A transaction requires technical diligence.
Transaction
We sign in three weeks. The data room has a repository, a wiki and a slide that says the platform is modern. I have to tell the committee what it actually does.
The deal lead
What do the supplied materials establish, and what remains unavailable?
The product at work
The systems in the data room, as the seller's slide lists them.
Coverage fills in as the code is read: what the supplied material supports.
The critical elements ringed: the values the business reports and runs on.
The gaps go in the Evidence record and Finding register: what was asked for and never came.
What usually happens
An engineer spends a week on what the seller supplied and comes back with an opinion. Questions go into the data room and answers come back slowly, and what was never handed over is easy to miss.
With a reading
With a reading, the code in the data room is read as it stands, and what it establishes is written down, which covers the relationships it supports, the evidence a reviewer can inspect and the gaps where source never came.
The relationships the accessible materials support, the evidence that can be inspected and the gaps that prevent a conclusion.
The record covers the code the data room actually held. Where source was asked for and never came, the gap is named, so the committee sees the edge of what was read.
Who it is for
For the deal team, technical adviser or investment committee weighing a business on the systems it runs.
What to bring
The repositories, configuration and workflow definitions in the data room, and the requests that went unanswered.