Ask most PE professionals how they view their portfolio, and they will describe two separate pictures. One is the equity story: NAV, IRR, MOIC, valuations, and value creation progress tracked in a platform like iLEVEL, Chronograph, 73 Strings, Allvue, or eFront. The other is the debt picture: facilities, maturities, covenants, hedging positions, and amortization schedules managed somewhere in a spreadsheet, or not really managed at all at the fund level.
These two pictures belong together. A portfolio company’s equity value does not exist independently of its capital structure. The debt on the balance sheet directly shapes the equity return, the cash available for investment, and the risk the fund is carrying at any given moment. Yet most PE firms track them in completely separate systems with no connection between the two.
That disconnect is a real operational problem, and it becomes more expensive the longer it persists.
The separation is not accidental. It reflects how the tools evolved.
Equity portfolio management platforms were built for the equity side of the house: valuations, fund performance, LP reporting, and IRR calculations. They do this well. Platforms like iLEVEL, Chronograph, 73 Strings, Allvue, and eFront became standard infrastructure for PE firms because they solved real reporting problems.
Debt was handled differently, and the legacy of how it was historically managed still shapes the industry today. Funds with dedicated capital markets teams were few and far between until about a decade ago. For most of private equity’s history, debt information was spread across deal teams and portfolio company CFOs, with no single owner at the fund level. That fragmentation is a big part of why centralized debt data remains so unstructured at many firms today.
At the portfolio company level, the CFO or finance team managed the facilities. At the fund level, where capital markets responsibilities did sit with a specific person, it was usually a VP or Principal with a broader remit who tracked debt in a model they built themselves. That model lived in Excel, got updated when they remembered to update it, and was rarely connected to the equity reporting system in any meaningful way.
The result is that most PE firms operate with a fundamental gap in their portfolio view. They can tell you the equity value of every portfolio company. They struggle to tell you, without some effort, the total debt outstanding across the portfolio, which facilities are approaching maturity, and which companies are operating close to a covenant threshold. Many also cannot easily report the average interest rate they pay across the portfolio, or identify where there is room to bring that rate down through repricing. That last point is not just a debt question. It directly affects free cash flow and, by extension, equity valuations.
As Planr’s 2025 research on PE portfolio monitoring put it, private equity has a visibility problem. Not a lack of data, there’s plenty of that, but the data arrives too late to act on. By the time most firms see what’s happening across their portfolio, the window to do something about it has already closed.
Behind that timing problem sits a structural one. The data isn’t just slow, it’s fragmented. Debt sits in one system, equity in another, and portfolio company performance in a third. None of them talk to each other, which is why deal teams, portfolio operations, and finance often end up working from different versions of the truth.
The gap between equity and debt visibility has always existed. It matters more today because the market conditions that allowed firms to manage it informally have changed.
Median portfolio company holding periods have reached 6.0 years, the longest on record, according to Private Equity Info’s February 2026 biannual study, compared to a historical norm of three to five years. That means debt facilities are being held across longer cycles, refinancing is happening mid-hold rather than at exit, and the debt management function has grown in scope and complexity.
Add-on transactions accounted for 75.9% of all buyout activity in Q2 2025, according to Cherry Bekaert, up from the five-year average of 72.5%. Each add-on changes the capital structure of the platform company. New debt comes in, existing facilities may be amended, and the blended leverage position shifts. A fund team that cannot see this clearly across the portfolio cannot assess its aggregate risk accurately
Limited partners want more transparency into how their capital is performing, and they want it faster. According to Grant Thornton UK’s Private Equity Pulse 2026 survey, 72% of UK respondents plan to offer increased transparency and reporting in the next twelve months in response to LP demands.
A fund team that cannot quickly and accurately describe the debt position of every portfolio company is at a disadvantage in those conversations.
None of these pressures are temporary. They represent a structural shift in how PE portfolios need to be managed, and the tools used to manage them need to keep up.
A unified view does not mean a single screen that shows everything at once. It means that the data sets for debt and equity are structured, current, and connected, so that the people making decisions about a portfolio company can see both layers simultaneously without having to pull information from two separate systems.
In practice, this requires four things to be true.
Every portfolio company’s capital structure should be captured and kept up to date. This means the equity layer, including invested capital, ownership percentage, and any co-investor or management equity, alongside the debt layer, covering every facility, its outstanding balance, its maturity date, its interest terms, and any amendments since the original close.
This sounds basic. In practice, fund-level models can lag a quarter or two behind on amendments and facility changes, simply because the person responsible for updating them is juggling several other priorities
Debt does not exist in isolation from operational performance, but the connection is rarely as clean as a single ratio suggests. Leverage ratio covenants are calculated against covenant EBITDA, which is earnings adjusted for permitted add-backs such as one-time costs, run-rate synergies, or pro-forma adjustments. Those add-backs can materially distort the picture relative to underlying operating EBITDA, and without visibility into both numbers, covenant headroom is easy to misread.
A unified view connects debt obligations to financial performance data. It shows covenant headroom alongside the EBITDA build that produced it, including the add-backs and adjustments. It gives the fund team the contextual view they need to assess risk, not just a clean leverage number that may not reflect operating reality.
Most PE-backed companies use interest rate hedges to manage the floating rate exposure on their term loans. Those hedging instruments have their own maturity dates, termination costs, and risk profiles. When a company refinances, and the hedge does not move with it, or when a hedge expires before the underlying debt matures, the mismatch creates exposure that needs to be managed.
A fund team that tracks debt in one place and hedges in another, or does not track hedges at the fund level at all, is missing a meaningful component of each company’s financial risk profile.
A unified view that lives in someone’s personal model is not really a unified view. It is a single-person dependency. The fund team should be able to access current capital structure data for any portfolio company, with debt and equity visible together, without needing to ask for a model to be updated or a spreadsheet to be emailed.
This is where the tool question becomes unavoidable.
The reason most firms do not have a unified view is not a lack of capability. It is tooling. The equity side has mature, purpose-built platforms. The debt side does not, or did not until recently.
iLEVEL and Chronograph are excellent equity portfolio management tools. They were not built to track debt facilities, monitor covenant compliance, manage amortization schedules, or surface hedging positions. Trying to use them for the debt side produces workarounds: custom fields that do not quite fit, manual data imports, and reports that require reconciliation.
The answer is not to replace equity tools. It is to add a debt-side layer that connects to them. The equity platform keeps doing what it does well. A debt-specific platform captures the credit agreement data, the amortization schedule, the covenant thresholds, the hedging positions, and the quarterly financial performance, and makes all of that visible to the fund team in a structured way.
Termgrid’s Portfolio Management module is built for exactly this use case. It sits on the debt side of portfolio management, covering capital structure visualization, amortization tracking, covenant monitoring, hedging positions, and a financials tracker that connects operational performance to credit agreement compliance. It is used by firms managing a combined $4.8 trillion in AUM, sitting alongside their equity tools rather than competing with them.
If your firm is starting from the current baseline, where equity lives in one system and debt lives in spreadsheets, here is a structured way to close the gap.
Here are six steps to follow:
Map every debt facility across every portfolio company. For each facility, capture the lender, facility type, outstanding balance, interest terms, maturity date, amortization schedule, and the current covenant package. Identify where this data currently lives and how out of date it is.
Define a standard format for capturing the capital structure of each portfolio company: equity layers, debt tranches, hedging instruments, and any shareholder loans or mezzanine instruments. Consistency matters here. The reason fund-level debt views break down is that every portfolio company model uses a different format.
For each portfolio company, map the financial covenants in its credit agreement to the financial metrics you track quarterly. Set headroom thresholds so that when a company’s performance moves toward a covenant limit, it surfaces automatically rather than being identified in a quarterly review.
Capture each hedging instrument, its type, notional amount, expiry date, and the debt facility it is protecting. Flag any mismatches between hedge and debt maturities as items to manage proactively.
Move this data off individual spreadsheets and into a shared platform. The right people at the fund level should be able to see the full capital structure view of any portfolio company, with current data, without having to ask for it.
When a portfolio company refinances, or when a new add-on acquisition brings in additional debt, the fund-level view should update as part of the deal workflow, rather than catching up later when someone gets to the model. This is where a platform that connects deal execution to portfolio management pays off.
Getting to a unified view of debt and equity is not an end in itself. It is a prerequisite for better decisions.
A PE portfolio is a collection of capital structures, not a collection of equity stakes. The debt layer is not a separate problem to be managed by a different person in a different system. It is part of the same picture, and decisions made without visibility into both layers are made with incomplete information.
The firms that are building a unified view of debt and equity are not doing it because it is technically interesting. They are doing it because longer holding periods, more frequent refinancings, closer lender scrutiny, and more demanding LP reporting have made the old approach too costly to maintain.
The tools to do this well now exist. The question is whether your current setup is giving you the picture you actually need.
If you are reviewing how debt fits into your portfolio management infrastructure, see how Termgrid’s Portfolio Management module handles the debt side, or request a demo to walk through it in the context of your own portfolio.
Because the tools evolved separately. Equity portfolio platforms like iLevel and Chronograph were built for valuations, IRR, and LP reporting. Debt was managed at the portfolio company level and tracked in fund-level spreadsheets. The two systems were never designed to connect, so most firms still run them independently.
It includes each portfolio company’s full capital structure: equity layers, every debt facility with its outstanding balance, amortization schedule and maturity date, covenant thresholds alongside current financial performance, and hedging instruments with their own maturity dates. All of this should be current, structured, and accessible without manual effort.
Directly and materially. Debt service obligations reduce the cash available for distributions and reinvestment. Covenant breaches can restrict operational freedom. Refinancing costs and timing affect exit proceeds. A company that looks attractive on an equity basis can look very different once the debt obligations, covenant headroom, and hedging costs are factored in.
You can, but platforms like iLevel and Chronograph were not designed for debt-specific workflows. They lack native support for credit agreement covenants, amortization scheduling, lender relationship management, and hedging instrument tracking. Most firms end up with workarounds and manual reconciliation rather than a clean, integrated view.
Start with an audit. Map every debt facility across every portfolio company and capture the key terms: outstanding balance, maturity date, amortization schedule, interest terms, and covenant package. Identify where that data currently lives and how current it is. That audit will tell you exactly where the gaps are and what it would take to close them.
Termgrid
