Here are some of the most important preparations you should consider:
Your Team
- Identify and engage key project stakeholders: a cross-functional team is normally very helpful, to include IT, operational system users, project managers and a vendor side consulting resource. This way everyone knows who needs to be involved and what their role is.
Implementation Plan
- Timeline: Operating with clear milestones and deliverables is essential.
- Resources: Understanding and allocating the required resources upfront, including people, budget and technology related, will be very helpful.
- Processes: Be open to review and re-engineer existing processes to take full advantage of the new efficiencies offered by your new technology from Day 1.
Work with your Vendor
- Expertise: Your vendor should be an expert in helping their clients onboard their solution, and our recommendation would be to leverage that expertise wherever possible.
- Consultancy & Support: In line with the contractual arrangements, schedule your user system training and ensure you take full advantage of every benefit your new system has to offer.
Data Migration
- Historical Data: Decide if taking historical data is worthwhile or not, and where possible decide to streamline your data migration projects by focussing on the transition of current data related to the active balance sheet.
- Migration Toolkit: As every fund administrator knows, fund switches are a reality and as such developing the skillset internally to manage data migration is not always simply related to the initial system onboarding. By investing in the team, and allowing the system users to develop the knowledge and skillset internally to manage any data migration exercises, this will help in any future migration projects which will make onboarding new clients easier, more streamlines and more cost effective. In our experience, fund migration projects can vary dramatically from client to client.
Communication
- Change Management: Some people do not like change on principle, and it will be important to manage concerns and prepare the teams for the transition, managing expectations along the way.
- Regular Updates: It is beneficial to keep stakeholders informed on progress, and up to date on any changes made to the project plan.
By carefully evaluating these factors, a fund administrator should be able to work with their vendor and bring their new system online with minimal disruption and maximum benefit.
Introducing PAXUS
PAXUS has supported the investment fund accounting and fund administration industry since 1999 via our core PAXUS fund administration system. PAXUS is a functionally rich, fully-integrated, specialist fund accounting and administration application that has been purpose built for the end-to-end back office administration of funds – including NAV calculations – and our solution fully supports a large range of alternative funds, including both open and closed ended structures; fund of funds, hedge funds, private equity, VC and real estate, and many other collective investment vehicle structures spanning all asset classes.
As a fully-fledged and fully-integrated fund administration system, PAXUS replicates the fund portfolio and trading for NAV accounting purposes and is used by fund administrators, asset managers, family offices and service providers around the world to perform fund accounting, portfolio accounting and investor services / transfer agency functions in addition to the compliance (KYC / AML) capture and monitoring, and oversight functions, including regulatory reporting and shadow accounting. Our solution includes multi-lingual reporting and both FATCA and CRS reporting as standard.
Everything you need for fund administration – and a lot more - is included with PAXUS. A true ‘one-stop-shop’ solution.
Operating a single code base approach means there is only one version of the system that exists, which means all of our clients have access to the same functionality regardless of size. The PAXUS standardised installation package provides clients with a working database with all accounting rules and configurations, enabling a working ‘out of the box’ system which is straightforward to implement and use – and provides users with a full suite of data migration tools to streamline the onboarding and data migration process.
PAXUS is offered as a full SaaS solution with hosting included, or clients can choose to make their own hosting arrangements for an on-premise installation.
Providing dedicated implementation training, we will train your users on how to gain the maximum benefit from the system from Day 1 resulting in a quick and effective implementation plan and support. This is complimented by our online Support Desk allowing nominated users to log queries with our experienced support team for quicker resolution.
One of the main benefits of PAXUS is that it can accommodate any type of fund, and the system is also highly automated meaning you can administer many structures with a lower number of users alongside highly competitive pricing.
