Schedule of Investments (SOI): A Complete Guide
The schedule of investments: A guide for fund CFOs
Author: The Carta Team
Read time: 11 minutes
Published date: January 23, 2026
Learn about the schedule of investments, including its core components and compliance requirements, and how to streamline its preparation from data collection to final presentation for your LPs and auditors.
What is a schedule of investments?
A schedule of investments (SOI) is a formal financial statement that provides an itemized list of all the investments a fund holds at a specific point in time. For a venture capital (VC) or private equity (PE) fund, the SOI is a critical component of the quarterly and annual reports you provide to your limited partners (LP) alongside documents like the balance sheet (or statement of assets and liabilities), statement of operations, statement of changes, and statement of cash flows. It details the single largest asset on your fund’s balance sheet: its portfolio investments.
This document offers a clear snapshot of your fund's holdings. It shows not just what companies the fund invested in, but also the original cost of those investments and their current estimated fair value. Think of it as the official inventory of your fund's assets, and a key part of your investor reporting for communicating your fund's composition and value to all of its stakeholders.
Its primary purpose is to offer transparency to your LPs, auditors, and regulators about what your fund owns and how those assets are valued, forming a key part of the private fund quarterly statements that disclose performance, compensation, fees, and expenses.
The strategic role of the SOI in fund reporting
The SOI is a foundational document for your financial oversight, investor communication, and overall fund management. An accurate and transparent SOI is essential for maintaining trust with your LPs and for making informed strategic decisions about the fund's future investment objectives through effective fund forecasting.
LPs are keenly interested in the VC and PE fund performance metrics derived directly from the SOI. This highlights how the SOI is the source document for the key performance indicators that build a fund's track record and matter most to investors.
Performance measurement: The valuation information contained in the SOI is the direct input for calculating critical performance metrics. These include metrics like distributions to paid-in (DPI), residual value to paid-in (RVPI), and total value to paid-in capital (TVPI), which shows the total value of the fund relative to the capital invested. It also supports the calculation of the fund’s internal rate of return (IRR), providing a clear picture of your fund's performance over time.
Investor transparency: The SOI provides your LPs with a detailed, line-by-line view of where their capital is deployed. This level of transparency is fundamental to building and maintaining investor confidence throughout the fund lifecycle.
Audit and compliance: During your fund's annual audit, the SOI serves as a primary document for review. Every line item, from the cost to the fair value of each investment, must be substantiated with supporting documentation. The accuracy of your SOI is therefore non-negotiable for ensuring compliance with private market regulations and successfully passing auditor scrutiny.
Key requirements for the schedule of investments
While the visual presentation of an SOI can vary slightly between funds, all schedules of investments that are required under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) contain core components. Specifically, the accounting standard ASC 946 for investment companies dictates what must be included. These elements provide a comprehensive summary schedule of your fund's holdings.
Core components of the SOI
Every SOI must contain several key pieces of information for each security your fund holds. This standardized format allows your stakeholders to easily compare investments and understand their contribution to the overall portfolio. Before listing the investments, you must gather the necessary details for each one, including the name of the company, the number of shares you own, and what you paid for them.
You also need to determine the current fair value of each investment, which is its estimated market price at the reporting date. This figure is essential for calculating your fund's net asset value (NAV) and related performance metrics like RVPI.
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Issuer and security details | The name of the company or entity you've invested in and the specific title of the security |
| Quantity | The number of shares, units, or the principal amount of a convertible note held at the end of the reporting period |
| Cost | The original purchase price of the investment |
| Fair value | The market value of the investment at the reporting date, which is necessary for calculating the fund's NAV |
| Percentage of net assets | The value of each investment shown as a percentage of the fund's total net assets |
| Industry | The industry in which the company operates |
| Geography | The geography (i.e., country) in which the company operates |
Each of these columns works together to paint a complete picture of the fund's investment activities and current standing. For an LP or an auditor, this structured format makes it easy to understand the composition of the portfolio at a glance.
Understanding investment categorization
For the SOI to provide meaningful insight, investments are typically organized by type, industry, or geography. This gives LPs and auditors a clearer picture of your portfolio's concentration and risk profile.
Preparing the schedule of investments: From data to draft
The creation of the SOI is an operational workflow that begins long before the final report is issued to LPs. It involves your team pulling data from legal agreements, portfolio company investor updates, and various spreadsheets to build the report at the end of the period.
Step 1: Centralize investment data
The traditional process often begins with your finance team hunting for investment documents, legal agreements, and transaction records from your deal flow across emails, shared drives, and spreadsheets. This process of data collection highlights the pain points of traditional, manual methods and shows the advantages of a modern, integrated approach.
When you're stuck in a manual scavenger hunt for closing documents, you may be introducing a high risk of error. This creates an administrative drag that slows down the entire reporting cycle. In fact, the delay is so common across the private markets that there is typically an administrative lag between when a transaction takes place and when it gets recorded, a delay significant enough to alter historical market data over time.
The modern solution is a platform with an event-based general ledger (GL), a key component of modern fund administration, that serves as a single source of truth for all fund activity. With Carta's Fund Financials, every investment event, from the initial wire to follow-on rounds, is captured on the ledger as it happens. This ensures the underlying data for your SOI is always accurate, up-to-date, and audit-ready from day one.
Step 2: Apply consistent, defensible valuations
A critical challenge in private markets is valuing illiquid investments. Your LPs and auditors demand a rigorous, consistently applied methodology to determine the fair value measurements of each portfolio investment—a task made more difficult by an average holding period of five years. The primary pain point for you as a fund CFO in preparing an SOI is portfolio valuations.
This valuation complexity is where most of the risk and effort in preparing an SOI lies. As Michelle Keyes at Withum explained during Carta’s Unlocking ASC 820 Valuations for Funds webinar, the process requires careful consideration of many factors.
Step 3: Draft the schedule and footnotes
Once your investment data is centralized and valued, a modern fund administration software can automatically generate the draft SOI in the correct, compliant format. This automation eliminates the manual work of compiling the schedule and significantly reduces the chance of human error, turning a multi-day task into a matter of clicks.
Footnotes are just as important as the schedule itself, as they provide essential context on your valuation methods, any restrictions on securities, and other required disclosures. A high-quality fund administrator acts as a partner in drafting these notes, ensuring they are clear, comprehensive, and fully compliant with accounting standards.
Preparing your SOI for audit
The annual audit can be a stressful time for any fund CFO. You know that auditors will rigorously test your SOI. They will trace values back to their source investment documents and valuation reports to ensure everything is accurate and well-supported.
A platform-based approach provides the best defense for this level of scrutiny. An auditor portal can give your auditors secure, permissioned access to the SOI and all of its supporting documentation. This simple step, often a feature of modern fund administration, transforms the audit from a disruptive, manual data-gathering exercise into a streamlined and efficient review process, saving your team valuable time and reducing stress.
Delivering transparency through the LP portal
The ultimate audience for your SOI is your fund's LPs, who are typically accredited investors. Providing them with clear, timely, and easily accessible reporting is a hallmark of a professionally managed fund. It is one of the most important ways you can build and maintain strong, lasting LP relationships.
Beyond compliance: Using the SOI as a strategic tool
The SOI should be more than backward-looking: By shifting your perspective, you can transform the SOI from a quarterly reporting requirement into a source of forward-looking strategic insight that helps you make better decisions.