You Have The Data. Now Use It!

In the alternative investment world, time is money, yet too much time is being wasted extracting and processing data. In many cases you already possess the data but consider the task of extracting the data elements you need too onerous or time consuming. There are many reasons for this. Operational costs, already substantial, are compounded by the manual data entry from numerous documents. Adding to the inefficiency, with cutbacks in personnel due to Covid, employee attrition and a myriad of other factors, many teams are already feeling stressed and looking for ways to make staff more efficient. Processing this data requires extraordinary amounts of time and typically assigning the project to over-qualified personnel who quite frankly are not happy to perform the arduous task of manually extracting and then reviewing the required data elements buried within these documents. Not only is this type of process inefficient, but it can lead to critical errors, spreading misery into every department involved.

For many fund managers and administrators, the standard methodology, or at least the only option they believe is available for extracting the detailed investment metrics from the gigabytes of pdfs, images and other information delivered on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis is to manually process each individual document. This outdated method exposes several inefficiencies. First, retrieval of the documents can be complicated by the range of sources, including databases, FTP sites, web services, and email. Once collected, the files need to be normalized, as they can vary in format from Excel, CSV, or PDF. The data must then be manually extracted from these files to be organized in a meaningful way, requiring even greater time and resources. As I mentioned earlier, throughout this whole process, the potential for human error further reduces efficiency, and could even be catastrophic.

Fortunately, data extraction technology has made this manual, outdated method obsolete, with Smonik Systems at the forefront. Smonik has created software to automate these operations. Documents are retrieved from targeted sources and normalized to meet any standard format and can be integrated into downstream systems All these processes are done automatically in a matter of seconds. There is no need to waste hours and resources on tedious tasks. Your professional staff can be used more effectively with the help of Smonik.

Finally, there are a number of data extraction tools available that will extract data from specific documents such as capital calls and investment statements, but what about the other data? Smonik takes a holistic approach to this industry problem. We provide solutions to the collection, extraction, normalization and integration of data… any type of data in any form. Smonik is the most flexible solution and will accommodate just about any financial document required. In this data intensive business, this is a tool that is required, it is no longer optional.