00

The Balance Financial Daily Money Makeover: A one-time daily finance makeover

At Balance Financial, we are now expanding our managed services to include onetime consulting services to families and small businesses around the country. With our Daily Money Makeover, we will work with you to identify the best methods and tools for you to use in managing your own daily finances more effectively. With our Daily Money Makeover, you will get:

- A custom review and analysis of how you currently manage daily finances
- Experienced feedback on ways you could improve and new methods to try
- A custom built management plan complete with recommended tools and methods
- One on one help in implementing your new plan

The program has a one-time fee between $300 and $500 depending on the complexity of the makeover. Clients will complete a questionnaire and interview to learn how we can best help. We will then work with the client to build a program that works for them. We may recommend a specific bill pay tool, expense tracking program or personal financial system. Our team is deeply knowledgeable with most major personal finance tools and can then assist the client with getting set up.

Struggling with managing daily finances?

Tried to set up Quicken and never finished?

Still writing too many checks?

Want to automate bill pay?

Not sure where your money goes each month?

Give us a call today!

If you know of a family member, friend or client that could use a Daily Money Review, please contact our staff at Balance Financial today. We will do a free evaluation to see if the program is right for you.

5th Anniversary: Technology and Daily Finances

2009-05-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

We just celebrated our 5th anniversary as a firm. We opened our doors in April of 2004 and it is hard to believe so much time has gone by. When we first started this business, many people doubted the industries staying power. They thought that most people only focused on the long term and that given enough time, technology would automate the entire daily money management process.

In just these 5 short years, the average American family has had to face one of the worst recessions in the last 50 years, hitting at the heart of the financial industry. As one financial advisor PPS works with the other day put it, in the last 10 years, the average RIA has provided its clients with a 0% gain on assets under management. This is a tough sell to clients who are being charged hefty fees to get so little. This has caused many families across so many economic demographics to reconsider the importance of their daily finances as they are faced with major cuts in income.

In the last 2 years especially, we have seen a tremendous increase in the personal financial management technology solutions available on the market. Free online services like mint.com and wesabe.com have made tremendous gains in subscribers. However, these systems and the several dozen like them all have the same fundamental issues as the prior generation of PFM systems had. These core issues are related to the difficulty of setup and the management required getting good results.
Systems like mint.com although very helpful in providing general financial insight, which is all most people need, does not provide the level of detail required to give a full financial picture. The time required to set up every last brokerage account, bank account, car loan, credit card, student loan and so forth can be daunting. Most free online systems claim setup is as quick as 5-10 minutes, which is true, so long as you only have a handful of accounts, all with the same bank and you have all the online data. However, our clients, and so many millions like them, need to have ALL their data in one place, accurately. Further, these systems all lack the abundance of tools that a Quicken has to provide detailed accounting reports. Bottom line, the free systems provide great basic data and insight but they are still just tools and like any tool, it provides a skilled operator to get the most out of it. The average consumer will not put in that effort.

So, in the next 5 years we look forward to even more advancement in technology and focus by consumers on their daily finances. The more this occurs, the more people will need skilled professionals to help them in managing these tools.

Largest National Daily Money Management Firm Helps High Net Worth Clients Better Manage Everyday Finances in Tough Economic Times

2008-12-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

Premier Payment Services, the leading national provider of personal daily money management services, works with high net worth families concerned over the recent market decline to better understand their spending habits and manage daily finances.

December 2, 2008 -- Even the wealthiest of Americans are making changes to their lives in response to the economic slump. The difference for the wealthy is the manner in which they tackle the problem. By working with personal bookkeeping services such as Premier, wealthy families are able to employ a trusted partner to manage bill pay and expense tracking.

"When the markets are tough and net worth is declining, the wealthy tend to get concerned about the simple areas of their finances like paying bills on time and tracking expenses to ensure that they have a firm grasp on their complete financial picture," said Devin Miller, President and CEO for Premier Payment Services.

"We have seen a sharp increase in new and current clients looking for a complete review of their monthly expenses and how to better understand where their money is being spent" says Miller.
Premier Payment Services works with many of the most successful independent investment firms to help their clients manage monthly bill payment, track expenses, monitor net worth, oversee business and foundation bookkeeping as well as work with advisors to monitor long term financial forecasting. As a leading voice in the growing daily money management field, Premier specializes in working with the wealthy and their financial advisors to ensure the most basic of financial concerns are handled with the utmost of professionalism and care.

"Financial advisers are scrambling and don't have time to assist valuable clients comb through receipts and monitor the cable bill. Premier manages these daily money management tasks for the client and can provide the advisor with insightful reporting helpful in guiding the client to make better financial decisions," said Miller.

"Wealthy people have complicated lives and finances. With a variety of homes, boats, planes and services to monitor, and concerns about shrinking investment portfolios, they may not be prepared for the long haul. Consistently paying bills on time and tracking expenses can help to avoid further financial difficulties." said Miller.

Premier Payment Services, as the leader in national daily money management services, offers the high net worth and their advisors a secure and detailed service for managing and understanding the most basic of financial issues to help weather this economic storm.

Recession!? Is your business ready?

2008-10-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

PPS works with a variety of different businesses. From online marketing companies, to investment property portfolios, university sororities, service companies and many more. In each case PPS is involved to make sure the business is operating efficiently and the owner or manager is using their time wisely. Ask yourself the following questions to see if PPS might be helpful to your business:

- Are your books up to date?
- Do you have an easy to understand general ledger that is updated regularly?
- Do you efficiently collect and record income to the business?
- Do you have a clear understanding and overview of company expenses that are consistently up to date?

If you cannot answer yes to all of the above questions, it might be time to seek out some help to make sure your business is running effectively. Good business decisions are based on timely, well informed decisions. By having your company finances in clean working order, a business manager can be sure they are making the right decisons.

Investment Property Bookkeeping

2008-10-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

Many of our clients at PPS have investment properties. The typical client has a 2-3 properties that they rent. For many years, most of these clients simply managed these properties as a part of their personal finances. This can get to be confusing when it comes to managing your finances. Here are some things that PPS has found successful in managing your investment property portfolio:

- Seperate the finances. Whether the property(s) is its own LLC or just part of your finances is up to you and your CPA but in either case, create a seperate checking account to deposit funds into and pay expenses from.
- Create a seperate chart of accounts and general ledger. Track the property(s) in a seperate file using Quicken or QuickBooks. This makes it very easy to get a picture of income and expense for the investment.
- If you have multiple properties, track each one seperately. This way if you sell or do a project on any of them, it will not impact any of the others. If you are using QuickBooks to track your investment properties, setting each property up as a unique class will allow you to track each one seperately but to then view the entire portfolio P&L together.

Best of luck!

Credit Card Issuers Tightening Their Belts

2008-10-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Here is an article from CNBC today.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/27011843

One of the fall outs from the credit crunch of late will be consumer spending limits on credit cards. The main credit card issuers are signaling that they plan to close dormant accounts and overall reduce spending limits on cards. This is a good indicator that the easy come credit markets have permanently changed. Further, if you have 'dormant' cards that you planned on using or if you are carrying a high balance on a card you still depend on, now might be a good time to start working on changing your debt habits, before the bank changes them for you.

Bail Out Bonanza: How the current market could impact you

2008-09-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

We have been watching this past weeks financial news with a close eye. We try and get a sense of how current market activities and news events might impact our clients and consumers in general. In doing some research here is what we found:

- Buying a home is most likely going to keep getting tougher. Down payment requirements are likely to increase, credit scores will carry heavier weight, and lenders will be more cautious.

- Credit card fees, banking fees, late fees and other costs associated with managing your personal finances should continue their rapid rise. Overall, fees and penalties levied by banks have been rising rapidly over the last few years. The current market activities will most likely allow this trend to continue. Banks and credit card issuers are hungry for steady and offsetting revenue streams, the fees they levy are a big source of this right now.

- Inflation is taking a step back. There was some concern over this summer that inflation was going to kick in pretty strong but for now at least that seems less likely. Buried in the news is the fact that oil is trading well under $100 per barrel and exports are still strong for the moment. With the fed keeping key rates steady, they are most likely wanting to keep inflation where it is.

- There is no bail out coming for the average American. While the appetite of the Fed for bailing out poorly managed mega companies seems endless right now, you are still on your own. Between increasing fees, more weight given to credit scores and no net underneath, now is a critical time to make sure you have your finances in order.

Media pundits have given plenty of airtime to discussions about where to invest, how to manage your portfolio or how to diversify during this difficult market. What is just as important but often overlooked is the fact that managing your daily finances carries significant weight in your long term financial success.

At PPS, we work to make sure our clients bills are paid on time and that they have a clear understanding of their monthly expenses. This way, they are more likely to have a healthy and stable daily financial footing.

Our monthly minimum for service is $150. Many of the people we talk to everyday say that they pay that amount or more each month in penalties, late fees, overdraft charges and in weakened credit scores. For many of our clients, the return on investment for hiring a daily money manager already makes sense. I think that in the months and years ahead, that ROI will simply get stronger.

Devin

Registered Investment Advisors - They keep on growing

2008-08-20T16:44:00.000-07:00

I get a newsletter from the Registered Rep magazine and this article caught my eye.

http://registeredrep.com/newsletters/wealthmanagement/rias_still_wooing_full-service_clients_0819/

It talks about how RIAs keep growing and are poaching work from the full service banks. This is something we experience on a daily basis as we hear from more and more advisors saying they are starting an RIA or are joining an existing firm. From my point of view, the interesting part of this article is the growth management that firms go through, mostly around hiring new people. What we are seeing is that as more RIAs launch and they popularity grows, the firms work to continue to grow and see their margins erode a bit and the growth cycle marches on. This is where services like what PPS offers comes in. We can prevent the need for another new hire and can usually provide a better service to the client as well.

Tough time for Credit Cards

2008-07-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

This article caught my eye at abcnews.com this morning.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/Story?id=5444545&page=1

It talks about tougher times for credit card companies and banks for many of the same reasons lenders are having with home loans. Too many loans made to poor candidates are costing the lenders millions. The banks and credit card companies are trying hard to prevent a bigger problem, and all this at the same time as some members of Congress are proposing legislation to target credit card issuers (see link below)

http://www.kansas.com/209/story/472843.html

The rules on what credit card companies can and can't do are fairly straight forward but it should be interesting what they do in response to these changes. Is it possible that the golden years of easy money are over? Of course American's are beginning to realize the price of this 'easy' money and the businesses providing it to them are also paying the price.

This is all just a great reminder of the iimportance of taking responsibilty for and properly managing your personal finances, down to the most basic details.

PPS Launches new website

2008-07-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Just a couple of days ago, we launched a totally redesigned website. After having our original site for 4 years, we thought it was time to update our look and expand the information we provided.

See it here: www.premierpaymentservices.com

The top two reasons for launching the site were to make it easier for partners and prospects to find us and most improtantly, we wanted to have a site that effectively told our story and portrayed who we are and what our firm provides.

Personal and business bookkeeping services include management of sensitive material and handling of large sums of client funds. We know who are and trust our team, but we ask a lot of new clients signing up. This is why our new website includes many elements to help describe who we are, how we manage security and what we do to create a safe environment for our clients and their personal information.

As PPS continues to establish itself as one of the premier daily money management firms in the country, we felt it neccessary to make sure our people knew who we were and what we could do. Sounds easy, but when dealing with something as sensitive as personal finance and providing a remote service, it can be quite tricky!

So, take a look and let us know what you think!

Personal Finance: Keeping up with a changing economy

2008-07-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

This is a particularly depressing summer for those of us unlucky enough to be tracking the national economy. The national media is bombarding us with one negative story after another about why the economy is in the pits. This is all typical but there is one theme that seems to be a bit unique this time around, and that is personal responsibility.

Todays changing economy contains a unique mix of problems that are putting more responsibility on the consumer to better manage their personal finances day to day. Gone are the days of getting cheap and fast money from banks and other lending institutions to start a business, buy a house, a car or get an education. Household cash flow is getting squeezed nationwide due to inflation and stagnant wage increases and there is a growing sentiment in some corners of the country that it is the patriotic thing to conserve and watch your spending. My wife showed me an article in Elle magazine from this month quoting celebrities about how they are 'cutting back' and changing their habits because of the 'recession'.

At PPS, we are also finding more and more that Americans from ALL economic brackets are taking a renewed interest in better managing their personal finances. All of a sudden, their credit score is much more important and the costs of not properly overseeing bill payment and monthly cash flow are increasing.

In America for the last couple decades we seem to have had it easy with readily available cash on loose terms, banks that were lax on late fees and other charges and our household cash flow was not as much of a concern. All this has changed for millions of people and even for those that are not as heavily impacted, they are reminded that it is a narrowing margin, no matter the economic bracket.

It is even more important today to pay your bills on time, review them for accuracy and changes. Americans need to be more personally responsible for controlling and monitoring their spending habits, saving for retirement and maintaining a process to stay on this track.

PPS fills a role for its clients by providing that managerial oversight of an individuals personal daily finances. We review the bills, pay them, dispute issues with the vendor and track to a fine detail clients monthly income and expense. We assist our clients in staying financially responsible and knowledgeable during these changing times.

The good times will roll again, they always do, but for now the rules have changed. Consumers are being punished more severely for being financially unorganized and the margin between success and distress is narrowing. If you are concerned about how you are managing your daily finances and don't have the time to devote to getting them right, maybe PPS is the right fit.

Devin

Bank of America Address Change on Credit Cards

2008-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

I have never really mentioned vendors by name that we are having problems with but Bank of America this week is one that made me a bit ticked. We have something like 25 PO BOX numbers in our system for BofA. Last month an issue came up with a client that has a BofA card. The statement came in and the BOX number is typically 37271. On this invoice, the BOX changed to 37279. We have both of these numbers in our system so the change seemed to be BofA simply changing from one box to another in what appeared to be in the same processing center since the rest of the addresses were identical. There was no stated notification of change on the statement (other vendors we work with periodically change the billing address, albeit to a totally different place and send a separate notice). This payment was delayed in its arrival and BofA called the client. We then noticed the change in address and wondered if that may have caused the issue. When we called BofA they stated that the issue was due we sent the bill to the wrong address. We stated that there was no notification of change and BofA stated that the change of address on the statement was the notification, basically saying tough luck. Only after heavy pleading and arguing did they reverse SOME of the charges.

We have noticed this quite a bit more lately of vendors randomly changing the billing address. This one really made me a bit ticked since the change in address was so minor and that the processing center did not even change. The vendor then was pretty smug on the phone in saying it is the cardholders responsibility to notice the change and they are not required to go out of their way to notify of such a change, even if the change can have a big impact on prompt payment.

This is a great lesson for the consumer to review all aspects of their bill and be cautious with auto payments. Many online banking systems will set up auto payments to go to a specific address and if that address changes, you need to adjust the payment info. Addresses are not the only changes that vendors make. Changes to the due date, amounts due and even terms of service change frequently.

BofA has a tremendous amount of credit cards but it gets quite annoying when the payment of bills begins to seem almost like a battle between vendor and client. There are a number of sites that give data on rates and fees for cards, maybe we need to start a site that talks about what being a client is really like.

Dont mind me...

2008-06-09T16:38:00.001-07:00

Technorati Profile

Mortgage Payments / Change of Address

2008-06-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

One trend we have noted lately is that when a vendor changes the billing address on a bill, not always is the customer notified. For example, one large bank recently sent a current statement for a mortgage to us. We noted that the billing address had changed but there was no official notice on it. Another client with the same bank had their address change as well and realizing we had not noticed this before, we called the vendor and sure enough, the payment was not yet processed. The bill was not yet late and a payment was made in time but due to the change of address, the bill would have surely been late and charged a late fee. In this case, with a mortgage the late fee was over $200 dollars and could hav led to credit concerns.

We have seen this with clients who set up autopayments before to send payments to a particular address. When the vendor changes the address, the payment is not processed at the old location or not in enough time for a timely payment to be made.

This is why we stress to our staff to always review the main parts of a bill for changes and new information. Not all vendors go out of their way to make you aware of changes to a bill that could result in financial penalties if not accurately noted.

Devin

Bill Paying Service

2008-05-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

In my attempt to better define services PPS and other daily money managers offer, one that constantly comes up is bill pay service. This is a term used for everything from paying the water bill to managing the daily finances for a ultra high net worth clients. For some reason this term comes up a lot because when people think of managing their personal finances, they think of paying their bills.

In reality, this is only a part of the process. Paying your bills is crucial of course but there is much more to managing your daily finances than just bill pay. At PPS, we use the term Concierge Bill Pay to denote the main steps of managing your finances.

A successful daily money management plan has a solution for managing the following areas. Listed with these are details on how PPS can help.
- Document Management: How do you manage the inflow of junk mail and bills? PPS receives and processes your monthly bills and in some cases, all of your mail. It is then scanned and posted on a secure website for your review. We also can shred or store the documents.
- Bill Review: Do you take the time to look at all of your bills for overcharges, rate changes or errors? Each client with PPS is assigned a personal bookkeeper who reviews and monitors your bills to make sure they are accurate.
- Bill Payment: Constantly have late fees, overdrafts charges and never seem to have time to pay bills? With Concierge Bill Pay, we make sure your monthly bills are paid on time, each month, guaranteed.
- Vendor Disputes: How often do you argue with a vendor over late fees or errors on a bill? Your PPS bookkeeper will argue that annoying overcharge or question any potential fraud on your behalf, saving you the headaches and hassle.
- Household Expense Reports: How well do you know your monthly expenses? Many of our clients have PPS update and manage a Quicken file to track monthly expenses. We compile your monthly income and expense data and create custom reports to your specification. Be better informed of your true cash flow and more prepared for end of year taxes.
- Daily Financial Process Management: Do you have a set process for managing your daily finances? Many of our clients do not need ongoing support, they need a one time review of how they can better manage their finances on their own. Our experienced staff with years of managing finances for our clients will create a custom plan just for you with recommendations on how you can stay more on top of your daily finances.
- Work with financial advisors: Do you have a financial professional you work with? For many clients, we partner with their trusted advisors to manage more complex daily financial structures.

Dont just think that so long as your bills are getting paid that your finances are in order. Again, whether you call it bill paying services, daily money management, personal bookkeeper or just help, getting help managing your personal finances is a great investment.

Devin

PPS Celebrates 4 Years!

2008-05-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

May 2004 marked the beginning of Premier Payment Services. It was in that month that we started working with our first clients. Those first clients are not all too dissimilar from the prospective clients we talk to today. Our first clients were Seattle entrepreneurs, professional athletes, busy professionals, seniors living removed from close family and families looking for a clear understanding of where all their money was going. We partnered with some of the Seattle area's top wealth management firms and financial advisers to provide clients with top notch personal bookkeeping services. Our two founders brought together years of accounting experience, financial planning and an entrepreneurial spirit. 4 years later PPS has hundreds of clients covering 26 states and is a trusted partner of hundreds of financial professionals around the country.

During our time working with clients we have experienced a changing economy and a developing financial landscape. Many credit card companies, lenders and other vendors are acting to protect themselves even more with steeper late fees, more aggressive billing terms and more stringent security practices. The result is that consumers are struggling to manage their daily finances in this more challenging landscape. Technology and the Internet have brought even more great tools and improvements to online banking however the key still missing is oversight by the client of their daily and monthly finances. Poor management of your daily finances can lead to even greater financial bleeding from late fees, overdraft charges, a reduced credit score and finance charges. No matter how great the tool a client was using before PPS, if they could not effectively act as a daily financial manager over their own finances, the costs of not doing an effective job were greater than simply working with a firm like PPS.

Over the next 4 years PPS hopes to propagate the message that developing a plan for and effectively managing your daily finances is critical to your long term financial health. And in many cases, working with a daily money management firm such as PPS may be a wise choice. Our firm will continue to grow and create leading edge services and technology solutions to assist our clients in effectively managing their daily finances. We believe that financial professionals are beginning to better eunderstand the importance of our message and the services we offer and that eventually that lesson will take on a more defined voice in the regular media and culture. So ask yourself, what is your daily financial management plan? Do you piece things together and shoot from the hip so to speak or do you have a structure in place that allows bills to be paid on time, expenses to be tracked, bills reviewed and files stored? If not, maybe a firm like PPS is worth considering?

Thanks for the support to all our partners and clients on the 4th anniversary of PPS!

Devin

Personal Bookkeeper or Daily Money Manager

2008-04-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Business Bookkeeping

2008-03-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

Here is a great article in my home town paper here in Seattle about business bookkeeping.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/355210_smallbusiness17.html

We manage the books for many businesses and find that the owners we work with are on the whole more successful. They are able to focus more on their business and make more informed decisions. The same can also be said for our personal clients!

Here are some tips for considering a bookkeeper:
- Qualifications: What are they experienced doing and what software are they using
- Services offered: What would be most valuable for you to hand over? You may not need or want everything outsourced. In some cases, we just do the data entry to make sure things stay current.
- Time saved: How much time would you save and could it be diverted to a more productive task?

Or, call us for details!

Consumer Spending

2008-02-29T15:02:00.000-08:00

This is not surprising, consumer spending is down.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1311ap_economy.html

There is a great book called 'Smart Couples Finish Rich" by David Bach (http://www.finishrich.com/books/couples_brandhome.php ) that talks about not feeling quilty about spending money but you should at least think ahead about your discretionary spending. Good advice for sure. If you want to go golfing each week and spend the money on it, go for it, as long as it is important to you. But, if you buy coffee each morning and it is just a lazy habit, you might have to drop the coffee to keep golfing.

With spending down, hopefully people remember that they should still spend some cash on themselves if they can, just maybe think it through a bit...

Devin

Concierge Bill Pay

2008-02-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

What is Concierge Bill Pay? We get this a lot from people calling in and new wealth management partners. To us, Concierge Bill Pay is simply daily money management. It is also personal bookkeeping. It can also be family office services, or maybe personal cfo services. Lost yet? If you are looking for someone to manage your personal daily finances for you then you better learn these many different names. That is why PPS came up with Concierge Bill Pay. Concierge because we are doing them for the client on their behalf and bill pay because paying your bills is the cornerstone of daily finances.

Like any standard business, the average individual has accounts receivable (A/R - or your income, paycheck, etc.), accounts payable (A/P - these are your bills, debts, etc) and then you should have a profit and loss report (P/L - where your income was spent each month). Any of the terms we used above focus on these three things for you personally as well as the overall management that goes into getting them done.

At PPS, we believe that services such as Concierge Bill Pay will continue to become more prominent and more people will seek some level of assistance with one of the the core areas of their daily finances. If you have a good handle on paying bills but don't have a clue where your money goes, then Concierge Bill Pay is a good fit. If you have 3 homes around the country and 50 bills to pay each month, Concierge Bill Pay is a good fit. If your income is coming from different areas and is somewhat sporadic and you need assistance managing the process, Concierge Bill Pay is a good fit. Overall, Concierge Bill Pay is anything that we can do to help you better manage your daily finances.

Thanks for letting me define the difference!

Devin

Daily Money Management for seniors

2008-02-26T11:12:00.000-08:00

As the American population ages, more and more families are struggling to find solutions to who manages the massive wealth held by the greatest generation. This can cause strife in many families and in others can leave seniors on their own. I come from a large extended family with a seemingly endless line of cousins. In our family, it does not seem to be a question of who is going to help a family member out, but how many will join in. But that does not mean we are qualified for the job when we volunteer!

http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnfall05/professionalsPG9.html

Deciding who will manage your parents money is a difficult decision for many families and one where you should definitely stop and ask yourself, am I qualified.... Here is a great link from the FDIC from a few years about with links to tips and thoughts on hiring a daily money manager like PPS as well as what is at stake in having a family member manage your finances. Be sure to stop and think about how this will affect the family dynamic, is the person managing the finances qualified, willing and able to do the task and what does the senior really need.

Devin

Inflation Rate

2008-02-21T09:43:00.001-08:00

Lucky us, we had the highest inflation last year here in Seattle.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/352078_economy21.html

It was bound to hit sometime and it seems to have hit in all the places you would expect. Groceries, gas, etc. Another reason to watch our spending more closely!

Devin