The footnote was read on day 2 and found on day 44

A US middle-market buyout sponsor, roughly $700M across three funds, eleven platform companies and a steady add-on program in industrial and business services. Twenty-two people: two partners, three vice presidents, two associates, a CFO who is also the chief operating officer, and no IT function. It ran on DealCloud for the pipeline, an Excel deal log the vice presidents actually trusted, Intralinks or Datasite depending on the bank, and a shared inbox that was the real workflow engine.

• On day 26 of a 60-day exclusivity a quality-of-earnings databook arrived with 23 proposed adjustments and normalized earnings 4% below the offering memorandum
• Three of them touched the same customer, but they were logged as financial-workstream items and the commercial workstream never heard about it
• On day 44 an associate reading an appendix found a footnote disclosing that customer was 31% of revenue, on a contract with 12 months left and a termination-for-convenience clause
• That footnote had been read on day 2 and noted as check later in an email to himself
• Roughly 40 inbound memoranda a month died in the shared inbox with no structured record, so an 11-month-old pass rationale lived in a partner's memory and got re-derived on the firm's own money

We built a diligence platform over the firm's existing tools, sequenced so intake and document capture came first, then the coordination and memo work that only becomes possible once findings are records rather than recollections. Every extraction is confirmed by a person before it reaches a memo.

Intake and structured capture

Inbound teasers and offering memoranda from the shared inbox are reduced to fields: revenue, earnings and the adjustments claimed to get there, sector, ownership, banker, asking multiple, and deal perimeter, with name variants proposed as matches against existing records. A pass requires a written rationale and a category before the record closes.

Data room document pipeline

When a letter of intent is signed, the opportunity record opens into a diligence register carrying the earlier teaser, memorandum, and pass rationale. Documents are classified into the firm's taxonomy rather than the seller's folder names, then put through targeted extraction of change-of-control provisions, termination rights, and concentration disclosures, footnotes included.

Workstream and question coordination

Every accepted finding gets a workstream, a named owner, a materiality flag, and a target memo section. Open findings generate the outbound request list, checked against the data room index and every prior request before it goes out. The tracker and the question log stopped being two records.

Quality of earnings and findings linkage

Each proposed adjustment enters the register with its rationale and the account and counterparty it touches. Findings naming the same counterparty appear together whichever workstream raised them, so a rebate adjustment in a databook and a concentration footnote in an appendix sit on one screen. That view is the difference between day 44 and day 8.

The data-bound committee memo

The memo assembles from the register and binds to a published version of the operating model, with the bridge from reported to adjusted earnings built from accepted adjustments rather than retyped. A partner clicking a concentration number lands on the page it came from, and when the model changes the memo shows a difference rather than quietly disagreeing.

Pipeline analytics and screening

Fourteen months of the inbox were loaded retrospectively, and screening runs across that history: what the firm has seen in a sector, at what multiple, and what it passed on that later traded. New opportunities are scored against the firm's criteria and prior passes, as a ranked read for a partner, never a decision.