Perspectives · Oversight
Reporting Speed Is the Tell: What LPs Actually Screen for Now
Before an LP asks what your fund returned, they're testing how fast and how cleanly you can prove it. What LPs now screen for in reporting.
· 5 min read
Part of the guide Private Markets Fund Data: Common Problems and How to Fix Them
LPs are writing fewer, bigger checks into managers they already trust, and they screen those managers on how fast and how deeply they report, not just on returns. The 45 to 60 day quarterly letter that used to be the standard is now the complaint. This one hits closest to home for heads of IR, CFOs and controllers at lean firms with no reporting team.
LPs are pricing the reporting first
Adams Street Partners' 2025 Global Investor Survey found that 88% of LPs plan to increase co-investment allocations, concentrating capital with managers they already know. But trust alone does not protect a manager from scrutiny. The SS&C Intralinks 2025 LP Survey reports that 59% of LPs picked "better report analytics" as the top way GPs could improve the relationship. And the Private Funds CFO Insights 2025 survey found that 58% of CFOs say LP requests now seek more detail and analysis than in prior years, with expected response times compressing from days to hours.
The message is consistent across all three: LPs are not asking for more reporting. They are asking for faster, deeper, more defensible reporting. The quarterly letter that arrives six weeks after quarter end used to demonstrate competence. Now it signals that you cannot keep up.
An LP asking about your reporting isn't asking whether you produce enough of it.
What is buried inside one diligence question
Consider a request that sounds straightforward: net IRR excluding one deal, plus loan-level detail on the ABF book. That single sentence stacks four tests.
Speed. How fast can you turn it around? An LP who asks on Monday expects an answer this week, not next quarter's letter.
Consistency. Does the number in the letter tie to the backup? If the LP checks your IRR against the capital account statement and it moves, you have a credibility problem, not a formatting one.
Custom cut. Can you exclude one deal and recompute net IRR without rebuilding the whole model? Most firms can produce a standard letter. Few can produce a one-off cut on demand.
Look-through. Can you drill from the fund number to the individual loan underneath? For private credit, this is the question that separates a manager who knows the book from one who is reading someone else's summary.
They are asking whether you can produce it on their terms. At a lean firm, reporting is the fourth job of the person also running IR. Every answer is hand-assembled from PDFs, administrator files and spreadsheets. A roster of ten LPs does not survive the jump to forty.
ILPA's templates as leverage, and build the answer once
ILPA's updated reporting template lands in Q1 2026, and the new performance template follows in Q1 2027. They standardize the shape of the answer but not the difficulty of assembling it. The template tells you what fields to populate. It does not reconcile your loan tape to your fund accounting, and it does not build the custom cut.
You can get ahead of this without buying anything. Three steps:
- Map your data to the ILPA template fields now. Walk through each field and identify where the number lives today: administrator file, internal accounting system, spreadsheet. You will find gaps before the LP does.
- Reconcile the loan tape to fund-level accounting before the question arrives. If the loan tape and the fund books already tie, look-through becomes a filter, not a fire drill. Do this once a quarter, not when the LP asks.
- Build a reusable parameterized cut. Instead of rebuilding the IRR calculation for each request, structure your spreadsheet so the variation is in the filter, not the formula. Exclude one deal by changing a parameter, not by copying the workbook.
These steps buy you time. They do not buy you scale. The roster will keep growing, and the questions will keep getting more specific.
What this looks like when no reporting team is coming
If you are at a firm between $500M and $10B AUM, a reporting team is probably not in the budget. The person running IR is also running reporting, and the tools are PDFs, administrator files and Excel. The question is not whether to hire a data engineer. It is whether the data you already have can answer the question without being reassembled by hand each time.
This is where Aquata's Central Data Layer changes the math. Administrator data, internal accounting, loan tapes and valuation documents land in one governed layer, so most "custom" LP requests become parameterized queries where the variation is in the filter, not the question. The LP letter and its backup are pulled from the same source at the same time, so the number does not move when the LP checks it. Look-through is reconciled before the question arrives because the loan tape and fund-level accounting already tie. IR authors and pulls the cut without filing a ticket. Excel stays connected as the sandbox. ILPA template fields map onto the governed model. No reporting department or data engineer assumed.
The firms that win the next fundraising cycle will not be the ones with the biggest teams. They will be the ones who can turn fragmented data into a defensible answer before the LP finishes asking the question.
