The Evolution of LP Information Requests

The days of LP reporting being limited to quarterly capital account statements and annual reports are long gone. Today's institutional investors require continuous access to detailed analytics across their investments, often demanding response times measured in hours rather than days. According to Private Funds CFO's Insights Survey 2025, 58% of CFOs report that ongoing LP information requests now seek "more detail and analysis behind the information" compared to previous years.

Today's in-flight requests go far beyond simple capital account balances. LPs routinely ask for cross-fund exposure analysis spanning multiple vehicles and vintages, detailed breakdowns of fee calculations and expense allocations, and performance attribution that tracks returns across the entire relationship. They want investment-level cash flow projections alongside investor-level projections—data that requires pulling from multiple systems and reconciling across time periods. Portfolio company metrics that once lived in quarterly reports are now expected on demand as well.

This shift reflects broader changes in LP expectations. The ILPA Reporting Template 2.0, released in January 2025, codifies the level of granularity LPs now consider standard: detailed fee and expense breakdowns, standardized performance metrics, and consistent reporting formats that allow comparison across managers. What was once "best practice" has become baseline expectation.

The Operational Burden

Consider a typical in-flight LP request: "Can you provide our total exposure across all vehicles, including co-investments, with a breakdown of management fee structures and our performance versus similar LPs?"

What seems like a straightforward query often becomes a multi-day project: 

1. An IR analyst emails the fund administrator requesting specific data points like commitment amounts, distribution history, and current NAV across all vehicles. Then they wait for a response.
2. While waiting for the administrator's response, someone manually compiles co-investment data from various spreadsheets. Fund III co-investments might be tracked in one Excel file while Fund IV co-investments live in a different spreadsheet with different column headers. Fund V uses yet another format. None of these spreadsheets talk to each other, and the naming conventions differ—one uses "commitment date," another uses "closing date," a third uses "funding date" for the same concept.
3. Finance gets pulled in to verify that fee calculations align with LPA terms. A Fund III commitment from 2020 uses committed capital as the management fee base. A Fund V commitment from 2024 switched to invested capital. Someone needs to pull both LPAs, confirm which methodology applies to each vehicle, recalculate if the administrator's numbers used a different assumption, and document the logic for future reference.
4. Data from different fund vintages needs to be normalized by someone before it can sit side-by-side in a single response. Fund III tracked performance on a quarterly basis. Fund V moved to monthly. The co-investments were tracked separately by deal team members using their own methods. Getting all of this into a consistent format—same date ranges, same calculation methodologies, same level of detail—requires significant spreadsheet reconciliation work.
5. Numbers go back and forth between the different team members for verification. Finance flags a discrepancy in the management fee calculation, while IR loops back to the administrator for clarification. Finance reviews the response and signs off. 
6. The IR team lead does a final review before anything goes to the LP.

By the time the LP receives an answer, three to five business days have passed for what should have been a 30-minute exercise.

The central problem is fund data accessibility—all the required information exists but sits scattered across systems that don't talk to each other. As Chris Iorillo, Chief Financial, Legal, and Compliance Officer at Freeman Spogli, noted in the Private Funds CFO survey (subscription required): "LPs have become more attuned to the importance of the back office. They want to see what systems and processes you have implemented to meet growing regulatory demands for information and their own demands for performance and expense data."

The Cost of Fragmented Data Access

The cost of handling LP questions is significant. Each request drains resources from teams who must work with fragmented data. Reliance on external fund administrators for routine information creates bottlenecks—and dependency risk when key administrator contacts change or response times slip. Manual workflows increase the risk of error; every hand-off and re-keying of data introduces potential for mistakes. Response times stretch from hours to days, sometimes weeks for complex multi-fund analyses.

This operational drag harms a firm in three ways:

Relationship damage. LPs who wait days for routine information draw conclusions about operational sophistication of the firm they’re working with. These impressions surface during re-up decisions when LPs compare their experience across multiple manager relationships. A firm that takes three days to answer a basic exposure question signals something about its back-office capabilities—and LPs notice. The IR team's responsiveness becomes a proxy for the firm's overall operational maturity.

Competitive disadvantage during fundraising. In a market where LPs are increasingly selective, operational excellence has become table stakes. Bain & Company's 2025 Private Equity Report notes that "the priority in today's market is to demonstrate to LPs that your firm is a responsible steward of capital." Slow, inconsistent responses to information requests undermine that narrative. When LPs are choosing whether to re-up with managers that have similar track records, the firm that can't efficiently answer questions about its own fund data might lose ground. "Proactive communication and transparency are essential to ensuring LPs remain committed" across fund cycles—difficult to achieve when IR teams spend their time chasing data rather than engaging strategically.

Staff time costs. A fund handling multiple complex LP requests per month is pulling high-value team members  away from strategic work—fundraising support, proactive LP engagement, or the kind of relationship management that actually differentiates a firm. 

Building a Better Approach

Forward-thinking firms are realizing that improving fund data accessibility for IR teams creates compounding benefits. When historical fund data across all vehicles and co-investments is immediately accessible—without waiting on administrator responses—routine requests become self-service. Calculation methodologies stay consistent and aligned with LPA terms, eliminating the reconciliation exercises that eat up analyst time. Performance validation happens automatically rather than through manual cross-checking. Fund administrators can focus on complex accounting work rather than fielding routine data requests. And IR professionals reclaim the hours they need for strategic LP engagement: proactive outreach, relationship building, and the kind of high-touch service that differentiates managers during competitive fundraising cycles.

A single source of truth for fund data maintains necessary controls while democratizing access across teams. When IR professionals can directly access validated fund data without relying on multiple handoffs, they can respond to LP requests faster and more confidently.

Using LP Reporting to Strengthen Relationships

LPs expectations are evolving, and they increasingly view the sophistication of a manager's data infrastructure as an indicator of operational excellence. Firms delivering accurate, detailed information quickly demonstrate their commitment to transparency and build stronger LP relationships. The Preqin Service Providers Report found that 59% of investors said transparency at the fund level can be improved—up from 54% the previous year. LP expectations continue to rise.

As private markets mature, the ability to efficiently manage and deliver fund information is an important differentiator.