What your firm gets
The fee they signed, every time
The schedule comes from the agreement, not a table someone typed in later.
A billing week that runs itself
Calculation, fee cash, and the Schwab file run in one pass. Your team reviews what needs a person.
Fees that respect the portfolio
Cash is raised under your allocation, tax, and wash-sale rules, with Roth dollars protected.
Everything on the household
Agreement, bill, invoice, payout, and any retry sit together in Mission Control.
The agreement is the fee schedule
Most billing errors start when the fee in the system drifts away from the paperwork. Athena closes that gap. New advisory agreements are signed in Athena, existing ones are stored on the household, and AI reads each one for the rate, the tiers and minimums, named exclusions, the billing frequency, the balance it bills on, and which accounts pay. A change to the agreement is a change to the next bill.
| The agreement says | Athena bills |
|---|---|
| 1.00% on the first $1M, 0.85% above | A blended, tiered household fee |
| Exclude employer stock | Employer stock left out of the billable base |
| Bill quarterly on average daily balance | The balance and frequency the document names |
| Pull the fee from taxable, never the Roth | Taxable pays; the Roth is never debited |
- The agreement says
- 1.00% on the first $1M, 0.85% above
- Athena bills
- A blended, tiered household fee
- The agreement says
- Exclude employer stock
- Athena bills
- Employer stock left out of the billable base
- The agreement says
- Bill quarterly on average daily balance
- Athena bills
- The balance and frequency the document names
- The agreement says
- Pull the fee from taxable, never the Roth
- Athena bills
- Taxable pays; the Roth is never debited
The agreement above is illustrative, not a client’s. If the loaded schedule and the signed document ever disagree, that household waits for your team instead of going out wrong.
A billing run, start to finish
Read the current agreement
Athena pulls the executed agreement on each household and checks the loaded schedule against it.
Calculate the household fee
Tiers, minimums, and exclusions, on average daily balance or period-end, exactly as the agreement says.
Raise cash where the fee needs it
The optimizer trades under your investing rules so the debit can execute, and raises only what the bill requires.
Send exact dollars to Schwab
The fee file goes out with exact amounts on exact accounts. Anything Schwab rejects comes back to the household to retry.
Your team’s part is the review: the handful of households that need a decision, not every line of every bill.
Fee cash, raised the right way
Schwab debits the dollars you send; it doesn’t store your fee schedule or sell holdings to cover a fee. So before the file goes out, Athena makes sure the cash is there, using the same optimizer that runs harvesting, asset location, and rebalancing overnight. The trades follow every rule in your investment policy: allocation bands, tax location, wash-sale lockouts, restricted lots, and gains budgets.
| Account | Fee cash |
|---|---|
| Taxable brokerage | First |
| Traditional IRA | Its own fee only |
| Roth IRA | Protected |
- Account
- Taxable brokerage
- Fee cash
- First
- Account
- Traditional IRA
- Fee cash
- Its own fee only
- Account
- Roth IRA
- Fee cash
- Protected
Only the cash the bill requires is raised, and tax-advantaged balances keep compounding. See how the overnight run works in Investing and the tax-aware ETF methodology.
Who pays is in the agreement
Quarter-end shouldn’t be the moment someone decides which account pays. With Athena, the agreement already says, and every bill follows it.
Taxable accounts pay first
When the household has a taxable account, the fee can come from there so tax-advantaged balances keep growing.
Roth pays last, or never
Roth dollars are the last place a fee lands, and the agreement can say they never pay.
An IRA pays only its own fee
A Traditional IRA covers only its own advisory fee, never a taxable account, a spouse, or another IRA. A Roth pays its own fee only when the agreement says so.
Named exclusions stay out
Employer stock, private positions, cash above a line, or a whole account sit out of the billable base when the agreement says so.
Athena can also pro-rate the fee across a household’s accounts when that’s what the agreement calls for.
Invoices, payouts, and retries in one place
Once the agreement is the schedule, everything around the fee comes from the same numbers. Each household gets an invoice and a billing statement that match the Schwab file. Your advisors are paid from the collected fee on the split grid you set, on the same run. When a fee doesn’t come out of a Schwab account, the household can pay by ACH or card through Athena. And when Schwab rejects a debit, the item comes back to the household in Mission Control to reconcile and retry.
Mission Control
Billing sits on the household record.
See the agreement, the bill, and the rest of the household on one record, next to overnight investing and every client conversation.
See Mission ControlReady for every exam
The SEC’s 2026 risk alerts name fee billing errors, such as fees the agreement doesn’t allow and billing on excluded assets. With Athena, what the agreement said, what was billed, who overrode a flag, and which debits were retried stay together on the household. Nobody reconstructs a quarter from a spreadsheet and a folder of PDFs.
Athena calculates the fee from the signed agreement, makes the cash available, and sends exact dollars. There’s no repapering and no new custodian.
Athena runs on AWS and is covered by a SOC 2 Type II report. Book a demo to see a billing run on households like yours.