how are you guys screening 5-10 messy proprietary deals a month without losing your mind on quickbooks?
looking at a pipeline of small tuck-ins right now ($1m-$4m range). most of these sellers send raw quickbooks exports with zero clean p&l or CIM. getting a full $1k+ third-party DD report or hiring a boutique analyst for every single target on day 1 makes no…
looking at a pipeline of small tuck-ins right now ($1m-$4m range). most of these sellers send raw quickbooks exports with zero clean p&l or CIM. getting a full $1k+ third-party DD report or hiring a boutique analyst for every single target on day 1 makes no sense financially, but doing manual excel re-bucketing for 24 months of "ask my accountant" and weird expense lines just to disqualify a deal takes way too long. curious how other searchers/associates handle the initial 30-minute triage. do you have a quick excel macro or script to flag red flags (like AR concentration and bank-to-GL gaps) before deciding whether to spend real time or money on it?
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unfortunately, not as much as i needed
man this is exactly what i needed to hear. the add-back creep point is gold, tracking that YoY % change instead of just absolute dollar amounts is such an obvious red flag i completely missed. quick question on the execution side for the fast-fail filter: when you're cross-checking bank deposits vs GL revenue on these messy $1m-$3m deals, how are you actually doing the data mapping? are you just dumping the raw bank csv and the quickbooks general ledger into an excel template and running an index/match, or do you have a faster way? dealing with vendor/customer names that the seller spells differently every single month is what usually kills my time before i can even run the math.
This is more of an accounting question, have you tried posting r/Accounting or talked to a CPA to find a better solution? Did you not receive a response in the other channels you posted this question to?
A quick script isn't hard to build, but the more useful thing is picking 3-4 checks that catch most disqualifying deals fast, so you're only doing the deep re-bucketing on targets that already passed the cheap filter. The ones worth automating first: AR aging concentration (top 3 customers as % of total AR - if it's over 40-50%, that alone kills a lot of deals before you touch the P&L), a bank-deposits-vs-GL-revenue reconciliation for the trailing 12 months (large unexplained gaps mean either undisclosed related-party activity or just bad bookkeeping, and you want to know which fast), owner addback creep (compare addbacks as a % of reported EBITDA year over year - if it's climbing, someone's getting aggressive with what counts as "personal"), and a simple duplicate/round-number transaction flag. None of that needs a fancy macro, it's a pivot table and a lookup against last year's numbers. The real time-saver isn't automation, it's having a hard pass/fail threshold on each of those before you let yourself get pulled into 24 months of "ask my accountant" line items.