The Private Equity Operations Team needs a way to show management that the Deal Team is executing on their value creation plan and that the firm’s portfolio continues to grow. In the dashboard below, we’ve included key financial elements that every operations team should include as they prep reports for quarterly portfolio meetings.

Key elements of our best-practice dashboard for the growth-focused Operations Team include:

• Portfolio Company Overview which includes fully-editable text fields for the company description, deal team lead, and debt obligations. This dashboard also pulls in calculated performance metrics such as NAV, MOIC, DPI, and IRR.

• Net Debt / EBITDA and Senior Debt / EBITDA being shown comparatively against their covenants. Whether it is budget numbers or covenants vs. your actuals; being able to show multiple versions of metrics across your portfolio companies in chart format is highly beneficial.

• Interest Coverage Ratio is similar to the above, but takes advantage of Cobalt’s unique ability to create calculated metrics (EBIT / Interest Expense = Interest Coverage Ratio) and apply that to dashboards.
  
• Entity List Table showing related deals and their key information like acquisition date, capital invested, realized proceeds, remaining value, and gross MOIC and IRR.

Cobalt’s Portfolio Monitoring platform gives you the ability to personalize team and user-specific dashboards that are in-sync with the way your firm operates and reports performance. Users can create and customize dashboards on the fly and then easily export to professional, pixel-perfect PDFs that are always partner-ready. Request a demo of Cobalt’s dashboard capabilities today.

Investor Relations professionals play a big role in satisfying LP requests and inquiries surrounding overall fund performance. Any IR Team needs to be able to quickly produce a professional report with up-to-date fund metrics and cash flow information. We created the dashboard below on Cobalt’s Portfolio Monitoring platform to include key reporting elements that capture big-picture fund performance for inquiring partners and investors.

Key elements of our best-practice dashboard for the Investor Relations team  include:

• Key metric values including fund size, invested capital, gross and net IRR. High-level fund performance indicators give a quick snapshot of the funds performance.
• Gross IRR vs. Net IRR Spread: When reporting to investors, it’s important to show both the IRR associated with the cash flows from investors to fund, as well as the cash flows from fund to portfolio companies.
• Distributions & Total Value graph gives you an accurate timeline of when distributions are being made compared to the fund’s total value.
• Schedule of Investments Table: the ability to seamlessly produce SOIs, organized by realized vs. unrealized, allows you to clearly visualize the performance of each investment and see the overall status of the fund. 

Cobalt’s Portfolio Monitoring platform gives you the ability to personalize team and user-specific dashboards that are in-sync with the way your firm operates and reports performance. Users can create and customize dashboards on the fly and then easily export to professional, pixel-perfect PDFs that are always partner-ready. Request a demo of Cobalt’s dashboard capabilities today.

ESG-focused Deal Teams are under pressure to show transparent reporting and progress on their sustainable initiatives. In the dashboard below, we’ve included some key reporting elements that not only allow deal team professionals to incorporate ESG metric tracking into their reporting process, but still provide key financials and essential revenue updates to managers.

Best-practice reporting for a Deal Team with an ESG-focused Portfolio Company might include:

• Employee Diversity Progression Chart gives users the ability to track the number of minority employees and the number of female employees compared to the number of overall employees. Many investors now expect GPs to keep up with ESG reporting and be able to display metrics such as diversity headcount. 
• Detailed information on the portfolio company gives a high-level overview of both performance based metrics (e.g. NAV, MOIC, DPI, and IRR)  as well as qualitative fields and updates (e.g. Company Description and/or Investment Summary). These components can be displayed in multiple formats and layouts.
• Revenue vs. Budget Table allows you to compare and contrast your budgeted metrics vs. your actuals using our comprehensive selection of graphs and charts. 
• Key Financials and our charts library allows you to quickly create a financial table for any company tracking financial metrics. With the flexibility to show multiple versions (e.g. Actual & Budget), periods and layers in our conditional formatting, visualizing your key financials is made easy.

Cobalt has supported many firms with best-practices as they’ve started incorporating ESG metric tracking into their investment and reporting process. Our clients track and report on more ESG factors such as:

• Environmental: CO2 emissions, water usage, energy usage 
• Social: Gender pay ratio, employee diversity, injury rate
• Governance: Board diversity, ethics and anti Corruption, data privacy

Cobalt’s Portfolio Monitoring platform gives you the ability to personalize team and user-specific dashboards that are in-sync with the way your firm operates and reports performance. Users can create and customize dashboards on the fly and then easily export to professional, pixel-perfect PDFs that are always partner-ready. Request a demo of Cobalt’s dashboard capabilities today.

Private Equity and Venture Capital Finance Teams need an investment-focused dashboard to report on all active investment performance and see updates in a recurring, automated way. In the dashboard below, we’ve included some key reporting elements that our clients from leading private market firms use on a daily, weekly, and quarterly basis to update their partners and respond to investor requests.

Key elements of our best-practice Investment Dashboard include:

• Entity List including the acquisition date, capital invested, realized proceeds, gross MOIC/IRR, and remaining values for all attached deals. Investors often raise capital in multiple rounds of financing and our entity list allows you to see all rounds (entities) associated with a specific company.
• Single Company Cap Tables show the pre-money, post-money, price / share and value / share for all active deals. The ability to see equity ownership, market capitalization, and market value all in one place allows investors to visualize their equity capital stake in each business as well as streamline shareholder reporting.
• Key Financials such as revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, net income, EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, and enterprise value. Our graphs and charts make it easier to analyze data on a period to period basis or when comparing a set of key financial metrics. With an abundance of formatting options (e.g. conditional formatting) to choose from, visualizing and identifying trends in your data is made easy.  

Cobalt’s Portfolio Monitoring platform gives you the ability to personalize team and user-specific dashboards that are in-sync with the way your firm operates and reports performance. Users can create and customize dashboards on the fly and then easily export to professional, pixel-perfect PDFs that are always partner-ready. Request a demo of Cobalt’s dashboard capabilities today.

After years of market research and direct client input, our latest, milestone platform release is here and it’s raising the bar for portfolio monitoring tools. 

From day one, Cobalt has aimed to provide clients with unparalleled portfolio monitoring tools that free them to focus on their work. Now, we’re driving operational efficiency like never before, with an even more streamlined offering that provides exactly what our clients need, when they need it, in a format that works for every user. 

From our CEO, Jason Weinstein:

“With this new platform release, Cobalt has definitively leap-frogged the portfolio monitoring category on accessibility, sophistication, and value provided to private capital leaders and their teams. We are delivering an entirely new level of operational efficiency and insight for private capital firms. It’s the kind of sophistication the industry has come to expect from every technology they use, and now, portfolio monitoring need not be the exception.”

 

What to expect from this release:

• Personalized Dashboards, simplifying and configuring the experience for all users from Partners and and team members spanning finance, investment professionals, portfolio operations and investor relations.
• Advanced Performance Analytics, bringing even more power to Cobalt’s in-platform analytics such as track record and attribution analysis, cash flow modeling, and easily creating LP reports.
• Actionable Insights, enabling users to create powerful analyses by comparing specific investment performance with operating metrics and KPIs.
• Streamlined Data Collection, providing close user control on Portfolio Company communication while further lightening collection workflow lift.
• Flexible Data Model to track cash flows and investment performance at the transaction level including tracking of cross-over investments, round-level performance, and consolidated investor reporting. 
• Enhanced Permissions and Controls, delivering more support to account owners and user management capabilities.

The latest version is now available. Reach out to our team to schedule a customized demonstration and see how the latest version of Cobalt’s platform can work for you.

Products devoted to social impact investing are growing faster than ever, moving out of socially-minded and niche organizations and into the broader public and private sectors. In 2020 alone, net inflows to ESG focused mutual funds and ETFs in the United States increased tenfold and one-third of all assets managed in the United States for individuals and institutions employ strategies that take social or environmental factors into account.

Clearly, this is no longer a niche investment approach and begs the question: how do private capital firms integrate this strategy, satisfy investors, and increase returns?

At Cobalt, we’ve supported many firms along their path to incorporating ESG metric tracking into their investment process through best-practices and our powerful portfolio monitoring technology. 

And we can help you too. Read our latest e-book which outlines the steps and considerations your organization can take to begin implementing an ESG investment strategy, provide investors with transparent reporting, and still drive the returns you need.

Download the Complete Guide to ESG Investing today.

As the leading portfolio monitoring platform for private capital firms, we talk to private capital CFOs, Portfolio Operations leaders, and heads of Investor Relations at private equity and venture capital firms day in and day out.

One thing we hear consistently is: there’s a clear need for integration between the best-in-class solutions they use. Ideally they feel like they’re using a holistic suite of tools rather than siloed tech platforms that don’t work together. 

Historically, Cobalt has partnered with DealCloud to ensure our solutions are compatible and today it|venture’s Connect Platform technology is a game changer, providing amazing integration for our clients and prospects. 

In our latest webinar we talk to Emmanuel Mesa, Client Solutions Architect at DealCloud and Rob Cartledge, Manager at it|venture about exactly this conundrum and how we’re all working together to solve for it. 

Watch the webinar now and learn more about how we at Cobalt are tackling this issue for our clients. 

Cobalt launches new website

2020 has been a big year for Cobalt: from major product enhancements to new critical partnerships, we’ve delivered on our commitment to bolstering our private capital GP clients’ experience on our platform. 

We work diligently to meet our clients, quite literally, where they are, so they can take their firms and portfolios where they want. The result is improved performance, excellent reporting, and top-tier business intelligence to propel private capital firms well into the future. 

As we head into 2021, a year that promises to hold even more good news from Cobalt, it was time for us to revisit our website. In a world where your online presence is often your first “port of call” for anyone you do business with, it was important that our own telegraphed the streamlined, intuitive experience our clients have on our platform. 

So, tying in with the logo we launched earlier this year, today we launched our brand new website. In a nutshell, it provides a clearer picture of what you can expect to find in the Cobalt platform, the company we keep among integration partners, and the type of ideas, reflections, and conversations we are having daily across clients, partners and other industry leaders. 

We hope you like it. As always, if you have any feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us directly.