The Deal-Making Engine for Roll-Ups

How is this different from the regional QoE firm we're using now?

Regional firms treat each deal as an isolated engagement. They hand you a PDF and move on. Nobody is responsible for making those numbers interoperable across your portfolio. With us, the acquisition work flows directly into your consolidated platform. The integration cost is essentially zero because the data was structured correctly from day one. Your CFO stops spending weeks rebuilding QoE output into a consolidated view.

We do 10+ tuck-ins a year. Can you keep up?

That's what we're built for. Fixed-scope QoE modules with standard intake and standard outputs turn add-ons from bespoke projects into a repeatable pipeline. Five to seven business days per deal, full scope. We've run engagements in parallel for operators doing multiple simultaneous acquisitions. The system gets faster with each deal because it learns your platform's classification logic and preferences.

Can we use you pre-LOI for a lighter-touch analysis?

Yes. Pre-LOI red flag review in two to three business days. Screening tool before committing to full diligence. Some operators use it to kill bad deals early rather than spending $50K and six weeks to reach the same conclusion. If you do proceed to full QoE, the pre-LOI work carries over.

What does "100% of the GL" actually mean?

Every single line. On a typical target, that might be 50,000 to 200,000 GL entries. A legacy firm samples maybe 2,000 to 5,000. We process all of them. On a recent deal, we caught a revenue recognition pattern buried across 8,000 GL entries that changed adjusted EBITDA by almost 15%. The previous QoE provider missed it because it was outside their sample.

Are there real accountants involved, or is this just software?

Both, and the split matters. Accountants typically spend 80% of their time on mechanical data work: extracting numbers, remapping charts of accounts, tying out figures. We invert that ratio. Software handles extraction, normalization, and verification. Our CPAs spend their time on what actually requires judgment: understanding how the business works, making calls on adjustments, having the conversations with buyers and sellers that move deal terms.

Seven days sounds too fast. Are you cutting corners?

A traditional QoE spends four of its six weeks on data extraction, re-keying, and normalization. We do that in hours. The remaining time, experienced accountants analyzing data, making judgment calls, writing up findings, takes the same amount of time it always has. A six-week engagement that samples 5% of the GL is doing less analysis than a seven-day engagement that examines 100%.

Every target is on a different accounting system. Can you handle that?

QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, Sage, NetSuite, legacy local installs. We've seen it all. On a roll-up, the whole point is that we deal with whatever the target is running. Five different systems, five different charts of accounts, five different fiscal calendars. The platform normalizes all of it into a single consolidated view.

How does chart of accounts mapping work?

The system analyzes the chart of accounts across all your entities and proposes a unified mapping to your platform's standard structure. A target that books contractor costs as "professional services" under opex gets mapped to what your platform calls "direct labor" under cost of revenue. An accountant reviews and approves. On accounting and service firms, we see 80% to 85% auto-mapped with high confidence. The remaining 15% to 20% get flagged for human review.

Does the system learn across acquisitions?

Each mapping decision trains the model for your specific platform. Acquisition number 10 maps faster and more accurately than acquisition number 3, because the system has seen your team's preferences and classification logic. The institutional knowledge accumulates in the platform rather than in one person's head. If your CFO or controller left tomorrow, the next person wouldn't be starting from scratch.

Our CFO spends the first week of every month consolidating. How does this change that?

Instead of pulling up five different QBO instances to track down a variance, every number in the consolidation drills down to the original entry in the original entity without leaving the platform. Full audit trail from the consolidated number all the way to the source document. The manual reconciliation work that eats your CFO's first week goes away because the data was structured correctly when each entity was onboarded.

What is the Deal GPT?

Every deal gets its own AI. "Across all entities, show me the top 10 clients by revenue concentration and flag any client above 15% for any single entity." That runs across your entire portfolio, every client record, three years of data. Eight seconds. And every answer is sourced: click any number and you're looking at the underlying transactions. When your deal team has a question at 10pm on a Sunday, they get an answer in minutes.

Can we benchmark new acquisitions against our existing portfolio?

Automatically. The system compares every target's patterns against what it's learned from your existing portfolio entities. If every other firm on your platform recognizes revenue ratably and this target is doing lump-sum, that gets flagged because the system knows your standard. By the time you're at 15 or 20 firms, outliers become very obvious.

What about earn-outs and post-close monitoring?

Continuous monitoring of earn-out targets with full audit trail from the same team that did your diligence. Plus TSA tracking and integration milestones through post-close. One firm owns the numbers from pre-LOI through exit. No handoff between the QoE provider and whoever is tracking post-close obligations.

Every roll-up hits a scaling wall. How does Daneel help?

Somewhere between 10 and 20 acquisitions, the financial complexity overwhelms the team's capacity to manage it manually. The consolidation gets harder, the close takes longer, the CFO is working weekends, and the quality of the financial picture actually degrades even as the business grows. The traditional solution is to hire more accountants, which is getting harder every year because the profession is shrinking. The platforms that build financial infrastructure that scales with acquisition pace rather than headcount have a structural advantage that compounds with every deal. Each acquisition gets easier, not harder.

How does this help us at exit?

Think about it from the buyer's perspective. You're acquiring a 20-entity platform. Would you rather inherit a consolidated GL that traces every number across every entity back to its source document, or a stack of PDFs from six different QoE firms and a bunch of Excel files held together with VLOOKUP formulas? Clean, traceable, consolidated financials are an exit multiple enhancer. Buyers pay more for platforms where they can actually trust the consolidated numbers.

How does this work commercially?

Two parts. A per-deal fee for new acquisitions covers the full QoE and integration into the platform, generally 40% to 60% below what you'd pay a Big Four firm, comparable to regional firms. But the real difference is that with a regional firm, your CFO spends weeks integrating QoE output into your consolidated view. With us, the integration cost is zero. Start with one deal or one existing entity, see how it works on your data, and decide on the rest. No long-term commitment until you've seen it.

What's the best way to get started?

Two options. One: give us a deal you're currently looking at and we run a full QoE. Compare our output and turnaround to what you've been getting. Two: we take one of your existing portfolio entities, one that's already closed and on your books, and ingest it so you can see what the consolidated view looks like with real data. We'll send sample output, have a scoping call with your deal team, and get the engagement letter out the same day. Five to seven business days for delivery.