Background: I work at a boutique investment bank on the east coast that does mainly M&A advisory for small grocery store and food chains ( think Kwik-E-Mart, 7/11, subway). Most of the time sellers own a portfolio of stores, 40+, and we market the whole bundle. What takes up most of our time is CIM production for the M&A sell-side process.
More Background: We get financials from the clients in pdf and excel, sometimes a mixture, with full income statements for each store. To create the model for the CIM, I end up spreading (copy/paste) 4 years worth of income statement information (30-50 line items) for each store from the clients documents into our model which turns out to be a massive data entry (c/p) exercise. (50440)
The Question: Is this amount of data entry normal for a CIM? At larger banks, do analyst spend time (c/p)ing thousands line items into excel? If so, what do you use to keep your mind/fingers from going numb?
- As a note, the audited financials we receive are on a consolidated basis and are useless for getting the depth of information on a store level basis needed to write the CIM. ** The excel/pdf client financials we get are usually a print out from their accounting system (include a budgeted and actuals column).
Are you just doing this exercise to verify that the financials match the consolidated? There's no way you are using each store's sales in the CIM financials? If the prior, I understand. Otherwise, consolidated figures should work for the CIM, with the individual stores' financials readily available in the data room. Actually, if there are any poor performer stores, that should be a synergistic opportunity for any acquirer. Thoughts, anyone else?
Our analysts (BB) send it straight to graphics department and some former art major hand types it overnight.
LOL this is 100% true.
I worked at a similar place for a year before lateraling to the MM that I am at now. In my experience, this amount of grunt work is completely normal for a boutique. Do your clients use an accounting software, like QuickBooks? One idea would be to ask them to export the files as Excel, which QuickBooks can do easily. Another suggestion may be to ask your bank to get you Adobe Pro. It does not do the best job, but it does a fairly decent job at turning PDFs into Excel files.
At the MM where I am at now, the CFOs send Excel files. If we get PDFs, we ask for Excel.
See if you can use these: http://www.pdftoexcel.org/ https://www.pdftoexcelonline.com/en/ (I think this one may be better)
Hopefully it will at least help you in the shorter term
I'm not trying to be that guy, but I would not do this. These website frequently store uploaded files for a brief time, which could get you into some serious trouble if someone sees sensitive client information.
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