Your portfolio companies close their books in two weeks. You get group-level visibility in five.

For private equity firms managing multi-entity portfolios, financial consolidation remains trapped in the 1990s. Finance teams export data from disparate ERPs, manually map thousands of accounts across non-standard charts, reconcile intercompany transactions in Excel, and chase down discrepancies through email threads. The process consumes 6-14 days per month—every month.

This isn't a staffing problem. It's an architecture problem.

Month closes Friday. Consolidation finishes Tuesday. Board meeting the following Monday. You're making capital allocation decisions with data that's 19 days old.

In private equity environments where market windows close in days and operational problems compound hourly, this lag is structurally untenable. You discover covenant risk after breach. You identify margin deterioration after customers churn. You spot working capital issues after cash becomes constrained.

By the time you see the problem, you're already managing the crisis.

You have 15 portfolio companies. Three are exceptional—gross margins above 50%, revenue growth above 30%, cash conversion exceeding 100%. Five are struggling—margins compressing quarter over quarter, customer concentration increasing, working capital consuming cash faster than operations generate it.

The crucial question: Why? And the more valuable question: Can you systematically transfer practices from winners to those lagging?

For most private equity firms, the honest answer is "We don't actually know"—and even when you suspect drivers, you lack systematic methods to validate hypotheses and execute transfers at scale.

Your portfolio company reports Q2 results: EBITDA down 15% versus forecast. Board discussion centers on the revenue shortfall. But the actual driver—staff utilization declining from 82% to 71% over 14 weeks, causing fixed costs to crush margins—never surfaces in the financial statements.

No one was tracking it.

By the time margin compression appears in your P&L, the operational deterioration has been compounding for months. You're managing symptoms, not causes. You're fighting crises, not preventing them.

This is the hidden risk problem in private equity portfolios: consolidated financial statements show outcomes, not drivers. They answer "What happened?" They don't answer "Why?" or "What's trending toward problems?"