VC Fund Performance Reporting: 45-Day Deadlines, ILPA's New Template, and What LPs Actually Get

45 days after quarter-end is ILPA's target window for a VC fund to deliver its quarterly report to LPs — yet only 26% of 2020-vintage funds have made any cash distributions at all, per Carta's latest fund performance data.

That's the short answer. The longer answer is that the quarterly report is the single most important document in the LP-GP relationship, it just got a major standardization overhaul in 2025, and most of what it reports is still unrealized paper value rather than cash back in your account.

How Is Venture Capital Fund Performance Reported to LPs?

Venture capital fund performance is reported to limited partners through a quarterly capital account statement, typically delivered within 45-90 days of quarter-end, covering called capital, distributions, net asset value, and multiples like TVPI and DPI. An audited annual report follows within 90-120 days of year-end, and GPs increasingly follow the ILPA Reporting Template to standardize the format across funds.

Unlike public equities, where performance is priced every second the market is open, a VC fund only marks its book four times a year — and even then, those marks are estimates of illiquid company value, not observed trades. That gap between how often you get a number and how meaningful that number actually is drives most of the friction in LP reporting. Track how these numbers compare across strategies on our VC & PE Performance dashboard.

The 2025 ILPA Overhaul: Three New Templates in 24 Months

The Institutional Limited Partners Association spent 2024 rebuilding its reporting standards under the Quarterly Reporting Standards Initiative (QRSI), and the rollout is landing in three separate pieces between January 2025 and Q1 2027. It's the biggest change to LP reporting mechanics in nearly a decade.

Figures are 2025-2026 disclosures blended from ILPA's Quarterly Reporting Standards Initiative materials, Gen II, ACA Group, and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals filings. Adoption of ILPA templates is voluntary, not regulatory.

The SEC tried to force the issue first. Its August 2023 Private Fund Adviser Rules would have mandated 45-day quarterly statement deadlines for liquid funds and 75 days for illiquid funds like most VC vehicles — a federal backstop to exactly the kind of standardization ILPA is now doing voluntarily. The Fifth Circuit vacated the rule entirely on June 5, 2024, and the SEC didn't appeal by its September 3, 2024 deadline. That left LP pressure, not regulation, as the actual driver of the 2025 ILPA rollout.

What's Actually Inside a Venture Capital Quarterly Report

Strip away the cover letter and portfolio commentary, and every VC quarterly report boils down to four numbers stacked on top of a capital account statement:

• TVPI (Total Value to Paid-In) — (distributions + residual NAV) ÷ paid-in capital. The headline gross multiple.
• DPI (Distributions to Paid-In) — cash actually returned ÷ paid-in capital. The only number that's real money, not a mark.
• RVPI (Residual Value to Paid-In) — remaining NAV ÷ paid-in capital. TVPI minus DPI, by definition.
• IRR — annualized, time-weighted return that penalizes capital sitting uncalled or unrealized for longer.

Under the new ILPA Reporting Template, these sit alongside a QTD/YTD/ITD (quarter-to-date, year-to-date, inception-to-date) breakdown of fees, expenses, carried interest, subscription-line interest, and internal chargebacks — line items that used to vary wildly fund to fund and made cross-fund comparison nearly impossible for LPs managing a multi-manager book. For a deeper walkthrough of each metric, see our guide to reading a VC fund performance report.

Why the Numbers in a Quarterly Report Understate How Little Cash Has Moved

A TVPI of 1.5x looks like real progress until you check the DPI line and realize almost none of it has been distributed. That gap is structural to venture, not a red flag on any single fund — but it means quarterly reports for young vintages are reporting marks, not money.

PitchBook-NVCA's Venture Monitor confirms the same pattern from a different angle: median DPI across the last decade of North American VC vintages sits below 1.0x, and median IRR for vintages since 2019 is stuck in single digits. None of that shows up as a problem in a single quarterly report — it only becomes visible when you stack vintages side by side, which is exactly what our Benchmarking dashboard is built to do.

How LP Reporting Timelines Actually Compare in Practice

ILPA's targets are best-practice recommendations, not law — actual delivery windows vary by fund size, back-office sophistication, and what got negotiated into the side letter.

Material events — a portfolio company getting acquired, a new close, a key-person change — aren't supposed to wait for the next quarterly cycle at all. Most LPAs carry a separate 5-business-day disclosure requirement for anything that materially changes the fund's risk profile, independent of the standard quarterly cadence.

What This Means for Emerging Managers and LPs Evaluating a Fund

For emerging managers, adopting the ILPA Reporting Template early — even ahead of the Q1 2026 requirement — is a cheap signal of institutional discipline to prospective LPs who are used to comparing dozens of funds a year in inconsistent formats. It costs a back-office system upgrade, not a strategy change, and it removes one of the easiest reasons an LP has to pass.

For LPs, the practical takeaway is to stop anchoring on TVPI alone and always ask for the DPI split next to it — a 2021-vintage fund reporting 1.6x TVPI with only 12% of peer funds having distributed anything is not the same claim as a 2019-vintage fund reporting the same multiple with real cash behind it. Check how a fund's reported numbers hold up across vintages on our Funds dashboard.