An investment committee pack built in four days

The situation

Kestrel produced a quarterly investment committee pack from a custodian feed, an internal valuation sheet and three spreadsheets maintained by different analysts.

Preparation took eighteen working days and most of four people. Because the figures were assembled by hand, every number was checked twice before the pack went out, which consumed much of the remaining time.

Constraints

The partners trusted the existing numbers and were not willing to accept a new figure without being able to see how it was derived. Lineage was therefore not a nice-to-have but the condition for adoption.

What we did

We modelled holdings, valuations and fees into one layer, with every figure in the pack traceable to the record it came from. The sixty-one manual spreadsheet steps reduced to three, all of them genuine judgement calls rather than data assembly.

For the first quarter both processes ran in parallel and the outputs were compared line by line. They matched on the second attempt, after we found a fee accrual the old sheet had been applying a month late since 2021.

Result

The pack now takes four days, one of which is review. The analysts who used to assemble it are working on the manager selection analysis the partners had been asking for since 2023.

Results

Measure	Before	After
Working days to produce the pack	18	4
Analysts involved	4	1
Manual spreadsheet steps	61	3
Figures traceable to source	Partial	100%