Every guide to a CRM for VCs starts with the deal pipeline, and every first-time fund reading one has two partners, a spreadsheet of startups that works fine, and thirty limited partners who each expect a capital call to be right and a quarterly letter to arrive. This page is a CRM for VCs written from the first fund's side: what a fund of that size has to keep now, what it computes rather than stores, and what it can leave until the second fund and the first associate. The figures are the worked examples from this site's own worksheets, so they can be checked line by line.
What a first fund has to keep from day one
A row per limited partner with the commitment from the subscription agreement, the eligibility counsel confirmed, and the partner who owns the relationship. Against each row, every capital call issued and every distribution made, with the date and the document as it went out. That is the whole record, and it is small: a fund with thirty investors and four calls has a hundred and twenty call entries. What makes it a CRM for VCs rather than a spreadsheet is that each entry is computed from the commitment rather than typed, and each notice is kept rather than overwritten.
What the record computes, on the worked example
A capital call of ten percent against a five million dollar commitment is a notice for five hundred thousand dollars; if one million seven hundred and fifty thousand had been called before it, the investor stands at two million two hundred and fifty thousand called, forty-five percent of their commitment, with two million seven hundred and fifty thousand uncalled. At the quarter end the fund's paid-in capital is the sum of every such call, and with the distributions and the residual value it gives DPI, RVPI and TVPI. Those five figures on a notice and three on a letter are what a first fund's CRM exists to get right, and every one of them is arithmetic over the record.
What can wait until fund two
The deal graph: email and calendar capture, the relationship map, the warm path to a founder. A first fund's pipeline is read by the two people who built it and a spreadsheet does not lie to them. Portfolio monitoring: a handful of companies report by email and a tab holds their figures until there are twenty of them. The LP portal: thirty investors receive a PDF and a wire instruction and are content. Each of those becomes a product at the second fund, and buying them at the first fund buys three jobs the fund does by hand for the price of the one it does not.
Questions people ask about crm for vcs
Which CRM for VCs does the deal graph well?
Affinity, 4Degrees and the Salesforce-based platforms are ranked for that on this site's page on the best CRM for venture capital. This page is about the other half of the job, and Rapportvo does only that half.
Is a first fund too small to need any of this?
A fund with five investors and one capital call is. The second call is where called-to-date and uncalled per investor stop being obvious, and a fund that has sent two notices to thirty investors has already outgrown the spreadsheet whether or not it has noticed.
What happens to the record when the fund hires an administrator?
The administrator keeps the ledger and the NAV and issues the formal capital account statements. The fund keeps its own working record of who its investors are, what was sent and what was asked, and reconciles the two each quarter. The record does not become redundant; it becomes the thing the administrator's figures are checked against.