Ten checks across the areas an acquisition can fail from, showing where diligence has done its work and where the deal is still running on the seller's account of itself.
Tick an area only if the work has been done for this deal and the findings have reached the people deciding it. The score is fixed-point arithmetic in your browser; nothing about the transaction is entered or stored.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
The gaps this score has surfaced are cheapest to close before signing. Operators who have bought, integrated and occasionally regretted acquisitions will review your diligence coverage in a confidential report from the Global Board.
Review this before committingTick an area only when the work is complete and its findings have been read by the decision-makers.
On this coverage, the deal is being priced on the seller's account of the business, with diligence functioning as a formality rather than an investigation. The areas left unexamined are not random: they are usually the ones that take longest, cost most or risk unsettling the deal.
The core financial and legal work is probably done, and the softer areas (culture, customers, integration) are probably the open ones. That pattern is the industry default, and it maps poorly onto how deals actually fail: post-completion damage comes disproportionately from the areas diligence treats as optional.
Diligence has reached most of the places a deal can fail from, which puts this transaction ahead of common practice. Coverage, though, measures where you looked, not what you did with what you found: findings have a way of softening as they travel from workstream reports to the board paper.
Every deal team believes its diligence was proportionate; the belief is tested only after completion. In practice, coverage is set by the timetable, the fee budget and what the seller makes easy, which is why the same three areas (culture, customers, integration) go unexamined deal after deal. Scoring coverage forces the omissions to be chosen rather than inherited.
Score coverage twice. At the diligence planning stage the gaps are cheap to close: the workstreams exist on a page and can be re-scoped in an afternoon. Before final approval the score becomes a disclosure question: whether the decision-makers know what was not examined, and whether the price reflects that.
Ten areas, ten points each, no partial credit: an area half-done is not done, and a report nobody has read does not count. The bands describe coverage rather than deal quality. A business examined thoroughly can still be the wrong purchase, but at least it will be the purchase you thought it was.
A standard scope covers the standard failure modes, which is worth having. The judgement call is the non-standard areas: culture, customer relationships and integration cost, where standard scopes are thinnest and post-deal surprises are concentrated.
Unticked, and treated as a finding in itself. Restricted access may be ordinary deal hygiene or it may be information. Either way, an area you were prevented from examining is an assumption in the price, and it belongs on the risk list with the others.
No. The score does not perform diligence; it audits its shape. The workstreams produce the findings, and this checklist shows the decision-makers where findings exist and where the deal is still running on trust.