A monitor for private funds and companies

The private book is the hardest part of a family office's portfolio to see clearly. Funds report quarterly and late, in capital-account statements that each administrator formats differently. Direct companies send investor letters, board decks and management accounts in their own shapes and on their own cadence, or stop sending them when things get hard. Marks move rarely and are stale most of the time. The question the office actually needs answered — which of these positions needs attention now, and why — was being answered by reading PDFs.

The PE / VC Monitor is a reading layer over the office's own record of its private positions. It takes the positions the Family Office platform already holds (cost, mark, distributions, performance) and adds everything the office learns about them from what they send: every document classified and dated, every investor letter read into dated headlines and proposed figures, every company's own accounts kept period by period with a tie-out, and every fund's schedule of investments read into a holdings grid. A review queue sits between the reading and the record, so a figure a model proposed never counts until a person approves it.

On top of that record it keeps a small universal spine of operating metrics for every company — revenue, EBITDA, cash, burn, runway, headcount — scored against the plan the company itself sent, within one reporting cadence, so a miss is visible the month it happens. Coverage says who is actually reporting against the cadence the office expects. Attention rules flag a stale mark, a stalled income stream, an underwater position, a high risk score or a data gap. The overview page is the answer to the office's question, with the evidence one click below it.

The PE / VC Monitor is a read-only reporting layer over the family office's own record of its private investments. It takes the positions the Family Office platform already holds (cost, mark, distributions, performance) and adds the part that record never had: how each operating company is actually doing, who is reporting and who has gone dark, and a running story of what has happened to every deal.

Some of the parts worth a look:

• The operating layer keeps a small universal spine of metrics for every company (revenue, EBITDA, cash, burn, runway, headcount) and scores each against the plan the company sent, within one reporting cadence, so a monthly figure is never judged against an annual one.
• Documents become data. Every file a company sends is classified and dated from its name; the investor letters are read by a model, which proposes figures and a headline that a person then approves or rejects. Nothing it proposes reaches the book without that click.
• Funds get their own lens. A blind pool has no P&L, but it does have a portfolio: the schedule of investments is read into a holdings grid, companies down and report dates across, with the fund's own printed totals kept beside the sum of the rows.
• Capital is attributed. A commitment read off a statement is tagged with whose position it describes, so a pooled vehicle's figure can never be shown as the office's own.

Python and Flask on PostgreSQL, server-rendered pages with Alpine.js. The monitor is deliberately read-only over the positions themselves: it reads them from the Family Office platform through an internal API and adds its own tables for documents, extracted figures, operating metrics, reviews and headlines, so the office's record of what it owns has exactly one writer.

• Extraction has priorities. Dark companies and fund holdings are read first, because they are where the office knows least; a company that reports well is read for its figures, a fund for its portfolio.
• Statements are stored as tables, not as text, period by period as the company wrote them, so a tie-out can check that revenue less costs equals the profit they printed, and a figure can be compared across reports.
• The operating spine is universal. Six metrics every company can report, scored against the company's own plan within one cadence, so companies in different industries can share one exceptions board without pretending their businesses are alike.
• Shared platform. Single sign-on with the other applications, the same database cluster, nightly backups to two object stores and a deploy on every push.
• Several hundred tests, checked by mutation, including the readers driven over statement shapes the office has actually received.

The code itself is private. If you would like to walk through it, get in touch.