Kestrel runs a good investment process on spreadsheets. They kept their order management system and their fund administrator — the official NAV never moved — and we built the working layer around them. Live in five months.
Kestrel Asset Management is an example, not a client. The firm and the numbers are made up. The shape of the problem, the parts of the engine, and the way a build runs are real.
Nothing here was broken enough to fix on its own. Together they cost the firm a person and a half.
A single file, opened by four people, with the version in the filename. Nobody could say when a weight last changed, who changed it, or what the book looked like on a date in the past.
Notes in documents and email threads. When a position moved, the reasoning behind it took an hour to dig up — if anyone had written it down at all.
Two people, a copy and paste from last quarter, and a manual check of every number against the administrator’s file. The commentary was the easy part.
“Our investment process is good. The paperwork around it is held together with spreadsheets.”
Chief investment officer, first scoping sessionFor an asset manager the book of record is not negotiable, and it should not be. We build around it.
Trades go through the order management system. The fund administrator strikes the official NAV, and that number is the number. We read both, we reconcile to both every morning, and we never pretend to be either. The book of record does not have to move for the work around it to get better.
Two sessions and one real mandate taken apart, at our cost.
Three of their last four client complaints came from a position that had drifted between checks. The check itself was sound. Its frequency was set by how long it took a person to do.
Most breaches were small and stale — a cash weight left over after a redemption, sitting there for weeks. Nobody was watching for age, only for size.
Numbers were only trusted once the administrator closed the period, so everything else queued behind that. Live positions, reconciled daily, take the queue away.
The note that explained a position and the position itself lived in different systems, so nothing could ever prompt anybody at the moment it mattered.
Every account against its model, checked every morning. Anything outside tolerance lands in one queue with the reason attached, and the research note sits with the position that caused it. Client and consultant letters generate from live holdings, so the commentary is written once and the numbers come from the book.
“Trimming the banks into strength, holding the cash until the December meeting.” — R. Vasquez, 12 Aug
Illustrative screen. Positions reconcile to the order system and the administrator every morning before the queue is built.
The investment plumbing already existed. Kestrel paid for their rules and their reporting.
Positions and performance, mandates and model templates, and assigning them across the book.
The client, the entity and the mandate they hold, in one record instead of three lists.
Letters, packs and exports generated from live data, in their brand.
Who changed a model weight, and when. This is what the spreadsheet could never give them.
Drafting commentary from the quarter’s real moves, for a human to edit.
Where consultants and clients see their own mandate.
A daily read of the order system and the administrator, matched, with breaks shown.
Their rules, including how long a breach is allowed to sit before it is escalated.
The format their institutional clients ask for, produced from live holdings.
Six of the nine pieces already existed. Three were built for Kestrel.
A short build, because most of what an asset manager needs is the part that already exists.
Two sessions with the CIO, a portfolio manager and the operations lead. We took one real mandate apart, weight by weight.
Their largest mandate, real positions, real drift, on screen. It found two live breaches on the first day.
Mandates and drift. Then the exception queue and research notes. Then reporting. Then the consultant view.
Everything runs from the cockpit. The spreadsheet still exists as a backup, and nobody opens it.
The investment process did not change. The evidence and the speed around it did.
Illustrative figures for an example build.
The cockpit was the first thing. What comes after it is entirely their call.
You choose the direction each month. Nothing about this build makes the next decision for you.
An RIA that wanted one place to work, without touching the system that runs performance and billing.
See the build Example build —A family office that could not answer "what do we own" without three days of work.
See the build Example build —A dealer whose supervision work was fine, and whose evidence of it was an inbox.
See the buildTell us how yours runs and what you wish it did instead. Half an hour on a call. We'll tell you what's already built, what we'd have to make, roughly what it costs, and whether it's worth doing at all. Scoping after that is free.
