A mid-size certificate buyer spent years running diligence out of shared spreadsheets and a shared drive of screenshots. The numbers worked. The record did not — and it was the record, not the math, that slowed every review and every LP conversation.
The starting point
Going into the season the team tracked candidates in a workbook, captured sources ad hoc, and reassembled context by memory whenever a file was questioned. Hard skips lived in cell comments. Reviewer overrides were invisible.
What changed
They kept their underwriting judgment exactly as it was. What changed was where it lived: each candidate carried its source URLs, freshness dates, the rules that fired, and an explicit reviewer decision. Skips became events with reasons attached, not silent edits.
The visible win was diligence review time. The durable win was that every acquired certificate arrived at servicing with its file already intact — no scavenger hunt, no reconstruction.