Operational Due Diligence

Diligence starts with whatever access the seller grants: the data room, exported ledgers, contract files, ticket history, correspondence. The window is measured in weeks and the record runs to years.

Cerenovus reads all of it, every ledger line, contract, ticket, and thread, at a scale no deal team could staff. Access stays read-only and inside the approved scope: nothing gets installed in the target’s systems and nothing gets written back.

A target’s files name the same customer four ways and carry one vendor under two acquired billing systems. Concentration, churn, and spend stay wrong until those names reconcile.

Cerenovus resolves every customer, vendor, employee, and account, then reconciles the numbers across systems. When the CIM says the top customer is 8 percent of revenue, the test runs against the reconciled customer, not whichever spelling the CRM used that year.

The purchase price rests on claims about the past: retention, pricing discipline, cost trajectory, working capital behavior. Testing them takes years of history, not the twelve months management selected for the deck.

Cerenovus reads the target’s full record time-aware, so what the business looked like in any quarter is a question the record answers. Every fact carries a verbatim quote anchored in a real source document.

Management presents what it prepared, and the exposure lives in what it did not. Every assertion in the CIM and the management presentation is a testable claim against the target’s own files.

Cerenovus runs each claim against the record and marks it supported, contradicted, or unsupported, with the source attached. Add-backs that do not trace, churn the ledger disputes, and processes already starting to break reach the deal team before they become surprises after close.

A finding without a number does not move an IC. Every confirmed issue needs a dollar figure that survives the QoE team and the lender’s questions.

Cerenovus prices each finding from the cited entries, with the workings attached, so any figure can be checked on demand. Findings arrive ranked by what they do to the price, largest first.

The IC needs the material issues in order, each one able to hold up in front of management. Nothing weakens a bid like a finding that collapses in the room.

The diligence brief lands ranked and cited, with every claim opening down to the original document. The question of where a number came from always has an answer.

Most diligence dies at close: the binder gets archived and the operating team rediscovers the same issues in month six. Work paid for once gets paid for twice.

The record built in diligence becomes the standing record of the company you now own. Findings, baselines, and open questions carry straight into the value creation plan on day one.