Private equity firm automates expense analysis for increased confidence

The customer

The customer is a US-based private equity firm managing over $10 billion in assets across a diverse portfolio of investments. The firm works with 450+external vendors, including consultants, legal advisors, and service providers, supporting activity across 30+ active deals.

With a strategic focus on operational excellence and value creation, the firm places strong emphasis on data-driven decision-making, particularly in areas such as cost management, deal tracking, and financial transparency. To support this focus, the firm sought to modernize its internal processes and replace legacy systems with scalable, auditable automation.

Challenge:

The firm’s CFO lacked confidence in the accuracy and credibility of expense analysis related to its extensive vendor network. Critical reporting was generated through an outdated Microsoft Access database, relying heavily on manual data manipulation and legacy VBA code—much of which had become inaccessible due to forgotten passwords.

A key complication was the need to identify deal associations within free-form text fields. The Access database was able to recognize only a small percentage of these records, leaving staff to manually interpret and assign deals to each expense entry. This approach was time-consuming, inconsistent, and introduced significant risk of error. Without a transparent or auditable process in place, there was limited trust in the data, and growing concern around the firm's ability to support effective, insight-driven decision-making.

Solution:

To replace the legacy database and restore trust in vendor expense analysis, the firm implemented a transparent and automated solution using Solvexia. Designed in close alignment with subject matter experts, the solution applies around 40 business rules and logic steps to categorize and analyze expenses across 450+ vendors and 20+ expense categories.

The platform was configured to automatically extract deal identifiers from free-form text fields, achieving a 5x improvement in deal detection compared to the previous system. A working prototype was developed in just one week, and full automation was delivered within a month—capable of handling over270,000 unique expense combinations. With a consistent and documented process now in place, the firm eliminated reliance on inaccessible code and ad hoc workarounds.