Small PE - work specific disappointment

Hi guys,

I am currently interning at a small regional PE fund. PE has been my career goal for quite some time, but so far I am a little bit disappointed in the type of work that I do. I wanted to ask you whether it is small PE fund characteristics and I should aim towards larger funds or if I should just get used to it / change career plan.

There is a lot of deal sourcing - cold mailing every day, looking for companies and adding them to database and many other sourcing tasks. And it is not only an intern task - even 2nd and 3rd year analysts are actively cold mailing.

Because the fund invests in small companies, these firms often do not have advanced accounting, so one of my tasks was to "rebuild it" - I was given single accounting entries and I had to classify each entry into revenue / cost sections to fit to our internal model template and P&L breakdown (so e.g. accounting entry was named "purchase of material x" and I had to classify it as "Materials consumption", which is a line in our P&L output). Another assignment was to prepare a monthly report for the fund partners based on the month-end balances of accounts (again - to fit our internal P&L template) and create checks with the P&L figures prepared by the company. I feel like these are tasks of a company's CFO / reporting / accounting teams.

I would rather analyse these figures and draw conclusions (rather than preparing reports), analyse markets, search for strategic solutions / new products / business models enhancements, build models for potential acquisitions etc. Instead, I am serving as a substitution to the companies' accounting departments.

Is it only a specific of a small PE fund, or I should change my view of the industry?

Looking forward to your comments.