A financial due diligence gives you an independent read on the numbers behind a deal: what the earnings really are, what working capital and net debt really look like, before you sign. You do one when there’s money on the line and the target’s reported figures haven’t been taken apart by anyone outside the room.
When to hire an external consultant
The deal has a deadline and your finance team can’t run a full quality-of-earnings analysis on top of the close.
You need numbers your IC, board or lender will treat as independently verified, not management’s version.
It’s outside your usual sector or structure, and someone has to understand the accounting quirks fast.
Typical activities
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Building the quality of earnings: normalising for one-offs, accounting policies and anything that flatters the run-rate.
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Working through net debt and debt-like items so the price bridge holds.
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Analysing working capital, its swings and the level that’s really normal for the business.
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Testing the forecast against the historicals and the commercial reality, not just the model’s own logic.
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Writing it up as the findings that move price, structure or the decision, with the numbers your SPA and model need.
Our Members specialised in this service come from Big Four deals and transaction services, corporate finance and M&A boutiques, and PE funds. We look for people who’ve run QoE and FDD start to finish against a deal clock, and who flag the one number that changes the deal rather than burying it.
“We quickly found an experienced and pragmatic professional through Sweav. He supported the portfolio company CFO and quickly took ownership of the internal sell-side processes. As a result, management had the bandwidth to stay focused on important business topics. Moreover, they could continue executing the growth agenda.”
“The Sweav member played a key role in the success of our exit. He quickly set up the dataroom, structured the financials clearly, and handled buyer questions with speed and precision. His proactive mindset and ability to seamlessly plug into our team made a real difference throughout the process.”
