Guideline documentation
A guideline register that is structured, versioned, traceable to source, and current — without three weeks of manual reading every time a document changes.
The source of truth for what a portfolio may and may not do is spread across an IMA, a prospectus, a fund supplement, a set of side letters, a board resolution and whatever was agreed in an email in 2019. Turning that into a clean, testable guideline set is slow work, and keeping it aligned as documents are amended is slower.
Reading a mandate and deciding what a clause actually requires is interpretation. It stays with a qualified person — yours, or mine working alongside them. That part is not automated and should not be.
What follows is. Once a restriction has been read and interpreted, we match it against a standard restriction library built for your range, and generate the register entry from it: what the restriction is, which document and clause it came from, which portfolios it applies to, how it is monitored, and who confirmed it. Where a restriction sits in the system but appears in no IMA or prospectus — the one-off agreed years ago and never written down — the entry records that too, and who signed it off.
The system assembles. A person decides. Nothing enters the register without a named reviewer, and every entry links back to the clause it came from, so the review is a check rather than a re-read.
When a document is amended, the workflow compares versions, flags what has changed, and routes only the affected entries for review. An annual guideline review stops being a project.
What you get
- A structured guideline register, exportable and version-controlled
- Clause-level traceability from every entry back to its source document
- Change detection across document versions, with a reviewer queue
- A documented mapping between guidelines and how each one is monitored — coded rule, manual check, or accepted as not monitored, with the reason recorded
- Review history: who confirmed what, when, and on which version
- The interpretation record — the agreed reading of ambiguous terms like "liquid", "credit" or "fixed income", held so the next analyst reaches the same answer as the last one
- Rule library de-duplication — the same restriction coded three different ways across three accounts, found and reconciled
Illustrative example, not a client engagement.
A UCITS manager with 40 sub-funds, four IMAs and a set of segregated mandates. In most years, two people lose the better part of January to re-reading documents and confirming the guideline register is still accurate. After the workflow is in place, the same review runs as a queue of 60 flagged changes, each with the old and new clause side by side. It takes four days, and the sign-off record is produced as a by-product.