Portfolio Reporting

What is a portfolio report?

Portfolio reports present key information about a portfolio’s performance and risks to stakeholders. They provide valuable insights into an investment’s return and are used to inform decisions about future investments and ongoing improvement.

Why are portfolio reports important?

Portfolio reports allow stakeholders to gain clarity on a portfolio’s performance, risks and opportunities for improvement.

Specifically, they are a mechanism for proving the portfolio performance to limited partners.

What are the challenges?

While it might sound easy, putting portfolio reports together is anything but. It can be stressful, laborious and frustrating. Below are the five main challenges as we see them:

1. Inconsistent data – it is often difficult to synthesise data across the portfolio, making it challenging to get a clear picture of the performance as a whole.
2. Time – those who work in private equity tend to be crazy busy. Doing deals takes time and is, understandably, prioritised. Putting together a portfolio report is time-consuming. It’s often done at the last minute, late in the month. And the quality can suffer.
3. Reports tend to focus on financial data. They don’t give a holistic view of corporate health, including people, sales and impact (ESG) data.
4. Reports focus on actuals – not the budget, investment case or forecasts.
5. Existing solutions are cumbersome and require you to map to their schema. No sooner is the data in than you it comes out again, into Excel for analysis and PowerPoint for commentary. It’s a disconnected, manual and time-consuming process.

What is the solution?

Data

It starts with data. We provide a streamlined solution that uses your schema (with the option to adapt one of our templates if you prefer).

• We map visually from within our platform. We start with the portfolio companies’ management accounts in Excel. We copy and paste them, ignoring redundant rows and columns. It’s that easy.
• We include other data alongside financial figures. We believe it’s important to understand a company’s health from different angles. We include people, sales, impact (ESG) data and all manner of KPIs. We don’t just consider actuals, but also budgets, investment cases and forecasts.

Actions are captured and managed and can be benchmarked across the portfolio.

Use templates for monthly, quarterly and annual reviews

The data can be pulled into different reports, depending on your need:

• Monthly trading reports – seamlessly traverse management accounts at both a company and portfolio level.
• Quarterly valuation reports – get insightful valuation reports with commentary to share with limited partners.
• Annual deep-dive review – conduct in-depth strategic reviews. Track and manage actions.

We provide one version of the truth

Get on the same page as your portfolio companies and improve the dialogue by giving them access to advanced analytics on monthly trading data. Make this more than a monthly chore for them. Ensure that they get value too.

Create a single version of the truth with numbers that match what’s being reported to the board.

We aim to give you time back. We want you to feel in control and more informed so you can ask better questions to the board, CEO and Chair.

We want to transform this from a burdensome chore into something fun. Let us help you spot the trends across your portfolio so you can have better conversations.