Summary
Fund managers can easily upload updated fund financial data for each investor in a fund via the Funds and Investors pages.
LP investment NAV and distribution CSV upload
Flow allows GP users and their service provider members to upload a CSV per fund to update Net Asset Value and Distribution figures with an associated “As of Date”.
Below provides the list of fields that Flow accepts:
- Investment ID -- Unique Flow ID that corresponds to the relationship between the investment account ("Investing Through") and the Fund/SPV. (Required)
- Full Name -- The name of the investment account owner. (Not required)
- Investing Through -- The legal name of the investment account. (Not required)
- Net Asset Value -- Aka Capital Account Balance. Should align with what is reported on the capital statement provided to the LP. (Required)
- Life to Date Distributions -- Total distributions from the fund to the LP over the life of the fund. Should align with what is reported on the capital statement provided to the LP. (Required)
- As of Date -- The effective date of the NAV and Distro figures, the date associated with the capital statement (e.g. quarter end). (Required)
An upload file will look like this:
Initiating an upload
GP users and their service providers have the ability to initiate an upload of a CSV file containing the NAV and distribution data from two locations:
Funds Page — Each ‘card’ per fund now includes the button “Update NAVs & Distributions”. This button will trigger the process to upload NAV and distribution data for the associated fund.
Investors Page — The Investors page includes the button “Update NAVs & Distributions”. This button will trigger the process to upload NAV and distribution data for the associated fund.
Downloading the fund specific CSV template
To assist with upload process, Flow provides a CSV export which pre-populates the ‘Investor IDs’, the investor ‘Full Names’, and the ‘Investing Through’ accounts.
The CSV export per fund can be found on the “Update NAVs & Distributions” page, which can be accessed by selecting the “Update NAVs & Distributions” button on either the Funds or Investors pages. To download the CSV, click on “Download CSV” (as seen in the screenshot below).
Additional notes on the CSV export:
- The Investment IDs per Flow (see the definition above).
- The Net Asset Value, As of Date, and Life Distributions fields will be blank. These are to be updated by the user.
- Non-active investors in the fund will be excluded from the export:
- Declined - Prospective investors who have declined an invitation to join the fund.
- Prospect - Investors who have not yet committed to the fund and have been marked as "prospective" by the fund manager.
- Archived - Investors who have been archived and are no longer active in the fund.
Selecting the CSV file
After selecting the “Upload CSV” button, the user will be prompted to select a file to upload to Flow.
Mapping and confirming the data to be uploaded
Once the file completes upload, the user is taken to a page where they are able to map the fields in the uploaded file to fields in Flow:
- Investment ID
- Full Name
- Investing Through
- As of Date
- Net Asset Value
- Life Distributions
Once the user has confirmed that the fields are mapped to the proper Flow field names, user selects button at the bottom of the page: "Review Import ->". Validations are run with the following checks:
- Any investor IDs included in the upload which are not in the fund will return an error.
- Error message: Please review: Upload includes investors (Investor ID) that are not in Fund/SPV. Please refer to the fund's latest csv template, which includes the list of valid investors, with their full names and IDs.
- Flow will know the fund based on the fund page that the user entered from.
- No IDs are entered more than once.
- Error message: Please review: The following id is duplicated: [investment ID]. Please refer to the fund's latest CSV template, which includes the list of valid investors, with their full names and IDs.
- Each LP investment into a fund has a unique ID.
- 'Net Asset Value' and 'LTD Distributions' cannot be non-numeric values.
- Error message: Please review: Upload includes non-numeric values for the 'Net Asset Value' and 'LTD Distributions' fields.
- For example: letters, symbols, etc. will trigger an error.
- 'As of Date' must follow a date convention.
- Error message: Please review: The 'As of Date' field requires dates to follow the format yyyy/mm/dd.
- The upload supports many different types of date conventions, though we recommend using yyyy/mm/dd to ensure there are no issues when processing the loaded data.
If all validations pass, then the user will be proceed to the confirmation page.
Confirm the data to be uploaded
After confirming mapping, you will be taken to a 'Confirmation' screen. From here, you can review (but not edit) the information you are uploading.
If you need to edit any of the data that you are uploading, click on the 'Back to Edit' button which will return you to the mapping/editing page.
After completing the review of the 'Confirmation' screen, you can select a button at the bottom of the page to "Confirm and update" the NAV, Distribution, and 'As of Date' values for the LPs in the fund.
Where LP investment NAV and distribution information can be found
Flow displays the NAV, distribution, and as of date information that has been loaded by the GP users or their service providers.
Investors page
The Investors page includes the uploaded investor data points in the main table: Net Asset Value (NAV) and Distributions (life to date) on a per investor basis.
Additionally, the details slide out for each investor includes a new section called “Valuation Details” which includes the new uploaded data points: Net Asset Value, Distributions, As of Date.
Funds page
Funds Summary page
Functionality notes
Notes to call out on the functionality to support NAVs, Distributions, and As of Dates:
- Flow will always display the last values which have been uploaded for the given fund/investor.
- Flow will not try to assume or interpret what each LP’s NAV and distribution values should be. When an investor is added to a fund, their NAV and distribution values will show as ‘0’ until the true NAV and distribution values are uploaded.
- Note: Flow does not handle the fund general ledger or the waterfall allocation of PnL and carry fees to investors. The ownership of those figures falls to the fund manager and their fund administrator.
- There can be a small lag between when the user has completed the CSV upload process and when those figures will be reflected in Flow (the lag is generally dependent on the number of investors loaded). The page will automatically refresh once Flow has completed processing the uploaded data.