Carta for management companies

Management companies are the operating backbone of investment firms. But until now, they haven’t been deeply integrated into Carta’s Fund Administration platform, as our focus had primarily been on the funds. This year, we set out to make Management Company administration a first order-product. I’m thrilled about the progress we’ve made so far, and what else we have in store for the wider world of private capital.

Introducing Carta’s purpose-built management company solution

We’ve focused on deeply integrating the management company within the DNA of Carta's end-to-end platform. This meant designing several purpose-built workflows, such as:

• Native expense allocation tools that make it easier for teams to tag and route expenses across multiple entities.

• An integration with Ramp that allows us to easily reconcile a firm’s spend activity to its general ledger on Carta, including built-in multi-entity support for intercompany allocations.

• Bank integrations and intelligent reconciliation rules that close the books faster and with greater accuracy.

• A tightly integrated budgeting and forecasting engine tailored for investment firms, enabling real-time cash planning and variance tracking within the management company context.

• Structured spend analysis enables teams to pinpoint exactly where money is being spent—by vendor, department, and category—so they can budget more effectively and make smarter decisions. 

• Visibility into intercompany flows and connections to fund entities, so finance teams can understand and control how money moves across their entire structure.

We’re giving firms full visibility and control across all their entities. Finance teams can now track, plan, and optimize spend with the precision and speed that investment firms demand.

Why did we decide to focus on the management company?

At Carta, we often hear from fund CFOs that, while fund administration and portfolio management tools have evolved significantly, the management company is still being tracked in spreadsheets or stitched together using generic accounting tools. These tools weren’t built with the nuances of investment firms in mind, leaving finance and operations teams dependent on manual workarounds to accomplish critical tasks like intercompany expense allocations, budgeting, and cash forecasting.

We saw an opportunity—not just to improve the management company experience, but to fundamentally reimagine it within the context of Carta’s ERP evolution.

Why now?

The role of fund finance is changing. Finance leaders are expected to be more strategic, forward-looking, and connected across the entire investment operation. That requires real-time visibility, smart workflows, and a powerful planning engine that connects entities, funds, and teams. By closing the loop between spend, revenue, and fund performance, the management company becomes more than just a cost center. It becomes a data-rich command center.

We spent hundreds of hours with finance and operations teams in venture capital and private equity to understand their day-to-day workflows and pain points. What we learned was how clunky and disconnected their key workflows were:

• Expense allocation was manually tracked and error-prone, with teams working on different spreadsheets and combing through statements to allocate shared expenses across entities.

• Cash and budget planning required separate tools or custom-built models that were difficult to maintain and often out of sync with actuals.

• Intercompany transactions lacked transparency and automation, resulting in unexpected reconciliation challenges at the end of the quarter.

• Management fee flows were often disconnected from the firm’s broader operations, opening the door for inconsistencies when data was duplicated across different systems.

• Spend patterns were difficult to analyze because teams lacked the tools to break down expenses by category and compare actuals to budget.

We’re tackling these issues head-on by building automation and connectivity into our existing suite of products. But there’s more to come.

What’s next?

As we continue evolving Carta’s ERP into a truly connected command center for private capital, the next frontier is Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)—the strategic layer that aligns forecasting, budgeting, and operational insights across the firm. By integrating the modeling flexibility of Fund Forecasting into our ERP foundation, we’re equipping private capital finance leaders with the tools to make smarter, faster decisions using one centralized platform.