Our client, a leading private equity firm, recognized that its long-standing approach to fund reporting was time-consuming, process-heavy, and increasingly unsustainable in a competitive landscape in which their sophisticated investment clients expected faster and more valuable insights.
The biggest challenge was that the firm really had a very manual and time-consuming approach to its reporting. The process relied heavily on hallway conversations, spreadsheets traded over email, and serial review cycles. A single report took an average of 45 days from start to finish, which translated to staff needing to pull a lot of “all-weekers” to cover the reporting needs across all of the firm’s 25 funds.
Adding to the urgency: The specter of evolving new reporting rules for private equity firms from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that promised even more complexity ahead.
A highly manual, time-challenged fund reporting process
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Working closely with the client, our KPMG team quickly identified the cloud-based Workiva software platform as an ideal solution to streamline the reporting processes and enhance the quality of the reports for each fund. The 19-week project has delivered rapid returns for the client in several key areas:
Report generation: Workiva’s fund reporting solution allowed for a direct integration to both fund accounting and portfolio performance systems. Within Workiva’s collaborative environment, the client’s custom report templates were built out. This established a pipeline straight from the source systems to the final reports. Workiva’s data tool tightly organizes and maps all required data on the back-end, which is then leveraged on the front-end through the software’s functionality to create templated reports with modular components that enable easy customization. With real-time data available in Workiva, the new platform is now generating dynamic reports in minutes versus the previous multiweek cycles.
User experience: Fund managers now have a dynamic new user experience for report generation that enables them to deliver high-value reports and insights for their limited partners.
Improved trust in reported data: Data transformations are centralized within the Workiva environment with a change and runtime log of all data pulls and calculations with full data traceability.
Audit-ready: Report reviews and approvals have been built into the Workiva platform with automated notification procedures. Evidence of these controls can be readily accessed to provide an audit trail for internal or regulatory reviews.
Centralized document management: Eliminated the management of multiple spreadsheets and different versions of reports by using cloud-based shared documents that live within the Workiva environment.
Going from months to minutes—in just a 19-week project
More time for informed decision-making. Less time on fund reporting. More value delivered across the board for investment partners, from top-line market insights to bottom-line fund performance.
Those are the net results for our private equity client, which started generating real returns from the Workiva platform within just weeks of the full rollout—net-new returns that are especially welcome in today’s high-interest, margin-challenged investment climate. The new platform has also empowered our client with more agile reporting capabilities overall, which enabled us to quickly incorporate updates that covered new SEC rules for private fund disclosures (adopted in August 2023) during the project.
Workiva’s value to private equity firms goes beyond its limited partners. Going forward, we’re working with our client to extend its capabilities and enhance other areas. These areas include tax management, distributions, and other areas of financial planning, analysis, and reporting operations.
Ongoing optimization of a valuable new asset
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