Firmex VDR for Private Equity

Firmex virtual data rooms can be use for more than just deals. Learn about the cost and time savings a VDR can bring to your private equity firm.

If you’re employed by a private equity firm, chances are you spend a lot of your time communicating and collaborating with limited partners, auditors and portfolio companies – which entails managing, organizing and exchanging a lot of confidential information and documents.

In this video, we walk through how a Firmex Virtual Data Room (VDR) can help funds and PE firms simplify and streamline their business-critical workflows. If you’ve ever spent way too much time trying to find a specific filing in your inbox, you know that manually gathering and distributing sensitive documents using email leaves much to be desired. A Firmex VDR can save you time every day, while also making your document sharing safer and more secure.

How a VDR Can Help PE

Using a Firmex Virtual Data Room can help PE companies in four key areas:

  1. Buy-side due diligence
  2. Receive monthly reports from portfolio companies
  3. Easily distribute documents to investors and the board via a secure, 24/7 online portal
  4. Sell-side due diligence

Below, we break down how a VDR can deliver new efficiencies and cost-savings throughout the lifecycle of your portfolio or fund.

1. Buy-side due diligence

When you’re considering acquiring companies for your portfolio, Firmex gives you the ability to upload a due diligence checklist by either importing a template of folders or dragging-and-dropping-in a folder structure. Advisors then typically invite the company to upload documents to the folders, using drag-and-drop, or by emailing documents to a staging folder. Your team is notified as soon as documents are uploaded. Document statuses and comments allow you and your team to set up your own workflow for document review.

2. Receive monthly reports from portfolio companies

Once a fund has been created, a VDR helps you centralize and manage your fund documents. Your portfolio companies send in or upload reports. Firmex’s permission model allows a company to only see its own reports, and no one else’s, while allowing members of your team to see the entire portfolio. Your team of advisors is notified as soon as the filings are in, at which point they can bulk download the latest documents.

3. Distribute documents to investors and the board

Once your analysis is complete, distributing documents to investors, LPs, and the board can be done manually, or automatically. Manually distributing documents is as easy as dragging the documents from a central folder to the individual user. Firmex sends a notification as soon as the documents are ready. Alternately, Firmex can automatically distribute documents based on pre-defined rules to the correct LPs. Either method takes the guess work out of document distribution and the headaches of lost or unsent emails. Firmex’s portal can also be embedded into your firm’s website, allowing your LPs and investors to access their documents anytime, anywhere.

4. Sell-side due diligence

When it comes time to sell a portfolio company, Firmex makes it easy to open up diligence to multiple buyer groups, either all at once, or through a staged diligence approach. Document protection options like watermarking and disabling save, keep you in control of the deal. Reports keep you notified of interested parties, and Firmex’s professional services are ready to send copies of the data room to you and the buyer.

Summing Up

By organizing all financial and organizational information about the companies in your portfolio or fund in one secure and central location, you can spend less time managing documents and digging through emails, and more time managing the portfolio companies themselves to ensure the best performance and outcomes.

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