How a Mid-Sized PE Firm Tested ClickUp as Its CRM: Background on Praxis Capital
Praxis Capital is a growth-stage private equity firm managing $1.2 billion in assets across 45 portfolio companies. In 2024 they ran a conventional stack: Salesforce for CRM, spreadsheets for portfolio tracking, and a growing collection of point tools for diligence and investor reporting. By late 2025 the CFO audited software spend and found $250,000 in annual licensing plus $150,000 in one-off integration and consulting costs. Adoption was uneven: only 60% of investment professionals entered deal notes consistently, pipeline hygiene was suspect, and weekly reporting still required two analysts spending a combined 30 hours to assemble board packs.
Facing pressure to cut overhead and get information into one place, Praxis piloted an alternative: repurposing ClickUp as the primary CRM and portfolio operations hub. The idea sounded odd to some partners - ClickUp is sold as a work management and project tool, not a CRM for institutional investors. Still, Praxis had reasons: far lower licensing cost, a flexible custom fields model, built-in automations, and a robust API. They budgeted a 120-day pilot with a strict success definition tied to adoption, operational time savings, and data fidelity.
The Dealflow and Portfolio Visibility Problem: Why Existing CRMs Failed Praxis
Salesforce had the power Praxis needed but the implementation had ballooned. Custom objects and screens made the UI slow; every small change required a consultant and a $5,000 change ticket. Key failures were operational rather than technical:
- Data model mismatch - investment workflows differ from sales funnels. Salesforce screens encouraged checkbox-driven updates that didn't capture deal nuance. Poor integration - portfolio performance data lived in QuickBooks and an internal data warehouse. Syncs were inconsistent, leaving stale valuations in Salesforce. Low adoption - partners found the system cumbersome. They preferred Slack and spreadsheets for quick notes, creating hidden siloed information. Cost pressure - combined subscription and consulting fees consumed budget that could otherwise fund two junior associates.
Praxis needed a solution that would: (1) fit an investment-oriented data model, (2) be easy for senior partners to use on the fly, (3) integrate cleanly with accounting and reporting backends, and (4) lower run cost without sacrificing auditability.
An Unconventional Choice: Transforming ClickUp into a PE CRM
The team landed on ClickUp for several pragmatic reasons. The licensing was an order of magnitude cheaper than enterprise CRMs, and ClickUp's custom fields, task hierarchy, and flexible views let the ops team craft a deal object that matched Praxis' workflows. Instead of forcing a sales funnel template, they built a "deal" task type with nested checklist items for diligence milestones, a portfolio "company" space with KPIs as custom fields, and a "investor relations" space for LP communications.
Key design principles:
- Minimal friction for partners: quick mobile notes, templated checklists for diligence, and a single permalink to a deal summary. Truth at source: integrate QuickBooks for financials and a BI layer for normalized valuations so ClickUp stores pointers and metadata rather than raw financial tables. Governed customization: a central ops team controlled templates, naming conventions, and field schemas to prevent chaos.
We made several deliberate bets. First, that a disciplined data model and API-backed integrations would supply the reporting accuracy they needed. Second, that the lower cost and higher usability would drive adoption. Third, that any missing CRM features could be filled via middleware and lightweight in-house scripts rather than buying a new heavyweight product.
Implementing ClickUp as PE CRM: A 120-Day Rollout with Daily Sprints
The rollout followed a tight, deliverable-driven plan. Here is the step-by-step timeline Praxis used.
Discovery and Data Model (Days 1-14)Stakeholder workshops with partners, associates, finance, and IT. Defined core entities: Deal, Company, LP, Investment Committee Memo, and Portfolio Review. Mapped required fields and access levels. Outcome: a 28-field canonical schema for Deals and a 36-field schema for Companies.
Platform Prototyping (Days 15-30)Built initial ClickUp spaces and task types. Created templates for diligence checklists and investor updates. Built sample dashboards for weekly pipeline and portfolio KPIs. Partners tested prototypes and gave rapid feedback.
Integration Build (Days 31-70)Two engineers built connectors. Financials sync used a lightweight ETL to push normalized metrics to a reporting schema. DocuSign and Google Drive links were attached via task attachments and custom fields. Middleware (Make and a small serverless app) handled two-way sync for contact updates and deal status. Approx engineering hours: 320. External consultant support: 80 hours at $200/hour = $16,000.
Data Migration (Days 71-90)Imported 18 months of deals and 45 company records. Cleaned duplicates and standardized naming. Migration scripts archived original IDs for traceability.
User Training and Champions (Days 91-110)
Eight training sessions, role-based guides, and three partner "champions" who audited entries daily for the first 30 days. Training cost: two full days of internal trainer time and 12 hours of partner time.
Enforced naming conventions, versioned templates, and a simple SLA for integration health. Set up weekly ops reviews and a ticket queue for fixes.
Overall cost of the pilot: estimated $40,000 in implementation, $35,000 annualized ClickUp and middleware subscriptions - roughly $75,000 for year one versus $400,000+ with the previous stack.
From Fragmented Spreadsheets to 60% Faster Deal Screening: Measurable Results in 9 Months
Praxis ran the pilot from January through September 2026. Metrics were tracked against the original success criteria: adoption, time savings, and data fidelity.
- User adoption: Within 90 days, 95% of deal activity (notes, stage changes, and doc attachments) flowed through ClickUp rather than email or spreadsheets. Previously only 60% of activity was entered into Salesforce consistently. Time to screen: Median time from lead to first partner review dropped from 14 days to 5 days - a 64% reduction. Automation of initial document requests and templated diligence checklists removed repetitive work for associates. Reporting time: Weekly board deck preparation fell from 30 hours of analyst time to 8 hours. The ops team automated KPI pulls and pre-populated status slides using ClickUp task data and BI exports. Pipeline accuracy: Forecast variance (difference between expected exit value and modeled value) improved from a historical 30% error to 8% error on tracked deals, because the canonical data model reduced field mismatches and stale valuations. Cost savings: Software and consulting spend dropped from $400,000 to about $110,000 in year one (including one-time migration), freeing roughly $290,000 for hires and deal diligence. Dealflow throughput: The team processed 260 qualified leads in the first 9 months, compared with 180 the prior comparable period. Closed commitments increased from 3 to 4 completed deals in the period; one incremental deal produced an estimated $4 million uplift in equity value at exit modeling.
There were trade-offs. ClickUp did not match advanced CRM features found in enterprise products, like deep territory modeling, built-in fundraising forecasts, or certain compliance modules. But by carving responsibilities - ClickUp as the operational hub, BI for valuations, and a lightweight LP portal for capital calls - Praxis achieved a pragmatic, measurable win.
5 Hard Lessons We Learned While Making ClickUp Do Heavy Lifting
We made mistakes. I admit it: in earlier pilots we tried to replicate every enterprise CRM feature inside ClickUp and failed. That taught us restraint.
- Design the data model before adding fields. Adding fields ad hoc creates mess. Start with a canonical schema and version it. Treat fields as contracts, not suggestions. Don't try to replace compliance modules with widgets. For audit-heavy functions, keep the official system of record in a system built for compliance. Use ClickUp as the operational layer and store pointers or signed PDFs for audit trails. Invest in integration health checks. Middleware can fail silently. Build heartbeat alerts, periodic reconciliation jobs, and a runbook for stale data. The hidden cost of an integration outage is repeated manual fixes. Keep senior partners in the loop with low friction. Templates and quick mobile entry increased adoption. If executives have to sit down at a laptop to update pipeline, they won’t. Plan for maintenance budget. A DIY CRM needs ongoing attention. Set aside 10-15% of initial build cost annually for updates and mapping changes as your investment model evolves.
How Other PE Teams Can Decide if ClickUp Should Be Their CRM
This is the decisive section. Small and mid-sized PE teams can do this; large multi-strategy firms may find the approach limiting. Use this framework to decide.
Decision checklist
- Firm size: Less than $5 billion AUM and fewer than 100 portfolio companies - candidate for ClickUp-first approach. Ops maturity: Is there at least one ops specialist who can own governance and integrations? If not, hire before you start. Compliance needs: If you need SOC 2, complex audit trails, or in-platform capital call processing, plan to keep those functions in certified systems. Cost sensitivity: If saving $150k+ annually matters to your hiring plan, this is compelling. Change appetite: Partners willing to use templates and follow a single source of truth will make this succeed.
Advanced techniques for teams that go this route
- Normalized reference tables: Maintain a separate lightweight data warehouse with normalized company IDs, contact canonicalization, and versioned valuations. Use ClickUp to display derived fields but always reference the warehouse for reporting. Event-sourcing for changes: Capture change events (status, valuation, person) in a log table. This gives you an auditable history and enables rollbacks if an integration corrupts data. Webhook-driven automations: Instead of polling APIs, use webhooks for near real-time sync. Implement rate limiting and idempotency keys to avoid duplicate processing. Soft-delete and tombstones: Never hard-delete deal records. Mark them inactive and record who acted and why to maintain auditability. Schema versioning: When a custom field changes meaning, add a new field and deprecate the old one. Keep mapping in integration logic so historical reports remain accurate.
Two thought experiments to test your decision
The "Board Emergency" test: Imagine a surprise request from an LP or the board for a complete portfolio valuation with backup documents within 48 hours. Can your ClickUp setup hand over signed documents, valuation assumptions, and reconciled P&L? If yes, your system is robust enough. The "Integration Failure" test: Simulate a middleware outage for 72 hours. Can your team operate on cached data and reconcile changes after the outage without losing records or creating duplicates? If your answer has more than two "I hope so" qualifiers, harden your integrations first. Enterprise CRM ClickUp as CRM Typical annual cost $200k+ $35k - $60k Out-of-the-box investment workflows Yes Custom build Compliance modules Yes Limited Speed of partner adoption Often slow Often faster Maintenance model Vendor-managed Ops-managedFinal thought: by 2026 the SaaS landscape has matured. Tools like ClickUp can hold much more than project lists if you treat them as a platform with disciplined engineering, governance, and a clear cut between operational convenience and systems of record. Praxis' experiment shows a Click for info pragmatic path for many firms: you can get faster, cheaper, and more usable tooling without sacrificing the essentials - provided you are honest about limits and plan the engineering around those limits.
If you're considering a similar move, start with a 90-day pilot, insist on a canonical schema, and prepare a runbook for integration failures. We still use Salesforce for a subset of mandates where enterprise features are mandatory, but for dealflow and portfolio ops ClickUp became the place everyone checks first. That practical trade-off turned out to be the better option for our firm.