The CRM private equity funds use changes with the fund's age, and a short list that ignores that sells a first fund a platform built for its tenth. This page is the short list by stage: what a fund runs between its first meeting with an investor and its first close, what it adds once it has commitments to call against, and what the second fund's investment team demands. It is written for the person choosing, not for the vendor, so each stage names what the product must hold and what it may safely leave out, and the worked figures come from this site's own worksheets rather than from anyone's brochure.
Before the first close: a list with owners and stages
A fund raising its first commitments needs one list: every prospective investor, who at the fund owns the relationship, what stage the conversation is at, and what was promised. A spreadsheet does this honestly for a while. What a spreadsheet cannot do is turn a prospect into a commitment at the close without retyping the person, or keep the promise made in March readable in September. The CRM a fund needs at this stage is small, and the test of it is whether the row that was a prospect becomes the row that holds the commitment.
Fund one: the commitments, the calls and the letter
Once there are commitments there are capital calls, and a capital call is where the investor record earns its keep. Every notice is a percentage of every commitment; on this site's worked example a ten percent call against a five million dollar commitment is a notice for five hundred thousand dollars, and after it the investor has been called for forty-five percent of their commitment with two million seven hundred and fifty thousand still uncalled. The record has to compute that for every investor, send it, keep it as sent, and reconcile the wire against it. Then, each quarter, it has to produce paid-in, DPI, RVPI and TVPI from the same entries. That is the CRM private equity funds need at fund one, and it is what Rapportvo is.
Fund two: the deal team gets its own CRM
By the second fund there is an investment team with a pipeline, and they want the deal CRM: email and calendar capture, the relationship graph, the diligence stages and the memo. That is a different product with a different buyer, and the vendors who build it well, Affinity, DealCloud and 4Degrees among them, are ranked on this site's page on the best CRM for private equity. The investor record does not merge into the deal CRM at this point unless the firm chooses a platform that does both; more often it stays where the investor relations lead keeps it, and the two systems share a list of names.
Questions people ask about crm private equity
Should a first fund buy the deal CRM early to avoid migrating later?
Only if the pipeline is the job that is failing. A deal CRM at a fund with no deal team is a database with one user, and the migration it saves is a list of company names. The migration that hurts is the investor record, because it carries commitments and every historic call, which is a reason to get that record right first.
Can the same CRM hold both records?
The platforms built for firms with both teams can, and at that size they are the right answer. Below that size the question is which record is still a spreadsheet, and buying for that one first is cheaper than buying a platform for both.
What does Rapportvo hold, exactly?
Investors with their commitments and an owner, capital calls and distributions against each, the notices and quarterly updates as they went out, and the figures computed from them. No pipeline of companies, no portfolio monitoring, no NAV.