Business owners may have a desire to sell their company, but unfortunately their data may not be ready. Strategic acquirers and private equity firms are sophisticated buyers. Their due diligence process will be rigorous and data-driven. The following two issues threaten to de-rail any deal process and negatively impact valuation.…
A software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider had different payment models with its customers: monthly, quarterly or annually recurring revenue. Customers had different start dates, pricing and term durations. To produce a rolling monthly revenue forecast, the company's finance department would gather sales team inputs and then manually cut, copy and paste values…
A mid-market specialty manufacturer operated on separate ERP systems at each of its facilities. Local staff lacked rigor in recording customer names. A given customer could be named differently within a factory. Customers could also be served by multiple factories and recorded locally under an entirely different name. Misspellings and…
A manufacturing client stored customer purchase orders and customer contracts on a cloud-based file repository. Outstanding orders were tracked in a spreadsheet, which was manual and tedious to keep up-to-date. As a result, management rarely had a real-time quantification of order backlog and could not assess monthly or quarterly trends…