Creating reports for alternative statements can take a lot of time, but by automating the data extraction, family offices will save a lot of time and energy.
There is a lot of manual work related to alternative investment statements and preparing reports...
Locating, downloading, renaming, reformatting, and storing documents are all part of the process.
And the most time-consuming and error-prone part is data extraction. In fact, manual data entry is one of the most hated tasks in the workplace!
These private equity and venture capital statements are sent in PDF, and they have data points that must be added to an Excel file.
Manually copying and pasting data is highly repetitive, and it's not something high-skilled employees should waste their time on.
There is a single family office in Northern California that came to us because they needed help with their alternative investments.
They had capital calls, distributions, and K1s, and it's a lot of work to handle each statement manually, one-by-one, at random hours.
They had data that needed to be copied and pasted from a PDF into Excel, and it got to a point where 'enough is enough.'
This is a family office that employs highly educated and talented individuals, yet their staff was spending an hour a day on the most basic and manual work.
What should they be doing is delivering the most value to the organization, that is, doing research, analysis, and managing the investments. This family office knew that, and Empaxis was ready to help.
Empaxis developed a series of bots to recognize emails with statements, then download the statements, store, rename and reformat the files.
From there, the automated bots would extract relevant data from the statements and place into a separate spreadsheet.
The client would perform a quick review of the data in the updated spreadsheet, then easily bulk upload the data to their portfolio management software.
By automating, process turnaround times were five times faster and errors were nearly eliminated.
Senior-level staff no longer had to be available at random, off-hour times to process the statements and enter the data.
The automation process would begin immediately upon receiving the emails with statements, capital calls, and links to manager websites for downloading statements.
This family office sure enjoyed no longer having to manually copy and paste data in to spreadsheets!
And by automating the steps, it freed up staff capacity, and they gained more than 5 hours of extra time every week.
If you're a family office or other type of investment firm that has a lot of alternative investments, you may have been in a similar situation to the Northern California family office.
You've thought about making better use of employee time and resources, but weren't exactly sure what to do or how to get started.
That's ok. We can help guide you along.
If you'd like to learn more about automating data extraction, among other processes related, feel free to download our automation guide and reach out.
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