The Number on the Page
Is Not the Number That Matters.
The Gap Between What's Reported and What's Real Is Where Deals Are Won or Lost.
In M&A due diligence, the gap between reported EBITDA and sustainable EBITDA can make or break a deal. Most teams are still finding that gap manually, under time pressure, with incomplete data. That is not a process problem. That is an intelligence problem.
The Story the Seller Built Is Not the Story the Buyer Needs
Every financial due diligence engagement runs on the same constraint. Compressed timeline. Messy source data. Financials that tell a story the seller constructed, not the story the buyer needs to see.
The one off items are buried. The revenue concentration risk is not flagged. The normalized EBITDA is whatever the model says it is until someone finds the anomaly that changes everything.
"Reported EBITDA and sustainable EBITDA are often not the same thing... revenue needs to be broken down properly."
M&A finance professional, r/FinancialCareers
What Manual QoE Review Actually Costs
The Core Trade-Off
When you are manually ingesting financial statements and building adjustment schedules by hand, you are trading accuracy for speed or speed for accuracy. The cycle does not give you both.
Where Deals Get Burned
- Revenue concentration hidden in aggregate line items
- One off management fees normalized without scrutiny
- EBITDA adjustments that look standard until a single customer represents 40% of revenue
- Nobody caught it until close
The professionals who get burned in FDD are not careless. They ran out of time before the data ran out of surprises.
Revenue Concentration
A single customer can represent 40% of revenue and go undetected until close under manual review processes.
Time Compression
Agentic ingestion pipelines can compress preliminary QoE review timelines by a factor of three or more.
Anomaly to Change It All
It only takes one buried line item to restructure deal terms, reprice the asset, or kill the transaction entirely.
What Agentic Systems Can Do in a Deal Cycle
AI orchestration is not a replacement for financial judgment. It is an accelerant for it.
The right agentic workflow ingests messy source financials, flags statistical anomalies, surfaces revenue concentration patterns, and produces a preliminary adjustment schedule in the time it used to take just to format the workbook. Your team still makes the call. The system makes sure you are making it with complete information.
Built for the Pace and Pressure of Real Deal Cycles
Agentic Ingestion Pipelines
Design agentic ingestion pipelines for unstructured and messy financial statements that would otherwise require hours of manual formatting.
Automated Flagging Logic
Build automated flagging logic for one off items and nonrecurring adjustments so nothing slips through under time pressure.
Revenue Concentration Risk
Surface revenue concentration risk in deal cycle timelines before it surfaces itself at the worst possible moment.
Repeatable QoE Workflow
Develop a repeatable QoE workflow that compresses review time without compressing accuracy or introducing new blind spots.
Doug Skinner — Author, 21 Keys to AI Orchestration | Founder, GTMSOS
Ingest Data
This agentic workflow replaces the most time consuming and error prone stages of manual financial due diligence, delivering a preliminary adjustment schedule in a fraction of the time while ensuring your team has complete information before making the call.
Ingest Data
Flag Anomalies
Surface Concentration
Adjust Schedules
The AI Auditor
Using Agentic Systems to Stress-Test Quality of Earnings
A specialized prompt library and workflow for RevOps and FinOps professionals to automatically ingest messy financial statements and flag one off items and customer concentration risks. Built for the pace and pressure of real deal cycles.
Every manual QoE engagement carries risk across three dimensions simultaneously. Agentic systems are designed to reduce all three without requiring your team to sacrifice the financial judgment that only humans can provide.
The Anomaly That Changes the Deal Is Already in the Data. Find It First.
Book a 30-minute strategy call with Doug Skinner at GTMSOS.
We will walk through your current FDD workflow, identify the highest risk gaps in your QoE process, and show you exactly how agentic systems compress your review timeline without introducing new blind spots.
Doug Skinner | GTMSOS | Author, 21 Keys to AI Orchestration
GTMSOS
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