Private equity management software is a phrase that means whichever of a firm's four jobs the vendor using it happens to sell. For a deal CRM it means managing the pipeline; for a monitoring product it means managing the portfolio companies; for an administrator it means managing the fund's books; and for an investor record it means managing the limited partners, their commitments and what they are owed. This page takes the phrase apart into those four jobs, says what managing each one actually involves, and puts the investor record where it belongs among them, with the worked figures from this site's worksheets rather than any vendor's claims.
Managing the deals: the pipeline and the people around it
The deal job is the investment team's: every company seen, every intermediary who introduced it, every diligence step and every memo, with the relationships captured from email and calendar rather than typed. Managing it means knowing where each opportunity stands and who at the firm knows the person across the table. Products built for this are ranked on this site's page on the best CRM for private equity, and none of them is the investor record, however good they are at their own job.
Managing the portfolio and the books: figures that arrive from outside
The portfolio job is the companies' quarterly figures, board packs and valuations, and managing it means a consistent view of twenty companies' numbers. The books job is the ledger, the NAV, the waterfall and the audited close, and managing it is usually the administrator's work on the administrator's calendar. Both produce figures the investor record consumes: the residual value on the quarterly update is the portfolio job's output priced through the books job. The investor record does not do either job; it takes their answer as an input and says so.
Managing the investors: the record that computes rather than stores
The investor job is a commitment per limited partner and everything computed from it. A capital call is a percentage of every commitment; on the worked example a ten percent call against a five million dollar commitment is five hundred thousand dollars, and the investor's uncalled balance after it is two million seven hundred and fifty thousand. Paid-in capital is the sum of the calls; DPI, RVPI and TVPI are ratios over it, and on the fund-level example they read zero point four zero, one point four five and one point eight five times. Managing the investors means those figures come out of the record rather than being typed into it, and every notice and letter is kept as it was sent.
Where a small fund starts
A first or second fund has an administrator or an accountant for the books, a spreadsheet for the deals that its two readers trust, and a tab for a handful of portfolio companies. The job most often still done by hand at that size is the investors, and it is the job whose mistakes an LP sees, so it is the sensible first purchase. Rapportvo is that purchase and nothing else: the investor half of private equity management software, with the other three halves named on this page so nobody buys it for them.
Questions people ask about private equity management software
Is private equity management software the same as a fund administration platform?
An administration platform is the books job with an investor portal attached, and at a multi-fund manager it is the right buy. The phrase covers it, and covers three other jobs too, which is why a search for it returns products that share almost nothing.
Can the investor record be managed inside the deal CRM?
The platforms built for firms with both a deal team and an investor relations team do it. Below that size the investor record is usually a separate, smaller product or the administrator's portal, and the deal CRM holds the investors as contacts.
What does managing the investors cost a fund that does it by hand?
A quarter's reconciliation between the spreadsheet, the inbox and the administrator's statement, and one call sent with last quarter's figures. The second of those is what turns a spreadsheet into a purchase.