How Accessible is your Critical Investment Information?

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Let’s continue with the theme of not being able to get a complete view of your investments.  What happens when there are interruptions in business or in the company and you don’t have a complete view?  Like it or not, issues, such as staff turnover, information not getting backed up or being completely lost, lack of access to information, and natural disasters do happen.  Nowadays, it’s a common practice among businesses to have comprehensive approaches, or business continuity plans, to minimize these disruptions.  But what about your firm, have you evaluated how your company will deal with these issues if they arise?  Even if everything is running smoothly now, have you addressed your points of potential weakness?  Do you have a business continuity plan in place as a preventative measure?  Where will your critical investment information be if something goes awry? 

The flip side of having a business continuity plan is actually having business continuity; a way of ensuring your clients and partners that they will have access to their information if something does goes wrong.  This could include many of the daily routines of project management, keeping good communications, keeping things backed up and keeping updated reports.  Good business continuity tends to be a manual and costly process, making operations harder to maneuver, which brings us to the next pain we relieve for our clients.

Pain #2 - There is a lack of business continuity in my office/ operations are hard to control.

• Critical investment information is kept in one place and not backed up.

Whether the information is stored in someone’s email, on one person’s hard drive, or in a filing cabinet next to your desk, there are numerous ways that information can easily become inaccessible.  Is your information backed up?  If the information is in the cloud, is it backed up on multiple servers?  Are the servers on different power grids?  If information is lost, one way or another, is recovery possible? If critical information is lost, it is imperative that recovery occurs in a timely fashion.

• There is no business continuity plan/ there is a plan, but no business continuity.

If you do not have a business continuity plan in place for your critical documents, start there.  It is important to have all critical information in a secure, backed-up, easily accessible place.  If you have a plan in place, is your company practicing the plan in a way that LPs and colleagues are comfortable knowing how to access their information if something goes wrong?  Communicating with your LPs and internal partners regularly, to keep everyone in the loop, is a significant way to establish business continuity, good governance and consistency.  If you have your information in the cloud, providing a user portal for access to the information is also a key way to provide ease of access to information.

• The daily operational tasks of properly managing my investments are getting hard to handle.

Trying to manually maintain work flows of investments can be extremely time consuming, not to mention, costly to the company.  Providing a good flow of communications between the company and LPs and investments is already quite a feat.  Now add on the responsibilities of keeping all the information backed up, organized, readily available to everyone, in reports to be analyzed, etc.  And then when a document is updated, starting the process again…it’s exhausting!

What do I need to solve these issues?

Organizing information on a secure cloud-based solution, backed-up on multiple servers (and on different power grids) ensures the security of information and its timely recovery in the event of data loss. Online user portals make accessing information easy but also make it possible to segregate information by role.  Automated emails can also help the daily operational responsibilities.  Capital calls, board packages, K1s, etc. should have reminder and chaser emails setup.  Notification emails of when new or updated information is put into a system are another great way to keep everyone on the same page.

Find out more about how DocDep can provide the solution.  Or get a deeper view into the software by requesting a demo.