Mutual fund and variable annuity shareholder reports are constantly in flux. Each year the SEC reviews and recommends improvements, from adopting plain English requirements and adding new disclosures on ongoing expenses to requiring summaries and analytical information on portfolio holdings and discussions about performance.
As the documents become more complex, the effort required for fund families to prepare and produce them within stated guidelines has grown to monumental proportions: gathering substantial volumes of specific data, composing and typesetting that data, circulating it to numerous reviewers who follow regulations and fund information, and printing and distributing the final result. Can the process ever get less complex? Merrill has a way.
MerrillReports is a comprehensive solution to prepare, typeset, review, manage and print structured and compliant shareholder reports. It provides a broad complement of tools and utilities that empowers you to quickly and easily automate the process, including integrating schedules of investments, financial statements, financial highlights and notes, letters to shareholders and more. MerrillReports streamlines the report preparation process and saves time, money and productivity.
The complete solution
MerrillReports includes a full set of modules and functions for preparing fund reports:
Financials – Pull financial data from operational accounting systems to create statements of assets and liabilities, statements of operations, statements of changes in net assets and financial highlights
Schedule of Investments – Easily prepare your schedule of investments, fund performance data and securities library data
Documents – Create and use “Notes to Financials text here” to customize each fund or re-use them consistently across all reports
Administration – Configure password-controlled access and define your data-download specifications from fund accounting systems
Structured Review – Circulate documents to Tax, Legal, Audit, Marketing and Compliance departments in a manageable review process
MerrillReports offers many advantages when you create shareholder documentation:
- Direct data transfers: Integrate MerrillReports with your fund accounting system to automate the creation of shareholder report data, saving time, accelerating production and increasing report accuracy
- Automatic changes and rounding: Make changes to one report and watch the corresponding changes to interrelated reports occur automatically, while the rounding feature instantly handles cross-checks, eliminates manual adjustments and improves report accuracy
- Faster proofs and approvals: Quickly create internal document proofs and distribute them electronically for review
- Complete customization: Customize each Schedule of Investments based on your fund’s reporting requirements
- Multiple class capabilities: Handle multiple-class funds as well as master/feeder funds
- Full auditing support: Display accounting formulas on statement pages to simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of external auditing
- Automatic footnoting: Attach footnotes directly to a specific security using the master security database, which then lets MerrillReports call out footnotes automatically in a Schedule of Investments
- Security library: Access and populate information directly from a complete (full legal descriptions) library of all securities in your portfolios to help eliminate the issue of maintaining security descriptions in multiple locations
