1st Year Here -
Was curious from the experienced associates / VPs here as to how you keep all of your diligence work and findings organized. I've been trying to come up with a good framework and file structure that would allow me to keep all of the diligence findings in one place with supporting files, links, etc., but not sure if that's a little overkill.
How do you guys stay organized throughout a deal and how do you usually structure your data room analysis?
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Make sure your deal drive is organized. Date-stamp all the dataroom pulls you do so that you can always reference the most recent materials. Also make sure that you have a spreadsheet which contains all your diligence finding notes and marks all items requiring follow-up if they don't get closed out with key parties needed to sign off the request. This is going to be pretty modular and you need to make it work for you. If you need a lot of space for your comments etc then so be it, no big deal. The main thing is that nothing slips through the cracks. I always found that during the more intense diligence periods, to have working group calls with legal/financial etc parties to make sure that the items provided in the data room were sufficient to checking off certain items and that circulating updated versions of the diligence tracker which reflected the most current data room status at a regular cadence was always super helpful.
Got it. That is super helpful. How did you end up incorporating those files into your model? I have found that I like keeping the financial backup separate from our financing models as those can get complicated very quickly and we are usually building our financial statements from scratch (lower middle market).
The reason I'm thinking about all this is that I've seen some models on our drive and they are incredibly disorganized, so I'm trying to find a better way to set it all up.
My best advice is meticulous version control. If you can, make sure your model framework for the source data can easily be updated so that you can rip in new source data without too much of a hiccup. Ideally, you should be able to crtrl-h a sheet and just replace the old source file with the new as long as the grid integrity is solid
Got a sanitized version of The spreadsheet you were referencing? I’d love to see an example
Same here
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