Three things that drive advisors crazy about transaction Q&A

Three things that drive advisors crazy about transaction Q&As

Feb 2, 2022

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Q&A spreadsheets.

They’re commonly used for closing out risk items in a transaction, but can be a major time-waster for advisors.

Here are three things that drive us crazy about Q&A spreadsheets. We wonder if, as advisors, you’ve felt this pain too.

1. Flipping between documents

You’re in your groove writing up your due diligence review, and realise you have a question that you need to submit. But arghh: where is the latest Q&A spreadsheet?! By the time you’ve dug it out, made an updated version to include your question and drafted an email, you’ve totally lost your flow. To make matters worse you’ve just missed the Friday deadline for Q&A submission, so it will be another week before your question is even seen...

2. Collating Q&A

As due diligence project managers, the weekly process to chase your 10+ teammates to send you their questions can be tedious. But what’s really tedious is when you get 10+ versions of the spreadsheet back, last-minute, and you have to copy and paste everything into one version, including the latest responses, often up against a deadline. This doesn’t feel like a good use of your premium hourly rate, and there is a real risk of a critical question falling through the cracks.

3. Email overload

Q&A spreadsheets are typically flung around by email. Your inbox is already cluttered enough, before having to hunt around in Outlook to find the latest version. And when you’ve found it - it can be a real pain finding which part of the due diligence review each Q&A item relates to.

Yes, Dataroom Q&A solutions are a step-forward. But fact is, they’re not designed to solve your key advisor painpoints of Q&A collation and due diligence review integration.

How LiveDiligence can help

LiveDiligence fixes your Q&A headaches with:

  • 1-click question submission right where you work - empowering your team to submit Q&A continuously (with approval step as needed).
  • Transaction-wide Q&A view with automatic Q&A collation - saving days of admin and reducing confusion with a single point of truth.
  • Excel export - for audit trail or working with external systems.

Get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Photo by Niranjan _ Photographs