As firms start up in the hedge fund and alternatives space, they have a lot of things to think about: selecting a fund administrator and trading system, configuring compliance checks, and establishing a book of record, just to name a few.
Often, they do all this while facing resource constraints – limited tools, no single source of truth, and a modest team and budget.
This dynamic puts a burden on the entire operation.
Faced with these limitations, emerging back-office teams often start out thinking they can cobble together their accounting operations by combining fund administrator exports with spreadsheets for reconciliation.
Over time, these firms find that not only is this patchwork approach overly manual – taking time away from focusing on the things that matter most – it also adds unnecessary risk.
Fortunately, there is a better way. By implementing an accounting system from the start, hedge funds can avoid the hassle and overhead of finding and adding staff to manage Excel sheets and avoid the inherent risk manual processes add.
However, with limited resources, hedge funds need to be selective about the accounting solution they pick. It’s important to find one that supports a solid foundation for their back office and alleviates manual labor without breaking the bank.
In a recent episode of our Tech It Up podcast, Starting Up Right: Accounting Must-Haves, Aani Nerlekar, vice president of solutions management and sales engineering at SS&C, and I joined hosts Jasmin Conner and Trent Berry to discuss the accounting functionality startup and emerging firms should prioritize as they build out their back-office investment operations. In this post, I share some of our insights.
Eclipse provides startup and emerging firms with the back-office essentials and beyond. This front-to-back, cloud-native solution keeps the entire operation in sync on the same data set, is quick to onboard and learn, and has the flexibility and scalability to grow with your hedge fund.
As a true cloud-native solution, the Eclipse development team can develop, test, and deploy new features fast without any manual upgrade processes for your firm, further automating your operations. This allows users to take advantage of new features and functionality almost immediately as their strategy or investment mix changes.
Having worked to shape and execute the product roadmap for Eclipse to meet evolving user and market needs, I’m really excited about what’s next for the platform.
Here are some of the upcoming enhancements I’m most looking forward to:
Dive deeper into accounting “must-haves” in the podcast episode, or learn more about Eclipse’s accounting functionality.