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You won't get clean portfolio company actuals in 90 days by standardizing every portco's chart of accounts first. There isn't time. Map each company's existing general ledger to one holdco reporting structure, leave their ERPs alone, and spend the 90 days making that mapping trustworthy.
The sequence that works: weeks 1 to 2, get read access and a trial balance export from every entity. Weeks 3 to 4, build the mapping layer. Weeks 5 to 8, run the first consolidated month in parallel with whatever the deal team or associates do in Excel today. Weeks 9 to 12, cut over and add the operating metrics.
Bottom line: Roll up portfolio company actuals by mapping, not migrating. Keep each portco on its own ERP, map every GL to one sponsor-level structure, prove the mapping against the old spreadsheet for at least one close, then switch. ERP consolidation can come later, on its own timeline, once the reporting is already reliable.
What does day-one reporting actually have to produce?
Less than most 100-day plans assume. In the first quarter after close, the sponsor needs four things from each portfolio company, on a monthly cadence:
- A P&L in the sponsor's format, mapped from the portco's own accounts.
- Cash and liquidity: closing cash, debt drawn, and a short-term cash view.
- The covenant pack: whatever the credit agreement defines, calculated the way the credit agreement defines it.
- Three to five operating KPIs agreed with the deal team, such as bookings, gross margin by line, headcount or utilization.
Everything else (full balance sheet reconciliations, a three-statement forecast, a board deck) matters, but it can follow once the actuals are trusted. For what a mature monthly pack and flash report contain, see our guide to what PE firms require from portfolio companies.
The covenant pack sets the pace. Maintenance covenants in private credit deals are typically tested quarterly and reported through compliance certificates delivered 45 to 60 days after quarter end, according to Sidley. If the deal closed mid-quarter, the first certificate may land inside your 90 days, which is why the mapping has to be right before anything else.
The 90-day roll-up, week by week
Weeks 1 to 2: access and raw data
Get read-only access to every entity's accounting system, or a full trial balance export by month if access takes longer. Pull at least the last 12 months so the first consolidated view has a trend, not a single point. Collect the credit agreement's financial definitions and the sponsor's KPI definitions at the same time. You'll map to both.
Weeks 3 to 4: build the mapping layer
Map every GL account in every entity to one holdco reporting structure: the sponsor's chart, at the level the pack reports. This is the core of the whole exercise. Write down each judgment call (where a portco books freight, how it splits cost of revenue) so the next close reuses it instead of re-arguing it. Make sure finance can edit the mapping without a vendor ticket, because new accounts will appear every month.
Weeks 5 to 8: run in parallel
Produce the first consolidated month from the mapping and compare it line by line with the spreadsheet the associates already build. Every difference is either a mapping error or a spreadsheet error, and you want to find both before anyone relies on the new numbers. Expect the second month to close faster than the first.
Weeks 9 to 12: cut over and add KPIs
Once two months reconcile, retire the manual workbook as the source of record. Then layer on the operating KPIs, which usually come from outside the GL: the CRM, the HRIS, the billing system. Lock each month's actuals as a version when it's reported.
What does a GL mapping look like in practice?
Take three companies in one portfolio and a single line in the sponsor's pack, "Cost of revenue: delivery."
- Portco A (QuickBooks) books it to one account, "Subcontractors." That maps straight across.
- Portco B (Sage Intacct) splits it across "Field labor," "Travel – billable" and "Equipment rental – jobs." All three map to delivery, and plain "Travel" goes to operating expenses instead.
- Portco C (NetSuite) books freight-out to "Shipping expense" in operating expenses, but the sponsor's definition treats freight as cost of revenue. The mapping moves it, and that judgment gets written down once.
None of the three companies changes how it books anything. The sponsor sees one comparable line across all three, gross margin means the same thing in every column, and when Portco B adds a new account next month, it shows up as unmapped instead of silently dropping out of the total.
Why not standardize the chart of accounts first?
Because it turns a 90-day reporting project into a 9-month systems project. Re-mapping a portco's chart of accounts means changing how its accounting team books every transaction, retraining people, and usually restating history to match. Doing that while the sponsor waits for its first pack is how the deal team ends up back in Excel.
ERP consolidation has its own logic and its own budget, and it's a big decision. In a December 2024 study, BCG found that SAP's end of support for its legacy ECC system will affect 726 PE-backed companies, and that just 25% of PE firms have a dedicated team involved in their portfolio companies' ERP transitions. Run that program on its own timeline. A mapping layer means the reporting keeps working while each portco migrates, because only the mapping changes.
The multi-ERP reality
A typical mid-market portfolio doesn't run one accounting system. One company is on QuickBooks, an add-on is on Sage Intacct, the platform company is on NetSuite, and a carve-out arrives with whatever its former parent used. Sometimes a single portco is halfway through moving from one to another.
The roll-up has to tolerate that. In practice it means:
- Connect to each system directly rather than relying on monthly exports. See which FP&A tools connect to Sage Intacct, QuickBooks and NetSuite.
- Map at the entity level, so each entity's accounts roll to the holdco structure independently.
- Treat an ERP migration as a mapping change, not a reporting rebuild. The new system gets its own mapping, and the history stays comparable.
If the portfolio also needs statutory consolidation (intercompany eliminations, FX translation, audit-ready group accounts), that's a different job from management roll-up. Our comparison of multi-entity consolidation software explains where that line falls.
How do you handle restated financials?
Version every month's actuals when you report them, and never overwrite. Newly acquired companies restate more often than anyone expects: an accrual gets trued up, revenue gets reclassified, or diligence adjustments get booked after close. If last month's numbers silently change, the sponsor's trend lines stop matching the pack they already sent to the investment committee.
A workable rule: once a month is reported, lock that version. When a restatement comes through, record it as a new version with a one-line reason and a date, and show the change in the next pack. That gives the deal team a clean audit trail and makes model changes traceable when someone asks why a number moved.
What does portfolio monitoring software cover, and what doesn't it?
Portfolio monitoring software (Chronograph and S&P Global's iLEVEL are the names portfolio companies meet most often) sits at the fund level. It collects data from every portco, tracks valuations, and feeds LP reporting. It's the right home for fund-level performance, and LP reporting standards are getting stricter: the ILPA Reporting Template and new Performance Template should be implemented from Q1 2026, and the 2025 IPEV Valuation Guidelines apply to reporting periods beginning on or after 1 April 2026.
What portfolio monitoring software doesn't do is produce clean, mapped actuals from a portco's general ledger. It consumes them. If the numbers going in are a hand-built workbook, the monitoring platform just stores the workbook's errors faster. The roll-up described above is the layer underneath, and it's usually owned by the portco's finance team or the sponsor's portfolio operations group. Our guide to FP&A software for PE portfolio companies covers the portco-side tools, and how sponsors and portcos work together on faster reporting covers the operating model.
Common mistakes in the first 90 days
Four mistakes come up again and again, and each one is cheap to avoid if you catch it early.
- Starting with the ERP instead of the pack. Teams pick the target system before agreeing on what the sponsor needs to see. Define the day-one pack first and work backwards.
- Mapping only the current month. A mapping built from one month's trial balance misses the seasonal and one-off accounts. Map at least 12 months, or the first quarter-end close will turn up accounts nobody has seen.
- Letting definitions drift. "EBITDA" in the credit agreement, the sponsor's KPI list and the portco's board deck are often three different numbers. Pick one definition per metric in week one and map to it.
- Skipping the parallel run. Cutting over after one month feels efficient until the second month disagrees with the old spreadsheet and nobody knows which is right. Two reconciled months is the minimum.
The 90-day post-close checklist
The checklist below is the whole plan on one screen. Each phase has one deliverable and a clear test for when it's done.
Where Aleph fits
Aleph is the mapping and reporting layer in this plan. It connects to each portco's accounting system (NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct and more than 150 other sources), and its AI mappings roll GL accounts up into one management structure, flagging new accounts for finance to approve. The consolidated actuals land in the Excel and Google Sheets models the deal team already uses, with versions and audit logs. It doesn't replace a statutory consolidation engine or the fund's monitoring platform. Book a demo to see a multi-ERP roll-up on your own entities.
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