Assets Under Management (AUM)

Assets under management (AUM) is the total market value of the investments a firm or advisor manages on behalf of clients. It moves as markets rise and fall and as clients add or withdraw money, so the figure is a snapshot rather than a fixed number.

AUM matters because it drives revenue for most advisory firms — the standard fee model bills a percentage of AUM — and it signals scale to prospects, custodians, and regulators. Advisors also watch it to gauge organic growth versus market drift.

In practice, AUM lives inside your portfolio management software, which aggregates custodial feeds, prices holdings daily, and rolls balances up by client, household, and firm. Clean AUM reporting depends on accurate account linkage and reconciliation.

Advisors typically track AUM in three ways:

• Firm-level — total book of business, used for valuation and fee revenue
• Household-level — all accounts for a client family, used for planning
• Discretionary vs. non-discretionary — what the firm actively manages versus advises on

Compare platforms that report AUM cleanly on our vendors page.