Investor Relations

How to track lp commitments and distributions as Asset Management Founders

Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're managing LP commitments across a handful of Excel files, a Notion table you set up in 2023 and haven't fully maintained, and a Gmail thread history that's your de facto audit trail. Every quarter, before you can send an update, you spend two days reconstructing who committed what, how much has been called, what distributions went out, and what's still outstanding. You don't have a fund administrator yet — or your fund admin sends you a report two weeks after quarter-end that you still have to reformat. Juniper Square starts at $50k and assumes you have an ops person to run it. You're doing this yourself, and the spreadsheet is getting dangerous.

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Investor RelationsFor Asset Management Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live LP commitment ledger that tracks committed capital, called capital, uncalled capital, and distributions per LP — queryable in plain English at any time

An automated quarterly update that pulls your actual financial data from Plaid and QuickBooks into a formatted LP report, with narrative you review and send — no more two-day assembly process

A CRM that maps each LP relationship: commitment size, communication history, next check-in date, and flags LPs you haven't contacted in 60+ days

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Investor Reporting Transaction Insights

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Plaid bank account data on a schedule (transactions, balances, categorized cash flows) and syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, journal entries, expense records). The CRM connects to Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so LP email threads stay current. QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List) are temporarily unavailable — entity-level data including journal entries and payments syncs normally and powers the commitment ledger.

Prompts to copy

Build me an LP commitment tracker with fields for LP name, entity type, committed capital, capital called to date, uncalled capital, total distributions to date, and distribution date history. Add a pipeline view that shows which LPs have open capital calls pending and which are fully deployed.

Set up an investor reporting workflow that pulls my Plaid and QuickBooks data, calculates fund-level burn and portfolio cash flows, and drafts a quarterly LP update with a distributions summary table, a capital call schedule, and a short narrative on fund performance. I want to review and edit before anything goes out.

Show me month-over-month cash flows from my Plaid accounts, broken down by fund operating expenses vs. capital activity, and flag any transactions over $10,000 that aren't tagged to a known LP capital call or portfolio investment.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Plaid in Starch — Starch syncs your fund operating account and any distribution accounts on a schedule, pulling categorized transactions and balances automatically.

2 Connect QuickBooks — Starch syncs your chart of accounts, journal entries, and payment records so capital calls and distributions that flow through your books are visible inside Starch.

3 Open the CRM app and tell Starch your LP schema: 'Add fields for committed capital, called capital, uncalled capital, distributions to date, entity type (individual/family office/institutional), and next communication date.'

4 Import your existing LP list — paste from Excel or describe the columns and Starch maps them. The CRM normalizes the data and flags missing fields.

5 For each LP, log the commitment documents by linking to Google Drive or pasting key terms. Starch stores the commitment amount and tracks it against capital calls you record.

6 When a capital call goes out, update the ledger in plain English: 'Record a $250,000 capital call to Sequoia Capital on April 15, 2026, for Fund II.' Starch updates called capital and uncalled capital for that LP.

7 When a distribution goes out, record it the same way: 'Log a $47,500 distribution to Greenfield Family Office on June 30, 2026, from the sale of Acme Corp.' Starch appends to that LP's distribution history.

8 Open Investor Reporting and prompt Starch to draft your Q2 LP update — it pulls Plaid cash flow data, QuickBooks journal entries, and the commitment ledger to produce a distributions table, capital call schedule, and fund-level summary.

9 Review the draft, make edits inline, then send from Starch to your LP list — Gmail is synced so replies thread back into each LP's CRM record automatically.

10 Use Transaction Insights to run a quarterly audit: ask Starch 'Show me all transactions over $5,000 this quarter that aren't tagged to a capital call or portfolio company investment' to catch anything that slipped through.

11 Set a recurring Starch automation: 'Every 90 days, pull the commitment ledger, calculate total called vs. committed for each LP, draft a capital account statement table, and put it in my drafts for review.' You review and send; Starch does the assembly.

12 Run the CRM query 'Which LPs have I not emailed or logged a touchpoint with in more than 60 days?' before every quarterly call cycle so no relationship goes cold between closes.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 LP Reporting — Meridian Capital Partners II

Sample numbers from a real run

Total committed capital (7 LPs)	4,200,000
Capital called to date	1,890,000
Uncalled capital remaining	2,310,000
Distributions paid Q1 2026	312,000
Distributions paid — cumulative	587,500
Fund operating expenses (Plaid — Q1)	43,200
Largest single LP commitment (Harlow Family Office)	1,000,000
Harlow called to date	450,000
Harlow distributions received	142,000

You're three months into Fund II. Seven LPs committed $4.2M total; you've called $1.89M across two capital calls — one in January for $1.1M and one in March for $790,000. Harlow Family Office is your anchor at $1M committed, $450,000 called, and $142,000 in distributions already received from a partial exit in a portfolio company. Before Starch, you were cross-referencing a QuickBooks export, a wire confirmation PDF folder, and an Excel sheet that was last updated in February to produce the Q1 summary. With Starch, you prompt 'Draft my Q1 LP update for Meridian Capital Partners II using my Plaid cash flow data and commitment ledger. Include a table showing each LP's called capital, uncalled capital, and distributions to date. Flag that the March capital call wires all cleared.' Starch pulls the synced Plaid and QuickBooks data, builds the table from the commitment ledger in the CRM, drafts the narrative in the tone of your previous updates, and puts it in your review queue in about three minutes. You edit one paragraph, add a note about the portfolio company pipeline, and send. The CRM automatically logs a touchpoint for each LP on your list.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Called capital as a percentage of total committed capital (by LP and fund-level)

Uncalled capital remaining per LP and aggregate dry powder

Distributions paid to date vs. total capital called (distribution coverage ratio)

Days since last LP communication (by LP in CRM)

Fund operating expense run rate vs. management fee income (from Plaid + QuickBooks)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Juniper Square

Purpose-built for fund LP management and ILPA reporting, but starts at $50k/year and assumes a dedicated ops person to configure and maintain it — not practical for a sub-$25M emerging manager doing this themselves.

Excel + Google Sheets

Free and flexible, but the commitment ledger and distribution history live in a file that breaks when you have more than three capital calls, has no live data connection to your bank accounts or QuickBooks, and produces no draft LP communications.

Notion database

Good for storing LP records, but has no financial data sync, no automated reporting, and no query interface — you're still doing the math yourself and copying numbers in manually.

Carta (fund admin module)

Handles cap table and equity management well, but LP commitment tracking and distribution waterfall reporting are secondary features, and it doesn't connect to your operating bank accounts or produce the narrative quarterly updates your LPs actually read.

Fund administrator (outsourced)

Accurate and auditable, but typically two-week lag on reports after quarter-end, costs $10k–$30k/year at emerging fund scale, and you still have to manage the LP relationship and communication layer yourself.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, investor reporting, transaction insights all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Can Starch produce a distribution waterfall calculation automatically?

Starch can track committed capital, called capital, and distributions per LP and query that ledger in plain English. For a full waterfall calculation — preferred return hurdles, carried interest splits, catch-up provisions — you'd describe the waterfall structure to Starch and it can model it, but you should treat the output as a working draft and verify against your LPA before sending to LPs. Starch is not an audited fund accounting system.

Will Starch pull QuickBooks P&L reports for the fund operating entity?

QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily unavailable while an upstream connector issue is being fixed. Entity-level data — bills, invoices, journal entries, payments, and vendors — syncs normally and is what the commitment and distribution ledger is built on. Full report view sync is on the roadmap.

What if my LP wires come from bank accounts that aren't Plaid-supported?

Plaid covers most major US banks and credit unions. For accounts Plaid doesn't support, you can connect your accounting records through QuickBooks instead, or manually log capital call receipts directly in the Starch CRM by typing something like 'Log $250,000 received from Westview Partners on April 12, 2026, for Fund II capital call 2.' Starch updates the ledger; you just have to record it.

Is my LP data safe? Are you SOC 2 certified?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs or fund counsel require a SOC 2 report from every tool that touches fund data, that's worth knowing upfront. Most emerging managers at the sub-$25M stage accept this trade-off given the cost of enterprise fund software. We're direct about it.

Can I use Starch instead of a fund administrator?

Starch handles the operational layer that fund administrators often charge you for: LP tracking, commitment ledgers, distribution history, quarterly reporting drafts, and LP communication. It doesn't replace the legal and audit functions of a full fund administrator — you'll still want a licensed fund admin for your annual audit and regulatory filings. What Starch replaces is the two days of manual assembly before you can send anything.

Can Starch send capital call notices directly to LPs?

Yes — since Gmail is synced in Starch, you can prompt Starch to draft individual capital call notices per LP (with their specific commitment amount and wire instructions) and put them in your Gmail drafts for review before sending. You stay in control of what goes out; Starch does the per-LP personalization and number-filling.