Due Diligence Practice or the Way to Make a Quick Business Audit With the Most Productive Outcome
September 7th, 2016 by admin
Merger and acquisition projects belong to the most time-demanding in the business sphere. They are, as a rule, connected with storage and exchange of different secret corporate files that have to be analyzed deeply before the work is started: buyer, investor, client or any other representative of the groups of interest is expected to be aware of what is going in the company he is planning to work with. For this reason, the organization has an obligation to provide its stakeholders with all the demanded data and with the venue where they can analyze the information. In the epoch of profound digitalization, the most adequate and convenient solution for information keeping and examination is a virtual room – digital depository for documents which is available 24/7 365 days a year all over the Earth.
Virtual platforms are especially useful when it is time for due diligence. As due diligence is pretty complex and irritating process, those involved in the transaction are usually interested in passing this milestone of the deal as soon as possible. As for virtual data room pricing course of action or formula to prepare a fast business checking with the most effective conclusion. However, inattentive attitude towards confidential information investigation may lead to unforeseen and harmful outcome. It means that, a wise buyer is always concerned about well-planned due diligence course. Virtual rooms are enhanced with diverse instruments that are aimed at facilitation of due diligence in particular and the business-making in general. Particular core tools virtual data rooms provide their users with to facilitate due diligence are named below.
Multi-sided protection system
During merger and acquisition transactions, certain private documents must be shared with the prospective investors. For this reason, all who take part in the project are interested in keeping the files in the most secure space that may be found. Reputable providers provide their customers with virtual rooms that are provided with a advanced security system: the data is protected from leakage, misuse, destruction, etc. The high-level security is commonly provided by such functions as “fence view” option, 2-step verification process, virus scanning, dynamic watermarks, 256-bit data encryption, firewalls, regular backups, etc. – all the mentioned features are aimed at guaranteeing security to the secret corporate data.
Permission categories
Within in-depth analysis of the documents not everyone among the room visitors should view all the files and documents: a repository must let the room administrator to separate VDR visitors into permission categories. Such clusters offer an opportunity to set up the level of information disclosure and to monitor the access to the documents. Hence, the room owner is the one to decide who can find what and how long for inside a virtual platform.
Activity tracking
Reputable virtual rooms provide their owners with an activity tracking feature – the feature that gives an opportunity to supervise every action of all the logged-in deal participants within the repository. Well-structured audit reports disseminate the information on who logged into the virtual data room, when, how much time for, which files were browsed, saved, edited, etc. Owing to activity tracking function the data room owners have a possibility to detect the most active bidders and to make sure that in a case of any potential problems with the colleagues or prospective partners the report may be used as evidence.
Simple interface
Due diligence seems to be a pretty painful and challenging process. Thus, the convenience is one of the main traits that have to be provided by a room provider: businessmen appreciate simple and convenient data rooms that might be navigated without any special preparation. Complex search system together with filtering features such a search by keywords, file names, uploading date etc. increase the speed of the work inside the VDR. The integration with Microsoft office means that the VDR users may work with PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents and are not expected to transform them. These tools help deal participants to focus their attention on due diligence. Also, invention of the mobile application accelerates the documents’ analysis noticeably as all the files are synchronized on all the gadget and the deal participants have an opportunity to browse the data wherever and whenever it seems to be convenient for them.