In 2024, most fund CFOs are still using spreadsheets and emails to run their funds. Carta Fund Administration offers a better way. The Carta platform gives GPs, LPs, fund CFOs, and their fund administration partners a single source of truth for financials, fund performance metrics, and task tracking. Instead of working across separate spreadsheets and workflows, you can view and track fund accounting and administration tasks in the same connected platform.
Here’s how it works:
The Carta fund operating system
Carta fund administration is much more than a tech stack: We’re an elite team of professionals leveraging the industry’s leading technology.
A team of experts
As anyone seeking a fund admin partner knows, the most important thing about your fund administrator is who you’ll actually partner with. Carta has built a team of 150 fund accountants who on average bring more than a decade of experience servicing some of the largest private funds.
Today our fund administration delivery team is over 400 people. The preparers, fund controllers, and fund directors are the quarterbacks of the client engagement. Our fund administrators have your back, and can advise on any situation or journey your fund is going through. Additionally, they are all trained on Carta’s platform—meaning once your fund is onboarded, they can see all of your fund’s documents, expenses, and terms. No more spending a year or more ramping a new fund admin on the nuances of your fund: At Carta they have all your fund information at their fingertips.
Event-based accounting
The core of Carta’s fund admin product is the Carta General Ledger, our event-based accounting platform. We built workflows to execute events, including capital calls, distributions, and investments. Those events automatically write to our General Ledger. Outputs and information like metrics, financial statements, and reports sit on top of the General Ledger and are updated in real time.
The General Ledger links to GPs, LPs, funds, investors, bank accounts, and vendors on the platform. You can think of Carta’s General Ledger as the NetSuite for closed-end funds. This is why we say Carta is the only platform purpose-built for fund CFOs.
Trackability
On the Carta General Ledger, every transaction is trackable. This not only makes it fast and simple to accomplish predictable routine tasks, like quarterly reports or tax and audit prep. Trackability also allows our fund accountants to respond with agility to day-to-day requests related to investments, capital calls, or any other questions you might have.
Each entry in the General Ledger is linked back to the event that created it, and each event is linked to its supporting documentation. This gives GPs and fund accountants a shared source of truth and transparency into every transaction—and eliminates opportunities for costly errors resulting from mistyped manual entries.
Real-time reporting
You can see the prices of all your public investments fluctuate in real-time, but in private-market investment, the standard was that you would only receive updates on a quarterly or annual cadence—if that. We decided to change that.
We’ve come a long way since we shipped a real-time schedule of investments in 2018. Today, almost all of our fund and LP metrics are updated as soon as the event is recorded in Carta. Our real-time allocations tool ensures that every event that should be allocated at the partner level is allocated in real time. Soon, we’ll ship daily updated fund-level net asset value, which also allows us to calculate up-to-date GP carry and tax obligations. This gives fund managers and their LPs unprecedented access and insight into what’s happening with their funds.
What does this mean for quarterly financials? We get them out fast. In fact, for most funds on Carta, clients can access a draft version of financials on the first day after the quarter closes. We understand that funds want granular control over timelines and communication around quarterly financials. Our financials project tracker shows GPs and CFOs exactly what inputs have been incorporated into their quarterly financials, and allows them to send Carta any outstanding items before financials are finalized and sent to LPs.
The world's most auditable platform
Our event-based accounting platform is designed to be highly auditable. Auditors can trace any number back to the journal entry, event, and document that created it. In addition, 60% of the portfolio companies of our fund admin clients are Carta cap table customers who are connected to the fund’s portfolio on Carta.
Today, most of our audit partners are already self-serving their fund audits by logging into Carta. Five years from now, no one will think of doing audits any other way.
Fund Tax
Last year, we introduced Carta Fund Tax. We’d noticed fund managers were spending far too long serving as the intermediary between their fund admin and their tax preparer during tax season. Thanks to Carta Fund Tax, your fund admin now works hand-in-hand with your tax preparer. As with our other predictable workflows, we’re bringing transparency, control, and consistency to the fund tax experience. Soon, we’ll be able to provide quarterly estimates of taxes to funds and their LPs.
Learn more
By increasing connectivity and transparency between LPs, GPs, CFOs, accountants, and auditors, we’re getting fund managers and CFOs closer to fully automated fund administration—so they can get back to the business of investing.
Get in touch with our team to learn more about how Carta helps funds of all sizes set a higher standard for LP relations.
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