Conclusion first
Accounting requires at least quarterly fair-value marks. It does not cap how often you mark. The quarterly cadence most private credit funds still run is a constraint of process — manual spreadsheets, batch advisory cycles — not of the standard. As books grow and scrutiny rises, the floor and the practice are diverging: the floor stays quarterly; best practice is moving to monthly and on-demand. The gate is not the accounting. It is whether the valuation method can be re-run cheaply and consistently.
What should drive the cadence
- Reporting obligations. The floor — typically quarterly for fund NAV and audit.
- Materiality of change. A covenant breach, a downgrade, a refinancing, or a sharp move in credit spreads can make a 60-day-old mark misleading well before the next quarter-end.
- Investor and risk expectations. LPs, IPV and model-risk functions increasingly expect marks that reflect current conditions, not last quarter’s.
- Operational cost of a mark. If each revaluation costs analyst-weeks, frequency is rationed. If it costs a re-run, frequency is a setting.
Why the market is moving off quarterly batch
The direction of travel across private credit is away from quarterly spreadsheet marks toward monthly NAVs, automated input ingestion, benchmark-driven marks, and audit-grade change tracking. The driver is transparency: stale, manually produced marks are the soft spot regulators and investors probe. The constraint that kept cadence quarterly — manual effort — is the thing software removes.
What on-demand actually requires
| Requirement | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Reproducible method | A fresh mark must be consistent with the last — same inputs, same value — or frequency just adds noise |
| Current market inputs | Rates and credit-spread benchmarks have to be available and dated for an on-demand reprice to mean anything |
| Delivery without rebuild | If a mark needs an analyst to rebuild a spreadsheet, it is not on-demand at any useful frequency |
| Change tracking | More frequent marks only help if each change is attributable — market move vs credit move vs assumption change |
How Verus supports any cadence
Verus reprices from recorded inputs, so a mark can be produced on any measurement date at the cost of a re-run rather than an engagement. Each deal carries an explicit revaluation policy, and a fleet-wide view surfaces overdue marks against it. Because the engine is deterministic, a monthly or on-demand mark is consistent with the last by construction, and every change is decomposable into its drivers. The choice of cadence becomes a policy decision, not a budget decision.
Related
- Valuation approaches — why cadence differs across engine, advisory and platform models.
- Day-1 calibration — the anchor that keeps frequent marks consistent.
- Methodology — the engine and the revaluation-policy surface.
- Sample report — a Verus output, screen by screen.
To mark your own book at the cadence you choose, book a demo.