|
Solutions Overview
Scenario
The controllers at the Hedge Fund were responsible for
completing numerous reporting and reconciliation tasks, which were taking more
than 2 hours a day to complete. Performance and trade information was stored in
two central spreadsheets that had grown to over 25 mb each and needed to be
redesigned in order to streamline and simplify the end-of-day reporting
process.
Company Profile
The client is a New York City based hedge fund with
over 400 million in assets under management.
Situation
Over time, the spreadsheets used for storing and
reporting on performance and trade information grew intricate and difficult to
maintain. The large size of the spreadsheets was due in part to data being
copied or reentered into several places in the workbooks because of the lack of
a central information store. The process of copying and pasting this
information everyday became too time consuming and error prone to continue. The
firm was looking for a comprehensive system that would integrate their
performance and trade data, handle the end-of-day reporting tasks, the daily
reconciliation with Hedgeware and Morgan Stanley, and the creation and
e-mailing of performance reports to company executives.
|
|
The Hedge Fund hired Willow Solutions to revise
their current system to streamline trade entry and performance analysis,
improve data control, optimize performance and vastly improve productivity.
- The
software is an Excel based system that was designed to calculate daily
portfolio performance, and generate several daily and periodic performance,
trade, and commission reports.
- The
software combines information from Hedgeware, the Morgan Stanley P&L Link
software and custom designed Excel data entry screens into a centralized Access
database.
- Data
was moved from an Excel-based, worksheet driven storage system to a Microsoft
Access database. Excel was used for data entry and report generation.
The
hedge fund manages their trading activity through two centralized spreadsheets
used for position keeping, calculating portfolio performance and storing trade
history. In addition to performance data, these spreadsheets also contained a
number of cross-reference lists, links to real-time data and portfolio
breakdown reports. As the fund grew, new reports and data lists were added
regularly. Eventually the workbooks became unmanageable, slow and unreliable.
Willow
designed a solution that would streamline and centralize their current Excel-based
system, while adding power and security to the back end with an Access
database. Trades would all be entered into Morgan Stanley’s P&L Link
software and uploaded daily into the database. All reporting and reconciliation
was automated, eliminating the manual process of copying and pasting trade
information into various sheets in the workbook. In addition to recreating
their existing reports, templates were designed to be flexible so that new
reports could be added easily to meet future development needs. The end result:
An automated system that significantly reduced time and increased productivity,
reliability and accuracy.
|
