Your outgoing fund administrator owes you the fund's books and records. It generally does not owe you its internal working papers, its spreadsheet models, its reconciliation templates, or its time answering questions after the engagement ends. That line is the single most useful thing to understand before you give notice, because almost every stalled administrator change is a GP asking for something on the wrong side of it and reading the refusal as obstruction.

The good news is that the side you are entitled to is the side that matters. Your books are portable. The working papers are not the fund.

The records are the fund's. The working papers usually are not.

A fund administrator produces two categories of output.

The first is the fund's own accounting record: the general ledger, the trial balance, the capital account by limited partner, the schedule of capital calls and distributions, the investment register with cost basis and carrying value, and the statements that were issued to LPs. This exists on behalf of the fund. It is the fund's property in substantially the same way the fund's bank statements are.

The second is how the administrator got there: internal checklists, review notes, pricing memos, the workbook where somebody allocated a management fee across eleven LPs with three different fee arrangements. This is the provider's work product. Most fund administration agreements say so explicitly, and the ones that are silent are usually read that way.

GPs get into trouble when they assume a handover means receiving the second category. It almost never does. What you receive is a complete record and enough support to reconcile it, not a copy of somebody else's operating system.

What to ask for, in writing, on day one

Give notice in writing and attach the request list to the notice. Do not do this in two steps, and do not do it by phone. A written list creates a shared definition of "complete" that both sides can point at later.

Ask for:

The general ledger for every period the provider administered, in a format that exports, not a locked PDF.
The closing trial balance as of the cutover date.
Capital account history by LP, showing contributions, distributions, allocated income and expense, and closing balance for each period.
The full capital call and distribution schedule, including notice dates, due dates, and amounts actually received.
The investment register: entry date, instrument, cost, subsequent rounds, current carrying value and the basis for it.
Copies of the LP statements and quarterly reports as issued, so the incoming administrator can reproduce numbers your LPs have already seen. This is the part people underestimate, and it matters more than it sounds. Our note on LP reporting standards covers what those documents should already contain.
Supporting documentation for the current and prior fiscal year: bank statements, wire confirmations, executed subscription documents, side letters, and the valuation support behind any mark that is not cost.

Then add one line that does more work than the rest of the list combined: a named contact who will answer reconciliation questions for a defined window after the final file transfer, and what that costs.

What you will probably not get

Set expectations here so you are not surprised into thinking something has gone wrong.

You will probably not get the provider's internal workbooks or templates. You will probably not get open-ended support after the transition window closes. You may not get anything at all until outstanding fees are settled, and that is normal and usually contractual, so check the balance before you give notice rather than after.

You will also not get the outgoing provider's help interpreting its own judgment calls in any depth. If a prior-year expense was classified in a way your new administrator would classify differently, the answer to "why" may simply not be available. This is survivable. It is handled by documenting the treatment going forward, not by relitigating a closed period.

The two items people forget until it is too late

The first is prior-year audit support. If the fund has been audited, the audit workpapers sit with the auditor, but the schedules the administrator prepared for that audit sit with the administrator. Ask for them by name. Reconstructing them later, from a provider you no longer pay, is the single most annoying task in a badly run handover.

The second is the tax package. Abax does not prepare tax filings, and neither do most administrators. Your CPA prepares the fund's return and the partner K-1s. What the administrator produced was the underlying allocation schedule the CPA worked from. Ask for those schedules for every year in the record, and tell your CPA a change is happening before filing season rather than during it. A provider change is not a tax event, but it becomes one if the CPA discovers it in March.

Where the agreement actually decides this

None of the above is a universal rule. Your administration agreement decides it, and administration agreements vary more than GPs expect.

Read three clauses before you do anything else. The termination clause, for notice period and whether there is a minimum term still running. The records and data clause, for who owns what and what format the handover comes in. The fees clause, for whether a transition or offboarding fee applies and what triggers it.

If you are evaluating a new provider while you read those, ask the same three questions of them. What am I entitled to take with me, in what format, and what does leaving cost. A provider that answers plainly is telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go. Our breakdown of fund administration costs covers what should and should not appear on that side of the ledger.

The sequence, briefly

The order of a migration matters more than its speed. Notice and file request first. Reconciliation of the closing trial balance to the bank and to the capital accounts before anything is loaded into a new system. One parallel reporting cycle where both records exist. Cutover at a period end, never mid-quarter. LP communication last, after the numbers tie.

The step that gets skipped is the reconciliation, and it is the only one that is genuinely load bearing. Everything else is logistics. Our full guide to migrating a fund administrator walks the whole sequence.

The cost of not doing it

Here is the part worth sitting with. The reason most GPs do not move is not that they have priced the risk of moving and found it too high. It is that the risk of moving is vivid and the cost of staying is invisible.

The cost of staying shows up as hours you spend chasing a statement that should have arrived, as a capital call that goes out later than you wanted, as a quarterly report you rewrite yourself before sending it to LPs. None of that appears on an invoice. All of it appears in your week.

A fund with a clean record and a cooperative provider can change administrators without any LP noticing anything other than a different name on the statement footer. A fund with a messy record has a problem that is not caused by moving and does not get better by waiting. In both cases the honest question is not whether switching is risky. It is what another year of this actually costs you.

If you would rather talk it through against your actual agreement and your actual close calendar, book a 20-minute call. Flat $5,000 per fund per year, no AUM percentage, and a straight answer on whether now is the right time to move or whether it is not.

What Your Outgoing Fund Administrator Owes You