Investor Relations

How to track lp commitments and distributions as Small Investor Relations Teams

Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your two-person IR team is tracking LP commitments and distributions across a combination of Juniper Square exports, a shared Google Sheet that your CFO last touched in Q3, and a QuickBooks ledger your fund admin controls but won't give you direct access to. Every capital call cycle means manually reconciling called capital against committed capital per LP, chasing your CFO for net cash figures, and formatting a distribution waterfall in Excel at 11pm before a board call. When an LP asks 'what's my unfunded commitment as of today,' you're opening three tabs and doing arithmetic. That's not IR work — that's data plumbing.

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Investor RelationsFor Small Investor Relations Teams2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live LP commitment tracker that shows each investor's committed capital, called capital to date, unfunded balance, and distributions received — updated automatically from your QuickBooks and Plaid data.

A custom CRM for your LP relationships that ties commitment data to contact records, email history, and last-communication dates — so you know who to call before they call you.

A scheduled capital call and distribution summary that drafts per-LP notices with accurate figures pulled from your financial systems, ready for your review before it goes out.

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule (invoices, payments, journal entries — entity-level data) and syncs your Plaid bank account transactions on a schedule for cash movement verification. Your LP portal — Juniper Square, Intralinks, or DocSend — is automated through your browser, no API needed. LP contact records and email history sync from Gmail on a schedule.

Prompts to copy

Build me an LP commitment tracker with columns for LP name, entity type, committed capital, capital called to date, unfunded commitment, total distributions received, and net IRR. Pull called capital and distributions from QuickBooks. Let me manually enter committed capital per LP and flag each one as institutional, family office, or individual. Add a view that sorts by unfunded commitment descending so I can see who has the most capital left to call.

Build me a quarterly LP distribution report that pulls cash movements from Plaid and reconciles them against capital call records in my commitment tracker. For each LP, show their pro-rata share of the distribution based on their ownership percentage, the gross amount, any withholding, and the net wire amount. Draft a per-LP notice I can review and send.

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Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks: Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — invoices, journal entries, payments, and vendor records. This becomes the source of truth for called capital and distribution amounts rather than an exported CSV.

2 Connect Plaid: Starch syncs your bank account transactions on a schedule so you can verify that wires went out and reconcile what hit the account against what QuickBooks shows was owed.

3 Connect Gmail: Starch syncs your Gmail on a schedule, pulling the email thread history that lives between you and each LP — capital call notices, side letter correspondence, distribution confirmations.

4 Build the commitment tracker app: Describe the schema you actually use — LP name, entity, committed capital, called capital, unfunded balance, distributions, net IRR — and Starch builds the surface. Manually enter committed capital per LP; everything else pulls from QuickBooks.

5 Attach LP records to the CRM app: Start from the CRM starter app and customize it for your LP relationships. Add fields your team cares about — relationship tier, lead GP, next scheduled call, side letter flags — and link each LP record to their commitment row.

6 Set up the unfunded commitment view: Ask Starch to add a view sorted by unfunded commitment descending. When you're planning the next capital call, this is the screen you'll use to model the call size and identify which LPs are at or near their commitment ceiling.

7 Automate the capital call draft: Describe the notice format you use — call amount, bank wiring instructions, due date, LP-specific called capital, updated unfunded balance — and Starch generates a draft per LP from live QuickBooks data. You review, edit, and send.

8 Automate distribution notices: Before each distribution, tell Starch the total distributable amount and the record date. Starch calculates each LP's pro-rata share from their ownership percentage, pulls Plaid transaction data to confirm the wire went out, and drafts the per-LP distribution notice.

9 Automate your LP portal updates: If your fund uses a web-based LP portal, Starch automates the update through your browser — uploading the quarterly report PDF, updating commitment figures, and flagging documents as available — no API required.

10 Set up the quarterly LP letter: Use the Investor Reporting starter app as a base, fork it for fund IR, and point it at your QuickBooks and Plaid data. Describe the sections your letter needs — portfolio company updates, cash position, capital account statements — and Starch drafts a version you edit down from 80% to final.

11 Add an LP question lookup: Tell Starch 'when an LP asks about their account, look up their commitment record and draft a response with their current called capital, unfunded balance, and last distribution amount.' Your two-person team stops doing manual arithmetic every time an LP emails.

12 Review and send: Every output — capital call notice, distribution letter, quarterly update — goes through your review queue before it leaves Starch. You're the editor, not the data gatherer.

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Worked example

Q1 2026 Capital Call and Distribution Cycle — $47M Fund

Sample numbers from a real run

Total fund commitments	47,000,000
Capital called to date (pre-Q1 call)	18,800,000
Q1 2026 capital call (30% of remaining)	8,460,000
LP A (family office, $5M commitment)	1,980,000
LP B (institutional, $12M commitment)	5,040,000
LP C (HNW individual, $2M commitment)	840,000
Q1 2026 distribution (realized carry from Portfolio Co exit)	2,100,000
LP A pro-rata distribution	223,404
LP B pro-rata distribution	1,021,277

In Q1 2026, your team is running a capital call on the $28.2M unfunded balance of the fund — drawing 30%, or $8.46M, from LPs in proportion to their commitments. LP A, a family office with a $5M commitment and $1.32M already called, receives a notice for $1.98M due within 10 business days. LP B, an institutional LP at $12M committed and $4.2M called, receives a $5.04M call. Simultaneously, a portfolio company exit closed in February generates $2.1M of distributable proceeds. Starch pulls the Plaid transaction data to confirm the wire cleared your fund account on March 3rd, calculates each LP's pro-rata share based on their ownership percentage (LP A gets $223,404; LP B gets $1,021,277), and drafts per-LP distribution notices with net wire amounts after a 0% withholding for these LPs. The whole reconciliation — which used to take your team a half-day of cross-referencing QuickBooks exports and a spreadsheet — runs in one Starch session. You spend your time reviewing the notices for tone, not checking arithmetic.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Unfunded commitment per LP (and aggregate) — the number an LP will ask about in every call

Paid-in capital as a percentage of total commitments — where you are in the fund's capital cycle

Distribution-to-paid-in (DPI) ratio per LP — what LPs actually care about at year 5+

Days from close decision to capital call notice sent — a direct measure of your team's operational throughput

LP response rate and time-to-wire on capital calls — flags relationship or operational issues early

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Juniper Square

Juniper Square is purpose-built for fund IR and handles LP portal, capital accounts, and K-1 prep — but at $50k+ per year it assumes a dedicated IR-ops analyst, and it won't let you build the custom surfaces (commitment trackers, LP CRMs, draft notice generators) that reflect how your two-person team actually works.

Addepar

Addepar is excellent for multi-asset portfolio reporting and LP performance analytics, but it's an analytics platform, not a workflow tool — you still need to manually produce capital call notices, maintain LP contact records, and draft letters on top of it.

Excel / Google Sheets + QuickBooks export

This is what most two-person IR teams actually use today; it's free and flexible, but every capital call cycle means re-exporting, re-reconciling, and hoping no one overwrote the formula in column H — Starch keeps the same live data connected without the manual export cycle.

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot works for LP contact management and email tracking, but it has no concept of committed capital, called capital, or distribution history — you end up maintaining a parallel spreadsheet anyway, which is exactly the problem Starch's custom CRM solves by letting you build capital fields into the contact record directly.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, investor reporting 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

Does Starch replace our fund administrator or our Juniper Square subscription?

No, and it's not trying to. Your fund admin handles K-1s, audit prep, and legal capital account calculations — Starch connects to the outputs of those systems (QuickBooks, NetSuite, Plaid) and lets you build the working surfaces on top: the tracker your team uses every day, the draft notices, the LP dashboard. Think of it as the layer between your back-office systems and the work you actually do in IR.

Our QuickBooks is managed by the fund admin and we don't have full admin access. Can Starch still connect?

Starch connects to QuickBooks with read-only access using your existing credentials. You need at least report-level read access to invoices, payments, and journal entries. If your fund admin controls the account entirely, you'd need them to provision a read-only user — most are comfortable doing this since Starch isn't writing to their books.

Can Starch pull data from our LP portal — Juniper Square, Intralinks, or DocSend?

If your LP portal has a public API, Starch can query it from the integration catalog. If it doesn't — which is common for DocSend and some Intralinks configurations — Starch automates it through your browser, no API needed. This covers uploading documents, checking LP access logs, and pulling commitment data that lives in the portal but not in your accounting system.

The QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List views aren't working — is that a Starch bug?

QuickBooks report views (P&L, Transaction List, Vendor Expenses) are temporarily disabled pending an upstream fix. Entity-level data — invoices, bills, payments, vendors, journal entries — syncs normally. For an LP commitment tracker, you're almost entirely working with entity-level data, so this limit won't block you. The report views are on the fix roadmap.

We need to track side letter terms by LP — different fee structures, co-investment rights, most-favored-nation clauses. Can the CRM handle that?

Yes. Describe the fields you need — side letter type, MFN flag, fee rate override, co-invest allocation tier, expiration date — and Starch builds a CRM schema with those fields on each LP record. You're not configuring a generic CRM that wasn't designed for fund IR; you're describing exactly what you track and Starch builds the surface around it.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? Our LPs ask about data security before we put commitment data in any new system.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your LPs or compliance team require SOC 2 Type II as a condition, that's a genuine constraint — worth asking about current security documentation directly. Starch doesn't have an on-premises or self-hosted option either.

Can Starch send capital call notices directly to LPs, or does everything go through our review first?

Every outbound communication — capital call notices, distribution letters, quarterly updates — goes through your review queue before it leaves Starch. Starch drafts; you approve and send. Your Gmail connection handles delivery on your behalf once you've signed off. Nothing goes to an LP without a human in the loop.