What does the ILPA Performance Template actually change?

Two ILPA templates are now in circulation, and they run on different clocks. Treat them as one initiative and it's easy to prepare for the wrong deadline.

Reporting Template v2.0 is already live

The Reporting Template v2.0, released January 22, 2025 as part of ILPA's Quarterly Reporting Standards Initiative, applies to funds still in their investment period during Q1 2026, as well as any fund commencing operations after January 1, 2026. First delivery is Q1 2026 — the very next reporting cycle for a large share of the fund universe. Teams that have filed this under "2027 ILPA stuff" are misreading which instrument has the earlier trigger.

The Performance Template's deadline is later — which is the problem

The Performance Template applies to funds commencing operations on or after January 1, 2026, with first LP-facing delivery not due until Q1 2027, after four full fiscal quarters of data capture. On its face, that sounds like breathing room. It isn't. The template doesn't ask a fund to produce a new report in Q1 2027. It asks the fund to have been collecting the right data since its first reporting period.

Most fund administration workflows weren't built to trace individual deal-level cash flows through to a specific set of standardized performance outputs — they were built to produce whatever performance summary the LPA and side letters required, on whatever cadence satisfied existing investors. The Performance Template requires a lineage from transaction to reported metric that many back offices have never had to formalize. That lineage has to be built into the fund's records from the beginning. It can't be assembled in the quarter before the first delivery is due.

What the template actually tests

Treat the two templates as one compliance item and the near-term one gets underweighted while the later one gets treated as optional for another year. Viewed separately, each template is a deadline for something different: the Reporting Template governs when a fund reports; the Performance Template governs whether a fund can prove how that performance was produced. Nothing about the Performance Template changes how a fund performs — it changes whether the fund's own records can show the work.