Cube vs Mosaic for RIAs: Fee Income and Payout Grid Modeling

Assets under management at the end of a quarter equal the beginning balance, plus net new client inflows, plus or minus market performance, minus withdrawals. Fee revenue is a fraction of that ending balance. If your finance function only tracks total AUM and total fee revenue, a strong quarter in the market can mask a firm that's actually losing clients, and a weak quarter can hide the fact that your advisors brought in real new business.

Mosaic's waterfall logic wants a clean new-expansion-contraction-churn split, which fits a subscription business but has to be adapted by hand for an RIA, since there's no natural "churn" event, only a shrinking balance. Cube and Jirav let you build separate inflow and market-return columns directly into the model, pulling beginning and ending AUM by household from your custodian feed and calculating the market-return residual yourself.

Most RIAs pay advisors on a grid: a lower percentage of trailing revenue below a threshold, stepping up at defined breakpoints, sometimes with a separate rate for assets an advisor brought in personally versus a house account they inherited. A team that shares a book complicates this further, since credit has to be split before the grid math even starts.

Cube and Jirav handle this well because a payout grid is just a lookup formula against trailing revenue, something a spreadsheet-native tool is built for. Mosaic's compensation modeling assumes department-level budgets and headcount, not a per-producer grid that resets every period, so you'd be working around the tool rather than with it. If your grid has more than two tiers or any team-split rules, budget extra setup time either way.

Fees billed in advance based on a beginning-of-quarter balance rarely match what actually gets remitted, since a client can add or withdraw funds mid-quarter, or qualify for a fee waiver or breakpoint discount you forgot to apply. Left unreconciled, that gap compounds across a book of a few hundred households into a real accuracy problem for your own revenue forecast.

Ask Cube which custodian platforms, such as Schwab Advisor Center, Fidelity Wealthscape, or Pershing, it supports through file feeds or integrations, and decide how granular you want the reconciliation to be. Mosaic can ingest the same feeds but expects them formatted closer to a billing system's native export, so a custodian that only offers CSV downloads means more manual mapping work up front.

A solo advisor or a two-person partnership usually runs billing, reconciliation, and compliance filings themselves. Somewhere past a few hundred million in AUM, or once a second custodian relationship or a state registration change enters the picture, that stops being sustainable and firms bring on a dedicated operations or compliance associate.

Nationally, accountants, auditors, and comparable finance staff carry a median salary a little under $84,000 a year, with the top quartile clearing $110,000¹. A compliance-focused ops hire at an RIA often lands closer to that top quartile once you factor in the Series 65 or IAR registration knowledge the role requires. Either Cube or Jirav can shorten the ramp-up for that hire by giving them a model that already reflects your grid and reconciliation logic, instead of one they have to build from scratch.

• If your payout grid has two or fewer tiers and no team-split rules, Mosaic's compensation module can likely handle it with modest configuration.
• If your grid has multiple tiers, team-shared books, or a different rate for house accounts versus advisor-sourced business, Cube's spreadsheet-native formulas will get you there faster than adapting Mosaic's model.
• If you're a smaller multi-advisor practice that wants a working forecast quickly without building the model yourself, Jirav's driver-based templates may get you to something usable sooner, so test that in a trial.

Whichever you pick, build the market-return-versus-inflow split first. It's the one number that tells you whether the firm is actually growing or just riding the market.