Fund administration for the 21st century

Author:
Vrushali Paunikar
Published date: May 3, 2024

Carta's connected platform gives GPs, LPs, fund CFOs, and their fund administration partners unprecedented transparency into fund transactions.

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.

Event-based accounting

The core of Carta’s fund administration product is our event-based accounting software. We built workflows to execute events, including capital calls, distributions, and investments. Those events automatically write to our fund admin platform. Outputs and information like metrics, financial statements, and reports sit on top of the platform and are updated in real time.

Carta's fund accounting software links to GPs, LPs, funds, investors, bank accounts, and vendors on the platform. This is why we say Carta is the only platform purpose-built for fund CFOs.

Trackability

On Carta, 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.

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. 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.

The world's most auditable platform

Our fund administration 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.

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.

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.

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Author: Vrushali Paunikar

Vrushali Paunikar is the Chief Product Officer at Carta, where she leads the team that is responsible for developing new products and advancing existing solutions. Before becoming CPO, Vrushali worked on building the valuation business and helped that business scale to software margins. She then went on to lead Carta's Venture Capital business, taking that business from zero to over $80M in ARR.

Before joining Carta, Vrushali served as a product leader at Applied Predictive Technologies, Dynamic Signal, and Rocket Lawyer. She has a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Mellon University.