inPrivate Blog | Private Equity Software

Survey Results

2014-05-15T10:37:00.003+02:00

The Benefits of an Ever-Growing Platform

2014-04-15T14:49:00.004+02:00

Measure your Performance as a General Partner

We continue to enhance our solutions by developing value added benefits for our customers.

We add new features upon your request, included in your subscription fee!

Here what has been done for you this month on InPrivate:

The Deal Value is shown on the Pipeline too;
a new Regions Chart with the deal value per country, a new pie chart showing the Deal Value per Type;
a more detailed Timesheet; a new Invoices Report with filters and subtotals;
a new layout for the Contact Details page, Asset under Management data and other inputs for classifying your Potential Investors during your Fund Raising, and much more.

or Create a Company Account, your first user is Free. You'll be able to add more users whenever you want according to our Pricing page.

What is InPrivate?

InPrivate is the Cloud Software dedicated to Private Equity Firms and Venture Capitals, but easily used by Business Advisors, Legal Firms and other companies for keeping track of their Deal Flow and their Fund Raising processes. Custom modules are also available for Investor Accounts Reporting, HR Assessment, and more. See www.inprivate.info for details or read our features flyer.

What about Services? We'll give you all the support and the advice you need for starting up with InPrivate and we encourage you to ask for new features.

InPrivate will help you optimize for efficiency, save time, reduce stress and increase customer satisfaction. Do you know any reason to wait more? Sign Up for Free today, or contact us

Dropbox pickup, New Deal by email and more

2014-04-15T14:46:00.003+02:00

Some major features have been added last month following our customer requests. We are excited to describe the new benefits that have been put in place recently:

the Dropbox integration is now fully running.
you can now open a new Deal just by sending an e-mail with an hashtag to InPrivate.
the Task Report, for easily tracking, who's in charge of what and what tasks has been completed on time.
New enhanced permissions for viewing the documents related to each Deal.
Tha contact detail page now shows a list of "Related Deals" and "Related Contacts" for each contact
You can now add an Activity to a Deal from the Calendar

Don't wait, Create a Company Account, your first user is Free Forever.

You'll be able to add more users whenever you want according to our Pricing page.

What is InPrivate?

InPrivate is the Cloud Software dedicated to Private Equity Firms and Venture Capitals, but easily used by Business Advisors, Legal Firms and other companies for keeping track of their Deal Flow and their Fund Raising processes. Custom modules are also available for Investor Accounts Reporting, HR Assessment, and more. See www.inprivate.info for details or read our features flyer.

What about Services? We'll give you all the support and the advice you need for starting up with InPrivate and we encourage you to ask for new features.

InPrivate will help you optimize for efficiency, save time, reduce stress and increase customer satisfaction. Do you know any reason to wait more? Sign Up for Free today.

Keep your Venture Deals Up to Date with Hashtags

2013-07-03T17:30:00.000+02:00

Keep your Deal Flow System Up to Date with Hashtags in your emails

"A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefixed with the symbol # ... Hashtags provide a means of grouping such messages, since one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it." (from Wikipedia)

Hashtags are extensively used on social networks, but they could be helpful for your business, too. Imagine to keep in copy your Deal Flow Management System while writing an e-mail related to to a specific activity you've done you just want to send to your team: by including a specific hashtag as your deal's identifyer, your system will parse it and will add it to the activity log of the deal.

inPrivate Deal Flow Updates your deals by parsing your e-mails and seeking hashtags

inPrivate has now this hastag parsing feature for inbound e-mails: try it by subscribing for a free Trial here.

inPrivate Gets More Privacy

2013-05-09T22:55:00.003+02:00

We are excited to announce a new major release of inPrivate Saas with unlimited support for permissions and roles on the users of your organization; you will share your deals only with specific users assigning different privileges to let your team members view or edit each information.

Your confidential information will be shared only betweeen limited groups of users.

The new Dealflow also supports:

Improved task management to assign a task to any contact from inPrivate CRM
Unlimited email alerts for the tasks (you can send alerts to any contact, including non users)
Activity updates with timesheet information
Activity updates via inbound emails
Deal Rating
Team management
Deal-specific documents

For more information about inPrivate please see the inPrivate.info web site, ask for a demo or get a free trial

How to Manage your Deal Flow with CheckLists

2013-01-25T12:52:00.001+01:00

If your company is an Advisor in the Private Equity Business, is a Venture Capital or if you are in any other industry, the use of checklists for managing your projects is very common. So, there's nothing new with the use of the checklists itself.

But depending on how you use your checklists and on how much you are accurate in your approach, your results will be different and the time you could save could vary a lot.

You have a huge experience and a long track record of Deals in the Private Equity Business, you are a M&A Advisor or you manage a Venture Capital Fund, so you should use your knowledge (and a bit of your time) to identify the common tasks for each category of the Deals that you know.

You probably consider each Deal unique, with a lot of unattended events, and you know that the key variables to succeed are 'soft', due to the ability on creating relationships, on understanding other's intentions, negotiation, and so on. So: managing a Deal Flow is not like building a car in 1930. True.

Anyway, you'll have a lot of benefits by seeking a formal (and flexible) model; more than a schema is possible, but let's now analyze the checklist approach:

- Choose the set of stages your deals could have (i.e.: Screening, Live, Success, Broken, etc)
- Identify the macro categories of your deals (i.e.: M&A, IPO, etc...)
- For each category, create a checklist with a list of Tasks. This is the key and the most difficult task; try to focus on the type of tasks you could have in the category and write down some instructions specifying the input and output for each task, such as writing/signing a document, meeting with contacts and so on. Always create an 'End' task to mark the checklist as finished.
- Identify wich tasks require to manage a list of contacts to be completed. In a task focused on finding customers or investors, you should iterate on a list of prospect contacts and you should do some action for each one.

Then you should instantiate your checklist model for your real world. How? And how to keep it flexible/adaptive? Try it using a spreadsheet, but keep in mind that you can't manage more than a few complex deals in Excel without confusion; some hints:

Write down your model in excel and try to check it with some past deals
One Deal can have more than a checklist of different categories (ex.: Raising + Acquisition); your choice of categories should be modular to build a unique mixed checklist for each deal.
Do not allow to change a task-name inside a checklist
Allow a different sorting of the tasks on the same category
Allow parallel tasks
Allow to delete a non-useful task from a checklist
Identify and exploit cross links between deals (i.e. the same contact could be involved in two or more deals)

Let me have your comments.

On inPrivate Software we recently introduced a flexible way to manage checklists and tasks inside the deals, Sign Up for free here, learn more about inPrivate Software or ask for a Demo here.

The Bid budget. Reloaded.

2012-06-19T22:52:00.001+02:00

Before giving you some details about our last updates on the budget management process for private equity deals, I should explain what is the “working version” of the Bid Budget on inPrivate Systems. Our users can add a Bid Budget for a specific deal, adding “rows” to a specific version. Each row, upon the completion of the process, will become a real contract with an advisor, and it contains the type of the service (Financial Advisory, Technical Avisory, etc), the name of the Advisor and the budgeted retainer and success fees.
When the budget is approved by the board, the system freezes this version, but the user can open a “working version” of the Bid Budget based on the last approved version. This version is useful because users can “adjust” the budget values within the constraints imposed by the board.*

The main constraints are to not exceed the overall amounts approved by the boards, neither the total retainer, nor the retainer plus the success amount.

Other constraints could be on the amounts for each row of the bid budget; for example, if the amount approved for a single Advisory service is greater than a specified maximum amount, the user can't change the name of the consultant and he can't input a greater amount.

Users can't modify the budget row if the relative contract is signed. If it's necessary to force a new update on the budget, they should restart the workflow of the contract, so the the approval process restarts for that contract.

Another improvement is that the entire budget now has its own workflow; when the users marks the budget as “approved from the board”, the entire budget is sent through the system to a member of the board, to let him certify that it’s the right version that it was effectively approved by the board.

If you’re interested in a demo or in a Trial Version of inPrivate Systems, please request it here.

(*) Usually the board approves also a buffer amount to be used for later adjustments of the budget.

Is Your Budget-Approval Process Under Control?

2011-11-09T11:44:00.000+01:00

Most of times, one of the key steps of each Investment Process is estimating the budget (sometimes called the "Bid Budget") for a deal and getting it approved by the Board. At first, you should identify, if possible, who are the advisors who will help you for that deal and for doing what, for example a technical due diligence. Then you'll write down a schema with the numbers for each Advisor, plus a "reserve" row of unexpected costs. You'll end up working with Excel and doing some simulation of the total budget, then you'll submit it to the board.

inPrivate DealFlow, in the workflow-enabled version, now implements this budgeting process, with many benefits:

You can create unlimited versions of the budget for each investment
Each version can change its status up to "approved from the board" (and it will be locked).
The system stores all the versions of the budget for audit purposes
When you sign a contract with an advisor, you have to link the contract to its budget
A contract linked to the Bid Budget cannot be modified.
The payment approval process is now totally under control because budget, contract and invoices are linked (and locked) together

Interested? Request a demo of inPrivate Software

inPrivate Dashboard: measure your Deals Success [video]

2011-06-30T03:54:00.000+02:00

<a href="http://www.linkedtube.com/hCtQNdBTcuQ58fcff46e0e7b93bdc59a0dd8854a57f.htm">LinkedTube</a>

How do you communicate with your Investors?

2011-04-29T02:20:00.003+02:00

If you are running a medium-sized Private Equity firm you know what I mean: sending emails and faxes to all of your Investors contacts or to a filtered subset of them is an easy task or is a complex and time-consuming process?

Probably most of you will admit it is an annoying activity, despite what the "do-it-yourself" technology offers. MS Office, mail merge, mailing lists and similar are great tools but to be sure you're sending the right attachment to the right Investor (a draw down letter? A quarterly report?) you'll ask your secretary to check carefully every email and probably you want to check everything by yourself once again before allowing the sending.

How to get everything easier? With a software like eMailer, the automatic mailing list builder that I recently designed and realized for a PE firm, integrated with the CRM and the fund administration software:

the users can filter the contacts with different criteria
the users can define an email template with common attributes
the system will import fax and email addresses from the CRM, will import the right documents for each Investor from the document management system and will create each email as defined in the template
the users can't send until the list will be approved by a supervisor

The process of creation, approval, sending and archiving the emails is now strictly guided and error-free.

What are the NVCA Model Venture Capital Financing Documents?

2011-03-03T15:59:00.006+01:00

Look at this article, explaining the nvca reporting model.

Three different approaches for Deal Management

2011-02-12T16:05:00.000+01:00

Doing BPM Projects for PE firms I found that each Private Equity has a unique way of managing his Deal flow that is different from other PE firms, but I would divide these "styles" in three macro-areas:

The focus on Cost Monitoring

In this case the PE firm uses a Deal Management System to:

Maintain the Pipeline with a few synthetic data for each deal, including the current status, the main documents and the decisions of the Investment Team ;
Monitor the Costs of each deal and to verify if each deal is "on Budget"
Build reports about the Costs, with the focus on broken deals and on how much they charged the fund

The focus on the Target Selection

This is a common approach of Venture Capitals, who has to maintain a huge list of potential targets and does a lot of work for selecting and filtering the most interesting ones.

Here the Deal Management System must have many long text fields for inputing qualitative information about the potential target, evaluations about the management, the market, summaries, and more.

Full text search and a custom reporting (better if integrated with excel) are the most important features.

The focus on the Process Workflow

If you want to manage both the data and the workflow for each deal, you should request much more features from the deal management system, seeking something more similar to a "workflow and document management" system.

This system should have a tool for editing the process (path, steps, action buttons...) and it should assign tasks to each user depending on the workflow rules. For example a deal could stay at the step "Pending Approval from the Board of Directors" until the assignee of the step completes a check list of required actions like: adding a Bid Budget to the project, adding a set of mandatory documents, and so on.

Other workflows should be implemented for managing the approval of the Agreements and the relative payments, too.

Do you work for a PE or a VC and you want to share your experience about the problems and the solutions adopted for managing your business processes? Please Contact me.

What software, besides email and Microsoft Word, is essential for PE firms?

2011-02-09T18:40:00.000+01:00

I just found on Quora this interesting topic, about what software is essential for PE firms.
David Snow, wrote: << You will need to keep track of the capital accounts of each investor, keep track of the performance of each portfolio company, keep track
of your deal flow, and keep
track of your own firm's finances, personnel files and regulatory materials...>>

That's truly right. PE firms could start using Office suite, but, as their business grow, the risk is to lose the control.

Following another answer, from JP Ellis: <<Standard productivity tools like MS Office or a similar suite of e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs are a given. Depending on headcount and AUM, some firms may also have a CRM and/or reporting software which streamlines Investor Relations reporting. Many professionals are wary, however, of including too many "bells and whistles" on reporting software, as often a firm's portfolio companies will vary greatly in capital structure, line and sector of business, and complexity; forcing automation onto unique circumstances does not always work out as planned and may even create more work synthesizing and re-packaging or socializing to investment and deal teams. Accordingly, many firms may still prefer to process Investor Relations reporting materials by hand in MS Office or other similar application suites. Looking in-house, a firm may also consider some form of Human Resources or Learning / Development software, but this is non-essential and will vary greatly based on size and bias of the firm. Other essentials include a secure document viewer for Investor Relations and deal due diligence. Watchdox and Intralinks are quite commonly used. Other cloud-based computing and collaboration tools such as Box.Net can also be very helpful, again, depending on the size and inclination of the firm. As David mentions above, there are also speciality providers of software which admirably try to synthesize the entire value chain. There's a lot on offer and you should read up on it in industry publications. >>