When ILPA released v2.0 of its Reporting Template in January 2025, it ended the era of “ILPA-like” financial reporting.¹

Funds still in their investment period during Q1 2026, and funds that started operating on or after January 1, 2026, are expected to use it from the Q1 2026 reporting period.²

Three changes stand out:

• No more modifications. Line items can no longer be repurposed, reordered or supplemented.³
• More granularity. Internal chargebacks are broken out, and external partnership expenses align more closely to the general ledger.¹
• Comparability is the goal. All GPs report a single, uniform level of detail.¹

Alongside it, ILPA’s new Performance Template standardizes how IRR and TVPI/MOIC are reported, with gross and net figures shown with and without the effect of subscription facilities.¹

For LPs, it’s a genuine step forward: fund financials can now be compared like for like, without re-mapping each manager’s format. That’s what the operational side still lacks.

The operational side has no standard yet

All of that sits on the financial side: fees, expenses, capital accounts and performance. The operational side, meaning how firms plan, track and govern value creation across the portfolio, has no equivalent.

There is no ILPA template for value-creation plans, KPI rollups, initiative tracking or stage-gate reporting. Every firm reports operational progress its own way, every PortCo defines its KPIs differently, and LPs accept the variance because there is no shared standard to hold it to.

Why that is unlikely to last

LPs who now receive standardized fee and performance reporting are well placed to ask the same of value-creation reporting. Two questions follow directly from v2.0’s logic:

1. Can you prove the number? A traceable record of the source data, the definition applied, the owner and when it last changed.

2. Is it comparable across the portfolio? The same KPI definitions, rollup logic and stage-gate criteria at every PortCo, or differences that are documented and intentional.

Expect these questions to arrive through side letters, LPAC requests and due-diligence questionnaires long before any formal standard does.

An architecture decision, not a reporting task

A tempting shortcut is general-purpose AI pointed at board decks and a data warehouse. It struggles with both questions. A chat transcript isn’t an audit trail, the same prompt can return two different summaries, and a summarizer flattens the definitional differences that make KPIs incomparable.

Firms that want to be ready need the value-creation plan itself in a governed model: typed goals, initiatives and KPIs; deterministic rollups; versioned, attributed changes; and maker/checker review on every update. Built that way, operational reporting can be proven and compared the way the financials now are.

Read the full perspective

Our perspective, Why the Next Era of LP Reporting Calls for Purpose-Built AI, sets out the six places internally-built AI breaks down in portfolio reporting, and what future-proofed operational reporting looks like instead.

Read the full perspective →

References

1. Institutional Limited Partners Association, ILPA Releases Updated Reporting Template and New Performance Template for Industry Adoption, January 22, 2025.

2. Institutional Limited Partners Association, ILPA Reporting Template (v. 2.0) Suggested Guidance, January 2025.

3. Citco, ILPA Reporting and New Performance Template.