Cascade Suite™: Automate your distribution waterfall calculations

Transparent and automated distribution waterfall processing

Increased transparency and controls for investors and regulators. Automated complex allocations and calculations. Reduced operational expenses. These are just a few of the benefits offered by Cascade Suite.

This powerful and flexible proprietary private equity software provides a scalable and efficient solution for your alternative investment infrastructure. Built by a financial technology team of professionals with deep alternative investment and software development experience, Cascade Suite can help you:

• Automate deal-by-deal waterfall calculation processing
• Perform scenario forecasting to evaluate the impact of hypothetical investment outcomes
• Generate the accounting entries required for your financial statements
  

Complete distribution waterfall and fee calculation solution

• Supports private equity, real estate, venture capital, hedge funds, mutual funds, and managed accounts.
• Cash, hypothetical liquidation, tax, and future scenario waterfalls.
• Internal rates of return (IRR), time-weighted returns (TWR), and performance multiple calculations.
• Capital account and net asset value (NAV) maintenance.
• Capital call and distribution notice generation.
• Distribution waterfalls can be configured at the fund, investor, investor/investment, and/or investor/tax lot level.
• Management fee, performance fee, and expense calculation and allocations.
• Single/tiered hurdle rates or preferred return calculations.
• High water mark and hurdle tracking for hurdle based funds.
• Loss and loss carry-forward allocations.
• Side pocket allocations.
• Share and unitization tracking.
• Leveraged and unleveraged results.
• General partner (GP) carried interest, vesting, clawback, and incentive plan calculations and allocations.

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Maximum flexibility

• A powerful and tested platform that supports hundreds of structures daily including master/feeder, mini-master, onshore/offshore, co-invest, and others.
• All fund and partner information is stored on a time-series basis allowing for changes to partner and fund structures while keeping prior values and results intact.
• A customizable data architecture that is easily adjusted to accommodate the unique needs of different programs, funds, users, and transactions.
• Intuitive, flowchart-based, deal-by-deal waterfall definition tool empowers nontechnical business users to own, design, and maintain inputs and calculations.
• Fund forecasting projects future fund and investor performance based on hypothetical investment sales, rate curves, and other user inputs.

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Increase scalability and operational efficiency

• Questionnaire based fund onboarding that allows for scale, streamlines the onboarding process, and adds control and standardization.
• Battle-tested architecture allows assets under management/administration to grow without an incremental increase in resource requirements. 
• With Cascade Suite’s copy functionality, creating a new fund is as easy as dragging and dropping an existing fund structure and tweaking based on differences.
• The system’s business logic library allows calculations to be accessed across the entire fund platform. 
• Workflow automation allows processing to run unattended and automatically.  

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Mitigate risk

• Cascade Suite automates the data exchange between downstream and upstream systems, such as accounting systems, data warehouses, and investor portals. Standard and customized data validations are performed on both inbound and outbound interfaces. 
• A “four-eyes” approval process is designed so that changes to any business rule or report are reviewed and approved.
• Robust audit controls permanently log the results of all calculations, configuration changes, true-ups, and user-access updates with both user and time-stamp information. 
• Role-based security allows customized application access rights for users across the organization.

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Enhance business intelligence

• Through a combination of a single data repository and robust reporting tools, Cascade Suite provides a wealth of reporting and data analytics.
• A simplified shadow for GPs using an administrator-grade platform that recalculates results and automatically performs the reconciliations to their administrator and identifies known root causes of breaks.
• Our flexible reporting tools accommodate various business intelligence needs—from in-depth analysis of a single fund to benchmarking an investment to top-level surveillance of the entire platform. 
• Templates for industry standards including ILPA, INREV, and NCREIF.
• A proprietary query tool provides powerful slice-and-dice, analytic, and export capabilities for responding to ad-hoc requests.
• Audit functionality provides a transparent method of tracking and reporting distribution waterfall calculations at all levels.

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Advanced technology platform

• Robust and configurable rules based security features, including native support for various user authentication schemes.
• Workflow automation using an in-built scheduler.
• A single relational database using SQL Server or Oracle.
• Support for load-balanced and failover-standby server configurations for quick disaster recovery.
• Integrated, configurable archiving of historic data to support large data volumes.

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