Buying a company

Diligence on a small UK company usually starts with the free public record and then stalls, because the half that decides the deal is not on the register. The register says what was filed. It says nothing about the leases, the customer concentration, the change of control clauses or whether the business survives the owner leaving.

snapdue puts both halves in one place, and the seller builds it before you arrive rather than in the fortnight after you ask.

A seller invites you as a viewer. That role reads the pack and writes nothing, and it is refused in the action rather than hidden in the form, so there is no path from reading a pack to changing one.

What you get is the public record already structured, the filings with links to the filed documents, and the section by section evidence the seller has assembled, each answer sitting next to the question it answers.

• Can one person deliver the whole company, or is delivery spread
• Is a lender in the way, and what does the charge actually secure
• Does the business survive the owner leaving
• Is the asset the thing being sold, or is it the relationship
• Will diligence run smoothly, or is the paperwork a rebuild
• Is anything about to surface, in a filing or in a lease
• Does the property carry a break, and when

These are the questions that decide a deal, and no free register tool answers any of them. The pack is arranged around them rather than around what happens to be easy to fetch.

A pack you read today is a pack as it stood today. snapdue keeps reading the register underneath it, so a charge registered mid process shows up as a recorded change rather than as a surprise at completion.