Author: Josh

This is the third blog post in a four-part series on how Private Equity firms can better use data and technology to their competitive advantage.

Whether it’s SEC auditors or investors requesting information, time is of the essence when it comes to the reporting done by Private Equity firms. In today’s digital environment, being able to quickly access relevant information is crucial to providing the appropriate response—and closing a deal—before the competition.

In our previous posts, we covered streamlining your data and choosing an analytics solution, plus the importance of a data management strategy for private equity firms. Here, we’ll explain how firms like yours can gain greater business intelligence and insight into corporate performance by combining two powerful technologies: data warehousing and ETL.

What is Data Warehousing?

Put simply, a data warehouse database is a central repository for storing a large amount of historical data. Unlike typical databases, however, a data warehouse is designed to give you a long-range view of data over time.

Even better, a data warehouse stores the data in a series of snapshots where each record represents data at a specific time. You can also search, gather, and present data from multiple sources in an aggregated report-based summary format for more efficient reporting and analysis. With data driving more and more business decisions, information like this is valuable currency for firms overseeing portfolios and originating deals.

What is ETL?

Often used to build data warehouses, ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. ETL is a type of data integration used to blend data from multiple sources. The process is simple. Data is extracted from a source system, transformed into a format that can be analyzed, and loaded into a data warehouse for storage.

Because the data is extracted and set into usable formats, the risk of human error from inputting data manually is greatly reduced. Business users can also access the data for analysis through simple queries, visualization, charting, tables, and other forms. The result? Analysts find the relevant information they need faster and can put the time they save towards tasks like preparing the initial operational assumptions for investment or building a forecast for the potential of the business.

A Solution Designed for Private Equity

Data warehousing and ETL work together to store all of your data in a central place. This kind of technology also eliminates version control issues, freeing the team to focus on the analysis instead of worrying about the precision of data and reporting.

Analytics Solutions like Altvia Answers use this efficient combination to empower business users to get the information they need themselves, so they don’t have to rely on clunky programs or waiting to get data from other teams.

An end-to-end business intelligence solution, Altvia Answers connects to, transforms, normalizes, and displays all of your data across systems. It’s a holistic solution that brings all of your data together into a single source of truth, removes error-prone processes, and answers your questions.

Has this ever happened to you? You forget your Salesforce password so you go to the login screen, click “Forgot your password?” and wait for the automated email from Salesforce asking you to reset your password. But the email never comes and you’re left unable to log in.

We noticed recently that a growing number of our clients were calling our support desk with this very issue. We dug a bit deeper and found that this is actually a common problem.

There are a couple of things you can do to ensure that you’re getting all of Salesforce’s updates, news, and that handy password reset email.

It’s Not You, Its Salesforce

If you’re not getting these automated emails from Salesforce, it could be that Salesforce is sending from a blocked IP address. This is not an unusual occurrence but it is one that can be easily identified.

If you have administrator credentials, you can follow these steps to verify that you are receiving email from every Salesforce IP address:

1. From Setup, click Email Administration -> Test Deliverability.
2. Enter your email address.
3. Click Send. Salesforce simultaneously sends a test message from all IP addresses to your business email address. Each test message specifies the IP address from which it was sent.
4. Check your email (a heads up: this is going to send you 50+ separate emails).
5. Finally, you can request an email log by clicking Setup -> Email Log Files (usually takes 5 minutes). Review the log to see what emails were sent and if they were received. Emails with a Status of D means Delivered (it left SF email servers) and R means Received (it was received by the user’s email server).
6. If you don’t receive all of the test messages, your organization’s email administrator should go to this page and whitelist all of Salesforce’s IP addresses.

If you don’t have admin credentials, you can contact Altvia Support and we’ll run the test for you.

Aggressive Spam Filtering

And of course, the issue could be yours. This is to say your organization or your email provider has set up rules that are likely filtering out unwanted email but also occasionally filtering out useful emails from Salesforce.

The process for getting Salesforce emails through your spam filter is a bit trickier and varies from one organization to another so we recommend you go through the steps listed above first.

But if you’ve gone through those steps and the emails are still not coming through, our account management team is happy to help you dig into your filtering process and find where these emails are getting caught up.

If you’d like to review more about our fund management software products, please contact Altvia.