Billing in Morningstar Office

Overview

Morningstar Office’s Portfolio Management System gives you the ability to calculate fees and create billing summaries for clients. Using the billing feature, you can specify your fee settings and tiers, automatically calculate fee amounts, and create client-facing billing summaries.

You can also generate a custodian fee file to upload fee information to your custodian to deduct fees from your clients’ accounts. If you import data from your custodian, the fee transactions will be included once they are executed.

This topic outlines the different management fee options available to you and walks you through the process of billing at the client, account, and group levels.

What can I bill for in Morningstar Office?

The table below describe the types of items you can bill for in Morningstar Office:

Billable Item	Description
Management Fees	Management fees are those collected for the management of clients’ assets. They can be asset-based or flat, and they can be generated by using the management fee settings or manually entered by users.
Billable Services	Billable services might include the following: initial consultation and account setup, and regular review of clients' financial needs.
Service Charge	Service charges might include the following: account maintenance charges such as a minimum balance charge and/or finance charge, and per item charges for requests of additional documents.
Adjustments	Adjustments are changes made to billable items or billing statement totals after the statement for such an item was already generated.
Payments	Payments are payments the client made toward billings that are not deposited into accounts. Payment is applied to older balances first.

How do I set up the program to calculate my clients’ fees?

The four basic steps to setting up your Office account to calculate fees are as follows:

Create management fees
Assign management fees to clients or accounts
Apply fee methodologies, and
Assign fee allocations to clients or accounts.

The table below briefly explains each of these steps:

Component	What is this designed to do?
Create management fees	Will you bill a standard dollar amount, or an rate based on a client’s assets? Will the rate be flat for all clients, or tiered based on the amount they have invested with you?
Assign management fees to clients or accounts	Once a fee is created, it must still be applied to a client or account.
Apply management fees	How will you bill each client or group? Will you aggregate all of their accounts? Will you bill each account separately?
Assign fee allocations to clients or accounts	If you charge a tiered fee to a client, will all accounts for that client be charged equally? Should one or more accounts be excluded from billing fees?