The ledger is the fund. It should not live in a workbook.
Capital calls, distributions, capital accounts and the audit trail are either one continuous record, or four documents that disagree at quarter end.
Inside the fundA seat on your fund’s plan. Every number below comes off one set of postings.
One ledger, and it reconciles itself.
Nine working days, five entries. Each line is posted once and read everywhere else.
- Day 1
The capital call is drafted once
Allocated by commitment, notices generated, posted to capital accounts and published to the LP portal. The allocation and the notice cannot drift apart because they are the same entry.
- Day 2
Distributions and the waterfall
What was called, what was returned, carry, and current TVPI and DPI come off the same postings rather than a parallel spreadsheet.
- Day 4
Every LP sees their own account
The LP portal reads the ledger live. “Can you re-send my statement” stops being an email you answer.
- Day 6
The marks are carried on a stated basis
Each mark carries its ASC 820 basis, with the input and the date behind it.
- Day 9
The auditor asks how a number was reached
Every posting carries who entered it, when, and from which document. The answer is a link.
The answer is a link.
This is what the auditor opens. Not a reconstruction: the posting itself, with its source attached.
- Amount
- $15.0M · 12.5% of commitments
- Allocated
- 42 LP capital accounts, by commitment
- Entered by
- Anika Rao, fund controller
- Source
- Call notice PDF, attached to the entry
- Mark basis
- ASC 820, input and date on each mark
- Read by
- LP portal, waterfall, quarterly report
What we do not do, stated plainly.
Said in the sales call, not discovered in month three.
In the product
- 409A OPM backsolve
- ASC 718 expense
- QSBS worksheet
- Delaware and Cayman registers
Not in the product
- An appraiser’s safe-harbor sign-off
- IFRS 2 reporting
- Schedule K-1 preparation
- Statutory and tax filings
Before: a vendor implying coverage it does not have, discovered in month three.
A controller does not want a prettier workbook. They want one place the number came from.
Fund accounting is the half of this category that gets sold on screenshots and bought on trust. The honest version of the pitch is the scope panel above.