Eight Signs You’ve Outgrown Excel for Portfolio Monitoring

Excel has traditionally been an easy (and natural) way to track portfolio companies, particularly when your fund was smaller, and perhaps less complex.

As your fund grows, however, you are likely installing technology to manage back-office tasks (i.e. accounting software for finance and a CRM system for the deal team). But none of that manages your “crown-jewel” front-office information: the data showing your portfolio company performance metrics and valuations.

So how do you know it’s time to upgrade from Excel to a proper portfolio monitoring platform? Here are eight tell-tale signs that it’s time to do just that.

1. It takes longer than five minutes to find something.

“Yes, I know the LP is on the phone. That number is on one of these tabs. Or possibly on the other spreadsheet. Can you stall while I look.”

2. You want to evaluate your entire portfolio for risk.

“Don’t a few of our companies have factories where that war is about to escalate? Have we scenarioed how that could affect our results?”

3. You have to restart a meeting when you realize people are looking at different versions of a spreadsheet.

“It says here inventory is down to a 10-day supply…Wait, what update? I’m reading version 3.2, when was it changed?”

4. You’re worried about an upcoming audit.

“I’m sure that valuation was based on the revenue projection they gave us. You know, the one before they lowered it. Don’t we have a record of the old numbers somewhere?”

5. Only one person knows how your ‘master spreadsheet’ works.

“A three-week honeymoon? How will we get the reports out?”

6. Your investor reports look like they were made in Excel.

“What do you mean BlackRock doesn’t have grid lines on its reports?”

7. It takes weeks of chasing to get all the information for a quarterly report.

“I don’t care how good that oil-services business looks. No new deals if we can’t keep track of the ones we’ve done already. Get me those numbers now.”

8. Everyone knows you need a portfolio monitoring system, but you think it would be too difficult to set up.

“I’m sorry, but we just don’t have the bandwidth to accomodate a software install.”

If you’ve heard anything like the above at your firm, it’s time to check out portfolio monitoring software. Imagine being able to open your laptop, tap the name of one of your portfolio companies, and see all the information you want—up-to-date, consistent, and with all changes tracked. You’ll be able to analyze trends across the entire portfolio, identify risk, and compare each company’s performance to your investment thesis. And your LPs will notice that you answer their questions faster and send crisp, professional reports.

And about that install… Not every software package is a time-suck delivery system. Spend half a morning calling a few peers and you’ll quickly learn that some portfolio monitoring packages are surprisingly fast to install and easy to use. When you see how much time your team regains once it is freed from juggling those old-school spreadsheets, the only thing you’ll be wondering is why you stuck with Excel as long as you did.

Simplicity. Sophistication. Usability. Service.

These are the four mantras at the core of every thing we do at Cobalt. Simply put, it was time that the way we talk about and present our business actually represents those mantras—and the experience our clients enjoy on our GP platform.

So we got to work designing everything from our logo to our website to tell the story of what Cobalt really does, and why.

With that in mind, some fun facts about our new look:

1. Yes, our logo is a wave. A modern, tech-forward look at a wave. That’s because Cobalt is the tool of choice of private equity and venture capital teams navigating change across their operating environment. That change spans internal controls, LP expectations, and competitive landscapes. Cobalt helps those teams simplify, speed up, and get more effective at riding that wave, and even putting it in a box they can check. See what we did there?
2. Our color palette is advanced and fluid. We aren’t your standard financial services technology company, because we’re nimble and forward-looking. We work hard to stay at the forefront of industry changes, so you can too. That’s why we landed on an unusual color palette that serves more as a metaphor for what we do for our clients: at its foundation, it is dependable and deep, but we reserve the ability to tailor it to our clients’ needs, grab attention, or highlight the most important information.
3. We feature a lot of people. Gone are the illustrated, mannequin-esque images, and conceptual “icons.” Instead, we’ve placed people front and center in our new visual identity. As we mentioned above, service is our top priority. We are available to our clients any time they need, to troubleshoot or find a new path in finding and assessing the data they need. Person to person. Front and center.

The new look is still a work in progress: important things like our library of white papers, cheat sheets, and industry observations will continue to be added to our Resources section as we continue to update them. Check back regularly for old favorites, and new ones.

In the meantime, we’d love to know your thoughts about our new look, or answer any questions you have. Feel free to reach out to us directly, and a team member will get back to you within one business day: info@cobaltgp.com.

Five Surprising Must-Read Books for Private Equity Pros

Just because you’ve finished Stephen Schwarzman’s What It Takes doesn’t mean you’re through reading.

In a world increasingly dominated by rapid-fire data flows, it’s a challenge to identify information that truly matters. One solution: Slow down your brain. Jason Weinstein, CEO of Cobalt, explains: “There’s nothing like an immersive few hours in a subject to help develop the instincts that discern signal from noise.” And because we’re nothing if not helpful, here are five volumes that are sure to broaden any private equity pro’s intellectual horizons, whatever the reason for hitting the books.