$5,800 to build a CRM for six LP positions. Wrong tool entirely?

Dumb question from the bottom of the ladder, what's a deal record versus a contact record? I've been reading about CRMs for two weeks and every article assumes I know.

ember, a contact record is a person or company. A deal record is a specific transaction attached to one or more contacts, with its own stage and amounts, so one sponsor contact can carry four deal records under it.

meridian, there are two jobs in that $5,800 and they have different value. One is document custody and date tracking on closed positions. The other is relationship follow-up on sponsors you might invest with later. A CRM is built for the second job. It is mediocre at the first, because nothing in it forces a PDF into the right place unless you or an integration puts it there, and the integration is where these builds break.

Run the entry cost. Six positions and four sponsors produces maybe 30 to 40 documents a year, a handful of capital events, and one tax package per sponsor. That is a small enough volume that manual entry is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is that nothing tells you when a document is late, and a calendar with recurring reminders does that for zero dollars.

The number that decides this is your three year position count. At 20 positions and 10 sponsors, with two or three intake conversations a month, you are tracking relationships over time and the CRM earns its keep. At six, you are paying for capacity.

Two things to get in writing before you sign anything. Who holds the software account and the billing, and what the monthly cost is after handoff, confirmed with the platform rather than with the consultant. Also ask for an export of every automation and field map at delivery, so a future consultant can read what was built.