When your portfolio becomes too complex to handle in a spreadsheet, it’s natural to look for software to help you manage it.
The right software for you depends on what type of portfolio you have. SMBs managing a portfolio of clients need very different software than private investors overseeing their assets.
In this article, you’ll discover seven portfolio management solutions, each specializing in a different type of portfolio.
Key takeaways from portfolio management software
Choosing software that specializes in the type of portfolio you oversee helps you avoid paying for features that don’t match your needs.
If you’re overseeing an investment portfolio, look for software that has account aggregation, rebalancing tools and robust analytics.
If you’re operating a portfolio of companies, choose tools that support scenario modeling, portfolio-level budgeting and streamlined reporting.
If you’re an SMB managing a portfolio of clients, use Pipedrive. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and see how simple handling clients can be.
What type of portfolio are you managing?
There are many types of portfolios, each of interest to a different type of portfolio manager. Here are some examples:
Portfolio type | Portfolio manager |
Clients | SMBs |
Business projects | SMBs |
Investment assets | Private investor |
A client’s investments | Financial advisor |
Real estate | Property manager |
Group of companies you own | Holding company |
Group of companies you have a stake in | Venture capitalist |
There’s no one-size-fits-all portfolio management tool that caters to all these different portfolios, because portfolio managers’ needs vary. For instance:
A small business managing a project portfolio needs to check off projects when they’re complete. An investor might manage the same asset portfolio for 30 years.
A property manager needs to know the occupancy rate across their portfolio. Unless they work in real estate, a business owner managing a portfolio of clients doesn’t give occupancy rate a second thought.
Occasionally, the software choices for different portfolio types overlap. For example, you could manage a real estate portfolio using dedicated real estate software, but you could also use generic asset management software as part of a more diverse portfolio.
Most often, however, you’ll want to look for a provider that specializes in the specific type of portfolio you need to manage.
Below, you’ll discover the best software for managing seven distinct types of portfolios.
Feel free to scroll to the type of portfolio that’s most relevant to your situation.
1. Pipedrive: best for SMBs managing a portfolio of clients
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that SMBs can use to manage and grow a portfolio of clients.
Pipedrive acts as a single source of truth for all your client communications. On each client’s card, you can log interactions like emails, meetings and calls.
You can also store account-specific details like:
Contracts
Onboarding notes
Renewal dates
Shared documents
Upsells clients are interested in
Storing account details centrally ensures anyone on your team can quickly get up to speed with each account without having to pester a manager or dig through email chains and spreadsheets.
Pipedrive in action: Video production agency Interesting Content migrated all its clients’ details from spreadsheets to Pipedrive. Thanks to a tidier customer database, the company was able to capitalize on more opportunities and increase revenue by 4x.
Each client’s card shows the amount of revenue from that account, allowing you to see which client relationships are the most valuable at any given moment.
Pipedrive integrates with popular tools like Slack, Asana and Microsoft Teams, so you can easily pass CRM data between team members without having to duplicate work across multiple systems.
If you need to schedule a meeting with a client, you can do that from within Pipedrive. Assign the meeting to the right account manager, then schedule automated reminders.
After the meeting, you can schedule follow-up tasks in Pipedrive to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Beyond managing your existing clients, Pipedrive can also help you expand your portfolio.
Once clients are in the system, a visual Kanban board lets you see all your deals by their stage in your sales process. Simply drag and drop a lead’s card to move it from one stage to the next.
Each lead’s card shows the probability of that particular deal closing, allowing your salespeople to prioritize the warmest leads. If deals fall through, you can log the reason to help you optimize your sales strategy and improve your win rate over time.
Pipedrive also includes sales forecasting tools that project future revenue based on the probability of deal closure. These tools allow SMBs to manage their cash flow with confidence.
2. Empower: best for individuals managing a private investment portfolio
Empower is an all-in-one investment portfolio management software for private clients.
It collects retirement accounts, 401(k)s, bank accounts, loans and brokerage accounts in one place. A central dashboard lets you see your net worth and how you’ve allocated your investments across different asset classes.
From your dashboard, you can track performance metrics across all holdings and compare them against both industry benchmarks and your own past performance.
If you dig deeper into the data for each asset class, you can look into individual holdings and review how much you’re exposed to each sector.
Empower updates in real time to match any changes you make to your portfolio, whether on the platform itself or on other tools it syncs with, such as your brokerage account.
Private investors can use Empower’s tools to inform their investment strategy. For example:
The Retirement Planner projects your future income, expenses and withdrawal rate and assesses whether you’re on track for a secure retirement
The Portfolio Analysis tool holistically measures risk across your portfolio and assesses whether your exposure aligns with your personal risk tolerance
Empower can also connect you inside its platform to a tax consultant who can give you tax advice and file paperwork on your behalf
If your investment strategy is off track, you can go back through past transactions to see where things went wrong, or use Empower’s tools to rebalance your portfolio to better serve your needs.
You can even have this software send you automated notifications whenever your portfolio requires adjusting.
3. Asana: best for SMBs managing a project portfolio
Asana’s project portfolio management software (PPM) lets SMBs manage multiple projects at once, view deadlines and ensure employees complete work to a professional standard.
You can set up distinct project management boards for each department, with automations that trigger the next workflow in the project lifecycle when the previous one is finished. For example:
Your graphic designer finishes creating an infographic. Asana automatically notifies your social media team so they can post it.
Your legal team approves contract language for a new service line. Asana sends a notification to your sales team, instructing them to send the contract.
Your freelance translator translates a landing page. Asana tells your website manager that they can publish the translated page.
As a manager, you can check in on deadlines and create approval processes to keep your team accountable. Asana’s calendar, timeline and Gantt views give you various visual options for reviewing task dependencies and identifying overdue tasks.
5 free project plan templates
You can also track a wide range of resources, including your budget, your team’s capacity, raw materials and product inventory.
If a task is at risk of going over budget or requiring more team members than you intended, you can create a risk management plan to address the issue. Teams typically log risks inside each project using custom fields and tags.
If your team gets overwhelmed with too many projects, Asana lets you rank tasks by priority to focus effort on the highest-impact initiatives.
Generating reports for senior management takes only a couple of clicks. Intuitive dashboards give leaders an overview of KPIs such as time-to-delivery, resource utilization rate and return on investment (ROI).
4. Envestnet Tamarac: best portfolio management software for financial advisors
Envestnet Tamarac lets financial advisors manage multiple client investment portfolios from a single dashboard.
The software pulls in data from multiple custodians for each client account and structures it by household. Examples of custodians Tamarac integrates with include:
Charles Schwab
Fidelity Investments
Pershing
The dashboard updates in real time as advisors or clients make investment decisions.
Your clients have 24/7 access to their portfolio data through a portal that includes options to communicate with you, performance reports and document delivery.
For clients who prefer a more hands-off approach, you can generate branded reports inside Tamarac and tailor them to your clients’ investment goals. Financial reports can be high-level summaries or more granular, depending on clients’ needs.
Along with creating reports for clients, you can also monitor your advisory firm’s overall portfolio performance within Tamarac.
If an investment portfolio is underperforming, you can rebalance it.
You can rebalance it manually, or have Tamarac monitor portfolios and trigger automatic rebalancing when a holding drifts. In both cases, the platform executes trades directly with custodians and reconciles them immediately.
Fund managers can rebalance a portfolio if a client communicates that their risk tolerance has changed. Tamarac will automatically tell you if there are any risks associated with concentrating investments in a single asset class.
If a tax authority decides to audit one of your clients, Tamarac maintains a record of all the trades and user actions for each account.
The software also checks for compliance before making any trades. These key features reduce the risk of breaking the law.
5. Carta: best for VCs managing a portfolio of companies
Carta gives VCs a way to access legal documents, track financing history and review their investor rights across all their portfolio companies.
The core of the platform is a cap table dashboard that tracks equity ownership across your entire portfolio of companies.
Carta automatically updates after funding rounds and option grants, showing VCs their exact ownership percentage, the value of each stake and where they stand relative to other investors.
The platform also includes options for managing prospective deals, including a place to store notes from due diligence and interactions with founders.
Carta tracks how the value of each of your companies evolves over time. It updates valuations based on:
Rounds of investment
Simple Agreements for Future Equity (SAFEs)
409A valuations that the IRS requested
You can also monitor the health of each business using operational KPIs like revenue, growth rate and burn rate.
Carta highlights trends across your portfolio so you can see which startups are performing best and which require more management attention. It also offers a range of different functions to assist VCs with cash flow planning and asset allocation.
The software can simulate funding rounds, acquisitions and IPOs to estimate expected returns. It can also model what might happen if ownership changes.
In addition to providing an overview of the numbers, Carta offers VCs the option to communicate with founders and investors directly within the platform.
VCs can request information from founders, and founders can share updates, KPIs and financial documentation. Investors also get access to a portal with automated quarterly reports and performance data.
6. Anaplan: best for holding companies managing a portfolio of subsidiaries
Anaplan allows holding companies to combine financial data from multiple subsidiaries into a single, unified platform.
For example, you can create reports that show the following for each subsidiary:
Balance sheets
Working capital
Revenue growth
Profitability
Board-level executives can use these financial insights to make data-driven investment decisions at both the group and subsidiary levels.
For example, imagine the board finds that one particular subsidiary has been consistently overspending.
You could use Anaplan to create a stricter budget, model what might happen operationally if the subsidiary implemented it and report on progress.
The software also allows for intercompany transactions. The holding company can bail out underperforming subsidiaries or allocate profits from the most successful parts of the portfolio.
You can track returns on invested capital (ROIC) across your whole portfolio, allowing you to assign resources to the highest-return opportunities.
You can be confident that any investments you make are safe, since Anaplan automatically tracks portfolio risk across financial, operational and market factors and sends warning notifications if anything is amiss.
If you want to acquire a new company and add it to your portfolio, it’s smart to plan the acquisition in Anaplan in advance.
You’ll be able to evaluate the financial and strategic impact on your entire portfolio, because Anaplan will model the most probable scenarios.
7. Buildium: best for property managers overseeing a real estate portfolio
Buildium’s AI-powered software lets property managers track rental income, view occupancy rates and communicate with tenants without switching between tools.
On the financial side, Buildium tracks rent payments for each unit. If tenants pay late, the software sends them automatic reminders and shows you the overdue balance.
Managers can use Buildium to track loans and financing arrangements. For example, you can view mortgage balances, interest and payment schedules. You can even integrate an external line of credit.
Between revenue and financing, Buildium ensures you always know how much cash you have on hand, allowing you to plan for future acquisitions and maintenance costs.
The software lets you model different future outcomes based on the assumptions you provide, reducing the risk of a scenario blindsiding you.
On the people side, Buildium offers numerous tools to help manage tenants. For example, it:
Runs background checks on new tenants
Maintains a profile for each tenant
Acts as a repository for lease agreements and contracts
Saves all the communications with each tenant in one central location
If a tenant asks you to fix something that’s broken in their apartment, you can use Buildium to assign and manage tasks for contractors or in-house staff.
Once you’ve assigned a task, the software will monitor it to ensure it gets done and track any associated costs.
Buildium also helps you stay compliant with local rental regulations by maintaining an audit trail for all your financial and operational transactions.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, the best portfolio management software for you depends on the type of portfolio you plan to manage.
If you’re an SMB with a portfolio of clients, Pipedrive is the stand-out choice. You can store account-level data in the CRM and pass it to other tools in your stack, all while growing your client portfolio.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial to start streamlining your client management system today.
