Key Takeaways
The best private equity valuation software maintains a firm’s bespoke valuation models as the calculation engine while automating the refresh of those models with trusted data, streamlining review and approval workflows, and providing continuous auditability of every data point and version. Chronograph takes this flexible approach so that any valuation methodology, firm AUM, or asset class can use the solution with the operating model and systems with which they are already most comfortable.
Private equity valuation software centralizes portfolio company financials and automates the recurring, quarter-end (though increasingly more frequent) workflows of refreshing, reviewing, approving, and reporting valuation marks. A fund’s process of getting to an accurate valuation of an investment spans deal teams, finance, investor relations, and other functions, and has traditionally relied on a combination of Excel workbooks, email and other internal threads, and manual reconciliation. The category exists to remove the bottlenecks and risks of that traditional process.
Valuation software solutions for private markets typically take one of two broad approaches:
The distinction matters because private capital valuations are not uniform. A software buyout, a private credit position, an early-stage venture stake, and an infrastructure asset are modeled on different bases with different assumptions, and the deal teams who are the true experts on each investment own the judgment inside the valuation models.
Chronograph automates the data and the workflows around a firm’s models rather than the models themselves. Since the underlying financials are validated and every figure traces to its source, marks stay defensible and the efficiency gains realized are substantial.
Chronograph plugs into a firm’s existing processes and resources regardless of complexity, and supports any asset, any operating model, any methodology, and any AUM. Its Excel plug-in, xConnect, connects live models to a governed system of record to:
Because deal teams stay in the environment they know, the platform is adopted well across the entire organization.
A modern, Excel-native valuation cycle moves through three stages, each removing a category of manual work.
The gains come from eliminating manual data entry, reconciliation, and status-chasing. Reported results from firms that deployed Chronograph’s valuation solution include:
“With Chronograph, we can get through 2–3 valuations in the time it previously took us to get through one, which has helped us significantly reduce the time to flow our quarter-end marks into reporting.”
A practical checklist when comparing options:
Chronograph is purpose-built for private capital and used across buyout, growth, venture, private credit, infrastructure, fund of funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance investors, family offices, and more.
“We chose Chronograph because it provided a one-stop-shop for our data management, valuations, and LP reporting workflows. This has been a big win, and there have been significant time savings for everyone involved.”
“Chronograph’s intuitive capture interface has meaningfully improved our quarterly financial data collection process without compromising our capacity to exercise human judgment over our data. This has moved our team away from manual data entry and toward higher-value review and validation, resulting in a trusted, easily queryable dataset that we can confidently use for valuations and reporting.”
“By centralizing the data used for quarterly valuations, portfolio dashboards, and reporting in Chronograph with a consistent taxonomy and standardized workflows, we eliminated many manual reconciliation steps and significantly improved transparency. Teams now work from the same dataset across processes, which has materially increased confidence in the numbers.”
Explore how The Carlyle Group, TA Associates, Ridgemont Equity Partners, and more are leveraging Chronograph to scale and automate valuations.
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