Abacus: Building Competitive Intelligence With Deal Management

As Abacus’s fund-size and deal flow grew in scale, their reliance on an Excel-based pipeline became increasingly unsustainable due to manual data entry: deals began to slip through the unwieldy system, making it easy to miss bid deadlines and crucial deal updates. The information that did make it into the pipeline was difficult to report on, making it nearly impossible to use prior data for business intelligence and competitive underwriting. Communication became fragmented across emails, different versions of files, and complicated folder structures, making it impossible to have a single-source of truth to fuel investment decisions. 

In sourcing deal flow nationwide, Abacus was sitting on a potential gold-mine of proprietary information in the form of rent comps, sales comps, and operational metrics that could be used for underwriting. However, the fragmented and disjointed nature of their data made it impossible to unearth key property performance metrics on the deals they passed on. When passed deals were logged, analysts had to spend precious time navigating different and conflicting pipeline versions: manually entering, cleaning, and analyzing pertinent deal data.

While working to make previous deals usable, it became challenging to leverage data to fuel investment decisions. Reporting to their Investment Committee became a major task as the team was forced to clean data, sort through fragmented files, and consolidate information into a presentable form, shifting focus away from the broader acquisition process toward time-consuming tasks. It was also challenging to perform bespoke analysis as each individual report had to be manually constructed from scratch. 

Suffered from: 

• Pipeline information fragmented across siloed documents and communications resulting in substantial time spent developing a source of truth
• Manual data entry created friction in assembling a proprietary understanding of market tides causing substantial inefficiency in leveraging passed deal data 
• Complicated process of reporting to the Investment Committee on investment recommendations due to a lack of automated data retrieval and inefficient business intelligence processes 

Abacus sought an easy-to-use platform that centralized data, eliminated manual data entry, and automated report generation. AtlasX’s powerful platform provides the team with the pipeline structuring, AI technology, and reporting capabilities needed to totally overhaul their acquisition processes. 

In order to ensure comprehensive tracking of documents and workflows, Abacus uses AtlasX’s intuitive pipeline structure to log critical deadlines, manage offers, and track key metrics that matter to their team. When managing deals, the team no longer navigates through email chains and outdated spreadsheets to have the most up-to-date information. Abacus can drag and drop underwriting models, compare across model versions, and perform variance analyses with a single click to see the progress on any given deal.  

When building their institutional memory of the market, AtlasX enables Abacus to automate data entry through Artificial Intelligence reading of broker email blasts, input property level research with AtlasX Insights, and autofill data from their Excel models. By using AtlasX’s industry leading AI technology, Abacus is able to supercharge the deals that enter their pipeline. Jim Leporte, Director of Acquisitions, described the impact by saying, “The AI technology can save 10-20 seconds at entering each deal which is a life changer when it comes to inputting 20-30 deals a day”

Finally, in leveraging historical data, Abacus uses reporting and pipeline automation to their advantage, making it easier to build their institutional understanding of the market with proprietary data. AtlasX’s intuitive report builder enabled them to auto-generate reports for pipeline meetings, as well as run comps reports on the markets that they actively track. The report builder allows them to schedule out reports at regular intervals and perform ad hoc analysis with just a few clicks. Jim Leporte, described the impact on their pipeline as transformative, “Now we have hundreds if not thousands of data points that we can see change over time and take to our investment committee.”

In implementing AtlasX, Abacus has saved substantial time throughout their acquisitions process by automating key workflows, eliminating manual data entry, and centralizing their proprietary data. This has translated to 15% more time for their team to underwrite and source deals.

AtlasX’s platform has helped Abacus to better leverage historical data and has built an institutional understanding of the market. Through this understanding, decisions brought to their IC have had greater buy-in and confidence, enabling the team to move faster on better deals.

Automation of deal entry into the platform has caused the process of managing data to shrink in scope. The team is able to collect a greater volume of data and data points with a lower investment of time, transforming what used to take 30 minutes of manual entry and consolidation into a few seconds. Mitchell York, Vice President, describes this transformation by saying, “Several AtlasX features help save us multiple hours per week. Adding deals to the pipeline by simply forwarding an email, populating all deal information and KPIs by dragging and dropping our model, and being able to provide a detailed pipeline report with a single click – these tasks now take minutes.”