The following scenarios help to illustrate our approach:

Case 1

A new client was acquiring a company and asked us to perform due diligence work as part of the transaction. Initially, our role was to review the management accounts and forecasts that had been presented to our client as reliable evidence of the value of the company.

Steven Gordon, corporate finance partner explains: "from an initial review of the business and industry our work quickly focused on stock records and recording of sales. Our work highlighted the fact that sales were recorded late, with no real controls, making it impossible to see what the results for any accounting period showed, creating uncertainty around profitability. This meant that the management accounts were likely to be inaccurate, affecting the availability of funding for the deal."

"After our initial findings our brief was extended to producing an estimate of the actual results for the target company in order to provide the client with some comfort in the acquisition. From the revised management accounts our client was armed with a negotiation on price which they were extremely successful in."

"It was our detailed work which provided the clients with factual evidence, that the price first offered was not realistic in terms of the actual performance of the company."