How Can a Private Credit Fund Cut Quarterly Portfolio Review Prep From Weeks to Days?

1. The Short Answer

A private credit fund cuts quarterly portfolio review prep from weeks to days by giving AI the first pass of the work that fills those weeks: gathering, keying and formatting. An AI assistant reads each borrower package, fills your one-page review from your own template and lists what changed since last quarter.

Your people still set the marks and the risk ratings.

At a firm of 10 to 40 people, this runs on Claude or ChatGPT on a business plan (the version each vendor sells to companies), beside the Excel workbook you already use. An analyst checks every figure against the page it came from.

Your committee then sees borrower performance and covenant compliance as of the day each package arrived.

2. Where the Weeks Go

A CFO who says review prep takes two to three weeks every quarter is describing a chain of jobs: waiting for borrower packages, keying their figures into the spread, testing the covenants, writing a page per borrower and assembling the pack for the committee.

No regulator, trade body or survey publishes how long those jobs take, so the evidence is lenders' own accounts.

"Our team spent most of each quarter collecting financials, entering data in Excel, and putting together portfolio reviews," Andrew Cosentino of LAGO Innovation Fund says in a customer story published by Lumonic, which sells monitoring software.

Waiting is part of it. In two credit agreements on file with the SEC (Comscore's and one other borrower's), quarterly statements were due within 45 days of quarter end. Each agreement sets its own dates. Every day a package then sits unread comes out of the review.

3. The Four Steps AI Can Draft

Whether you call it a credit committee pack or a valuation committee packet, the prep runs in four steps. AI drafts each one, and a person checks it before the next starts, because each step builds on the last.

These steps suit AI because each starts from a document and can be checked against it. PwC's Global Private Credit Survey 2026 puts it this way: "If a task is document grounded and verifiable, AI is usually ready now."

The only published accounts of weeks becoming days are two customer stories from Lumonic about its own software: LAGO's, quoted above, and Avante Capital Partners', whose quarterly review went from a couple of weeks to two to three days. No independent figure exists, for monitoring software or for Claude and ChatGPT.

Plan for one limit: a general assistant such as Claude keeps no history of your covenant tests. Hand it last quarter's review page with each new package, and keep the workbook as your record until the firm is ready to move off spreadsheets.

4. What People Still Decide

Two lines on every review page belong to people: the risk rating, which follows your firm's own scale, and the mark.

The mark is an estimate that someone at your firm defends to the auditors and your LPs. SEC staff wrote on Sept. 28, 2026 that private credit assets "do not trade on established secondary markets and therefore generally lack readily available quoted prices."

What the rules ask for:

• ASC 820, the accounting standard, says how to measure fair value. It sets no valuation frequency. The quarterly rhythm comes from your reporting: SEC reports for a BDC, the fund's own terms for a private fund.
• SEC Rule 2a-5 covers BDCs and registered funds, and a private fund that is not registered sits outside it. Under the rule, the board determines fair value in good faith, or names a valuation designee who reports to it in writing at least quarterly.
• SEC staff, in the Sept. 28 statement (a staff view, with no standing as a Commission rule): "It is important to remember that a lack of timely information does not relieve management of its responsibility to estimate fair value."

Each of these places the decision with named people: management, a board, a designee. AI's work ends at the draft they read.

Timing changes the mark itself. Houlihan Lokey, a valuation adviser, describes two managers holding the same loan: "One received audited financials two weeks before quarter-end; the other is still working from a trailing management estimate." A package read the day it arrives gives your valuation people better information, as well as more days.

5. A Plan for Your Next Quarter End

Test the four steps on five borrowers before you trust them with the book. One quarter is enough.

1. Four weeks before quarter end: set up. Buy business seats, never personal accounts: Claude Team and ChatGPT Business each cost $20 a seat a month billed annually, or $4,800 a year for 20 people. Write one page on which borrower files may go into AI.
2. Three weeks before: rerun last quarter. Upload five borrowers' packages and your review template, and ask for a page on each. Compare them with your team's pages, and fix the instructions until every figure ties.
3. As packages arrive: same-day intake. Run those five through steps 1 and 2 the day each one lands.
4. Review week: time both routes. Draft, check and assemble the five pages, and write down the hours beside five borrowers done by hand.
5. After the committee meets: decide whether the whole book goes through the four steps next quarter.

Keep the analyst's check in every step: a wrong figure on a review page travels into the rating, the mark and the report your LPs read.

6. Where to Start

1. Write down last quarter's dates: when each package arrived and when the pack went to the committee.
2. Settle on one review template if analysts use different layouts.
3. Name one owner, such as your head of portfolio management or controller.
4. Choose five borrowers and pull last quarter's packages and review pages.

Getting packages in on time is the subject of How Do You Stop Chasing Borrowers for Financial Statements?