How we improved Carta for investors over the last few months

Over the past few months, the Investor Services product team at Carta improved our most common workflows and created new ways of surfacing data. Our goal is to help you become more efficient, make informed business decisions, work more smoothly with our fund administration team, and see the progress of requests more clearly. 

Portfolio company one-pagers 

Investors can now quickly generate clear, ready-to-share one-page reports on portfolio companies that include the following:

• Financial performance data (revenue, EBITDA, KPIs)

• Stability information (cash, headcount, leverage)

• Cap table data

• Custom quarterly reviews 

You can now access three new one-page report types: a portfolio company snapshot, a tear sheet, and a detailed report. You can also download an investment tracker, which shows a list of your portfolio companies in a tabular format, ready to be shared.  

Firm-level permissions

If you manage several funds, or if your funds are complex, you need to be able to give team members or partners the ability to “self-serve” information without granting them full access. With a new, more granular permissions workflow, you can: 

• Grant specific access at the fund and firm level

• Give your auditor view access to fund information—and prevent data bottlenecks

Capital call process 

We made the process of creating a capital call request faster, easier, and clearer. Here’s how it works:

1. Make the request within the app.

2. Choose your issue date, due date, amount, and purpose right away. You can see information about the status of your fund and how much has been called on the sidebar.

3. Leave a note for the fund admin team with the purpose of your request and any details you want to share.

4. Your request triggers automatic review of your capital call request for accuracy

5. You’ll get an email alert as soon as it’s ready for final approval.

You’ll see the alert on the right of the screen in the new event center on the firm overview page, which shows any requests awaiting final review and approval.

In-app financial statement approvals

Our fund admin team typically prepares quarterly financial statement packages. When your package is ready to review, you’ll receive an email and an in-app alert. You can now review and request any potential changes on the site rather than via email.

Firm view in mobile

We’ve added a firm view for fund administration customers to our iOS app. Firms can now see their active capital calls, their company investments, and their funds all in one place. GPs can use the app to review important information before in-person meetings with LPs. Data you can access includes quick stats on their most recent fund, gross IRR,  and the status of capital calls.

Investment document storage on SOI (schedule of investments)

We’ve built document storage directly into the schedule of investments. Investment-related documents can be associated with the right company and transaction. Clients and auditors can access documents like the purchase agreement and voting rights agreement from the traceback view on the schedule of investments. 

Management fees

Fund properties are built to extract data from your associated documents, such as your LPA or subscription docs. In the video above, we show how we apply this to the management fee schedule. Once we extract that data, we can use it to populate accounting within Carta and apply the fee schedule to calculations like allocations.

Once we digitize traditionally complex documents into structured data, it unlocks an ability to integrate the data as a source of truth and automate more processes. (More to come there soon.)

Partner email communications management

Often, requests for important and sometimes time-sensitive actions for your limited partners within the platform happen as automatically generated email. We’ve added options to let you review those emails and be more precise about how they’re sent. 

For all LP emails, you can now: 

• Easily see whether an email was sent 

• Double-check the address for accuracy and any email issues

• See who will be included on an automatic email send for a capital call or distribution on the GP review page

All partner emails can be tracked on the partners tab, under the “email” sub-tab for a specific fund. 

Partner capital history and called capital to date

It’s important to know where your partners stand on previously called capital, track what’s been called vs. what’s been paid, and see how much more room you have to call per partner. We’ve added partners’ capital status fields to the partners page and to the partner export selection.

We added these columns as optional columns to the in-app view of the partner tab:

• Called capital

• Uncalled capital

• Percent of capital called

• Prepaid balance

• Outstanding balance

The partner export will automatically include all columns.

Partially vs. fully realized investments

This quarter, we added granularity to the company investments, overview, and firm overview tracking bars for investments. You can see them as tabs on your dashboard.

The tracking bar will now show:

• Total investment count

• Fully realized count

• Partially realized count

• Unrealized count

We hope you continue to join us on our journey to reinvent venture fund administration. Please reach out to us if you’d like to discuss how we can help you operate and grow your fund.

DISCLOSURE: This communication is on behalf of eShares Inc., d/b/a Carta Inc. (“Carta”).  This communication is for informational purposes only, and contains general information only.  Carta is not, by means of this communication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice or services.  This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services nor should it be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business or interests.  Before making any decision or taking any action that may affect your business or interests, you should consult a qualified professional advisor.  This communication is not intended as a recommendation, offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of any security. Carta does not assume any liability for reliance on the information provided herein. ©2021 eShares Inc., d/b/a Carta Inc. (“Carta”). All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.