Building a Multi-Tenant SaaS Portal for PE Firms
How I built The Hub — a multi-tenant client portal that gives PE operating partners real-time visibility into portfolio technology health.
Every PE operating partner I work with has the same problem: no single view of technology health across the portfolio. Spreadsheets get stale. Quarterly updates lack depth. And nobody wants to log into 12 different dashboards.
The Problem
After building the AI Readiness Assessment framework, I needed a platform to deliver it at scale. Not as a PDF, not as a slide deck—as a living, breathing dashboard that updates in real time.
The Solution: The Hub
The Hub (cutlineadvisory.app) is a multi-tenant SaaS portal purpose-built for PE technology oversight. Each portfolio company gets its own tenant. Each operating partner gets a unified view.
Architecture Decisions
Multi-Tenancy with Microsoft Entra ID
Each PE firm is an Entra ID tenant. Portfolio companies are mapped as applications within that tenant. This gives us SSO, RBAC, and audit logging without building any of it ourselves.
Data Layer
Each tenant's data is isolated at the database level. I use row-level security so that even a bug in the application layer cannot leak data across tenants. This was a hard requirement from every PE firm I talked to.
Embedded Analytics with Power BI
The dashboards are Power BI reports embedded directly in the portal. Operating partners get the visualization richness of Power BI without needing a separate license or login. The AI readiness radar charts, tech debt heatmaps, and savings projections all live here.
TypeScript Everything
Full-stack TypeScript with React on the front end and Node.js on the back end. Type safety across the entire stack is critical when you are handling sensitive financial and operational data.
Key Features
- Portfolio Health Dashboard — aggregate AI readiness scores, tech debt metrics, and savings projections across all portfolio companies
- Company Deep Dives — drill into any company for detailed assessments, audit trails, and recommendation tracking
- Engagement Tracking — monitor which recommendations have been implemented, which are in progress, and which are blocked
- Automated Reporting — quarterly board reports generated automatically from live data
Lessons Learned
- Start with identity — getting Entra ID right from day one saved months of security remediation later
- Embed, do not redirect — PBI Embedded keeps users in-context; redirecting to a separate BI tool kills adoption
- Tenant isolation is non-negotiable — PE firms will not adopt a platform where data isolation is an afterthought
The Hub is live at cutlineadvisory.app.
