Automated Reconciliation for Venture Capital Investment Management

A national accounting and advisory firm now runs automated reconciliation across venture capital investment documents and schedules of investments. The solution onboards clients faster at 90% accuracy across multiple document types, tracks and compares investment documents and flags discrepancies, and gives their team better visibility into their clients’ investment lifecycle.

The firm's venture capital audit practice depends on hundreds of pages of legal and financial documents. Every investment cycle brings new share counts, purchase amounts, and terms that have to be extracted, validated, and compared against related documents before an audit can move forward.

Done by hand, that work meant reading every document, tracking lifecycle changes like stock splits and ownership transfers, reconciling duplicate investor and company records, and coordinating confirmation activities with outside parties, all before comparison and reconciliation could even begin. The process was thorough, but it was slow, and keeping hundreds of pages in sync across every open engagement grew harder as client volume grew.

Ashling designed and built a custom solution for the firm's specific audit workflow, covering intake through final reporting. At the center of the program is automated reconciliation: the system matches investment data extracted from source documents against the corresponding records the firm's accountants already track, and flags what does not line up.

Documents enter the system through SharePoint. From there, they move through four connected modules:

1. Document Viewer. The firm's team searches source documents and reviews, validates, and corrects any extracted data before it moves forward. That human-in-the-loop step keeps a person in control of every record's accuracy ahead of reconciliation.
2. Contact. The team adds purchaser and company details and sends investment and limited partner confirmations through DocuSign, with signed copies stored and tracked automatically.
3. Audit. The team gets one centralized view of every client's schedule of investments (SOI). Its Financial Audit Comparisons page runs the automated reconciliation itself, matching investment data extracted from source documents, including stock purchase agreements (SPAs), simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs), and convertible promissory notes (CPNs), against the corresponding records in the SOI or client-prepared SOI (PBC SOI).
4. Aggregates. The module brings together a consolidated picture of holdings and activity by purchaser and by portfolio company. Its Purchasers page aggregates investment data across document types, financing rounds, and transactions, so the team reviews purchaser activity from a single interface instead of paging through a document backlog.

Automated reconciliation between source documents and schedule of investments records changes four things for the firm's accountants:

As the firm takes on more clients, the system gives the practice room to absorb the added volume without adding equivalent manual review time.