July 23, 2026 · Operations, Deal Flow
When a fund outgrows Notion and spreadsheets
By Emily Buckley, founder of SamCIO
Every fund starts the same way: a spreadsheet for pipeline, a Notion page for notes, maybe a shared drive for decks. It works, because at ten deals a quarter, a spreadsheet is faster to set up than any tool and flexible enough to bend around however the team actually works. The question is not whether Notion and spreadsheets are good enough on day one. They are. The question is what specifically breaks as the fund grows, and when.
The signs, in order of how they usually show up
Deals stop getting logged consistently. At low volume, every deal gets a row because there are only a few. At higher volume, logging becomes a discipline problem: someone forgets, someone logs it three weeks late, someone uses a different column for the same field. The spreadsheet is still accurate for the deals that got entered right. It quietly stops being complete.
Notes live in three places at once. A call note in Notion, a follow-up email in someone's inbox, a voice memo from the car ride after the meeting. None of this is wrong individually, but when it's time to write the memo, someone has to go find all three, and they usually only find two.
Scoring becomes whoever's loudest in the room. Without a consistent framework, deal quality gets assessed by discussion, which means the partner who argues best wins more often than the deal that scores best. A spreadsheet can hold a scoring column, but nothing enforces that everyone fills it in the same way, or that the weights reflect the fund's actual thesis rather than whoever built the sheet.
The data room becomes an archaeology project. By deal 40, "where's the model for that company we looked at eight months ago" takes ten minutes of searching shared drives and old email threads, and that is the good case, where it hasn't been deleted or lost with someone's laptop.
LP reporting turns into a rebuild every quarter. MOIC, IRR, and dilution across a portfolio should be a query. In a spreadsheet-based process, it's usually a rebuild: pulling cap table changes from each portfolio company by hand, re-deriving ownership percentages, and hoping the numbers tie out to last quarter's.
None of these show up on day one. They show up around the point where deal volume outpaces what one person can hold in their head, which for most funds is somewhere in the first eighteen months.
What dedicated deal management actually replaces
The honest answer is: not spreadsheets for modeling. If your fund builds return models in Excel, keep doing that. SamCIO reads the model you upload rather than replacing it, so the modeling work you already trust doesn't need to move.
What it replaces is the layer above the model: the pipeline tracker, the scattered notes, the manual scoring, and the quarterly LP report rebuild. Concretely:
- Deck parsing. Upload a deck, including image-only PDFs and DocSend links, and the content is extracted and structured automatically, instead of someone retyping numbers into a sheet.
- Underwriting in about a minute. A first-pass score and memo draft against your fund's thesis, instead of a scoring column that depends on who filled it in.
- Synced context, not scattered notes. Emails and call transcripts (Gmail, Outlook, Granola, Fireflies, Fathom) attach to the deal automatically, so the memo draws on what was actually said on a call, not whoever remembers to paste in notes afterward.
- Portfolio math on demand. MOIC, XIRR, and dilution per round computed from the record, rather than rebuilt by hand each time an LP asks.
- LP reports from the same source. Because the underlying deal and portfolio data is already structured, the quarterly report pulls from it instead of starting over.
The real cost of staying on spreadsheets too long
The cost isn't that Notion and spreadsheets stop functioning. It's that the fund's institutional memory becomes dependent on specific people remembering specific things, which is fine until someone leaves, a deal resurfaces after a year, or an LP asks a question the team can only answer by reconstructing it from scratch. A dedicated system's real value is that the answer to "why did we pass on that one" or "what did the model say about dilution at Series C" is a lookup, not a memory test.
When to actually make the switch
There is no universal deal-count threshold, but a reasonable signal is when your team spends more time maintaining the tracker than using what's in it, when memo quality starts depending on who has time that week rather than a fixed process, or when an LP question about portfolio performance takes longer to answer than the question deserves. If any of those sound familiar, the switch is usually overdue rather than premature.
A full side-by-side, including where spreadsheets and Notion genuinely hold up and where they don't, is in the SamCIO vs. spreadsheets and Notion comparison.