Fund management software solutions are sold in three shapes, and a first-time fund usually meets them in the wrong order: the enterprise administration platform first, because its vendors advertise, then the deal CRM with an investor tab, and only last the plain investor record that does the job the fund is actually stuck on. This page describes the three shapes, what each one does with a commitment, a call and a quarterly figure, and which of them fits a fund that has just closed and has investors to manage before it has anything else, using this site's own worked figures.
Shape one: the administration platform
The administration platform is the fund's ledger, NAV, waterfall and audited close with an investor portal on top, run by an outsourced administrator or by a firm large enough to staff it. It is the right fund management software solution for a manager with several funds, and it is priced and implemented for that manager. A first fund on it pays for a general ledger it will not touch and an implementation it cannot staff, and still keeps its own note of who the investors are, because the platform closes on the administrator's calendar.
Shape two: the deal CRM with an investor tab
The deal CRM is built for the pipeline and treats investors as contacts with a fundraising stage. It is the right solution for the firm whose problem is the deal side. Its investor tab stores a commitment as a field and a call as a note, which is enough until the second call, when called-to-date per investor and the uncalled balance stop being obvious and nothing in the product computes them. A fund that buys shape two for its investors finds itself keeping the capital account in a spreadsheet beside it.
Shape three: the investor record
The investor record holds one thing well: each investor's commitment and everything computed from it. A ten percent call against a five million dollar commitment is five hundred thousand dollars, and after it the investor is forty-five percent called with two million seven hundred and fifty thousand uncalled; the quarter's paid-in is the sum of every such call, and the multiples over it, on the worked example, read a DPI of zero point four zero and a TVPI of one point eight five times. Rapportvo is shape three, does not do shapes one or two, and is the fit for the fund whose investors are the job still done by hand.
Questions people ask about fund management software solutions
Can a fund move from shape three to shape one later?
Yes, and the record makes the move cleaner: every table exports as CSV, so the administrator receives a history of commitments, calls and distributions rather than a spreadsheet to reconstruct.
Is shape two ever right for the investor side?
At a firm with a deal team and an investor relations function, the platforms built for both do the investor side properly. Below that, the investor tab of a deal CRM is a contact list.
What does fund management software cost a first fund?
Shape one is a service fee set per fund in a contract; shape two is priced per user by each vendor; shape three, on this site, is one published monthly price for the whole fund. No competitor's figure is quoted here because an unread figure is an invented one.