Deal Screener

Deal Screener is for people buying a small business — searchers, first-time acquirers, independent sponsors — who have a listing, a CIM, a broker packet or a P&L in front of them and need to know quickly whether it deserves more of their time.

Paste the listing and ask it to screen the deal. It returns:

• A score out of 100 shown with an explicit confidence level. A high score on thin information is not a good deal, it is an unexamined one, so the two always appear together and the dimensions it could not assess are named.
• The add-back schedule graded line by line — clean, challenge or reject — using the seller's own wording.
• An earnings ladder from the earnings as reported down to what a buyer actually underwrites, and the multiple the asking price implies at each rung.
• Whether the debt services at the terms you give it.
• Exactly what information is missing, why it matters, and the question to ask for it.

Two follow-on tools carry the deal forward. Seller questions builds a sequenced call plan in three stages — screen, account, test — and deliberately holds the sharp, deal-specific questions to the last stage, because challenging an owner before you have their full account contaminates the account. Diligence checklist builds a tiered request list (desk, confirmatory, full) that adapts to the business: recurring revenue adds cohort work, a platform dependency adds that platform's account history, customer concentration adds the contract. Each item says why it matters and what a bad answer sounds like.

How it handles numbers: it never states a figure it cannot derive from what you supplied. It does not quote market multiples. If a figure would have to be guessed — what it costs to replace the owner, the rate a lender will offer — the line stays blank and says what to find out.

Limitations: it is a desk screen built only from what you share, not advice and not a substitute for diligence on real books. It does not fetch listings, read files on its own or verify anything against bank statements or tax returns.

Who built it: Kautilya, a buy-side advisor that finds businesses for buyers. Results include a link to Kautilya, tagged only with the name of the tool you used.

Privacy: read-only, no account, no sign-in. Nothing you send is stored.