A boutique advisory firm needed to run real diligence on small private targets without staffing up. The work that mattered was being deferred because there was nobody to do the parts that should not still be done by hand.
The firm took on roll-up and add-on transactions where the targets were small private companies. Books were typically in QuickBooks, tax filings were on paper, and the structures were never quite the same twice. Every diligence cycle was a senior person re-reading the books from scratch on a tight calendar, with the same questions every time about related-party items, unusual recurring journal entries, and tax positions taken on the prior three returns.
The firm's options were to staff up for diligence, to defer it, or to send it to a subscription tool that would not produce a memo in the firm's house format and would not, by design, learn anything from one engagement to the next.
The system takes the target's books and tax filings, walks the books for related-party items and recurring exceptions against patterns the firm has flagged before, and produces a draft diligence memo in the firm's house format with citations back to the underlying source documents.
Underneath sits the firm's own database of every prior diligence engagement: which exceptions were flagged, which were dismissed, which became deal points. The system is sharper on the second engagement than the first, sharper on the tenth than the fifth, because the firm's institutional view of "things that matter" is encoded into the database, not into one senior person's memory.
The output is a draft. A senior person reads it, marks it up, and either resolves an open item or routes it to the target for explanation. Volume goes through the system. Judgment stays with the firm.
The firm now takes diligence engagements it used to defer. The first read is faster, the memo is consistent across deals, and the firm's prior view of recurring fact patterns is available to the partner before they pick up the file rather than only after.
The firm owns the code. The firm owns the database. There is no per-deal vendor fee. When the underlying technology changes enough to warrant rebuilding the system, we are available for that engagement. Until then, the firm runs what we built.