Reported EBITDA
$121,000
As presented in seller-prepared financials
The platform documents. People decide.
Find the issues buyers will challenge — before the deal reaches diligence.
Built for business brokers and M&A advisors in the lower middle market.
A-06 · Family payrollNeeds review
Spouse on payroll, no documented role
$38,000
You choose the treatment. The calculation updates.
The seller markets one number. The buyer underwrites another.
Reported EBITDA of $121,000. Marketed SDE of $363,000. Buyer-adjusted SDE of $243,000 — and an item the evidence can't yet resolve, so the figure is shown as a range rather than a false point.
All three are defensible. The difference between them is the deal.
Figures from a synthetic demonstration file.
Seller's Discretionary Earnings
$363,000
After owner-benefit addbacks · the marketed figure
Buyer-Adjusted SDE
$243,000
What a non-operating buyer underwrites
Unresolved range
Current buyer-underwritten earnings range
$243,000–$261,500
The problem was in the P&L the whole time.
None of these findings are exotic. A competent buyer's accountant would find every one of them. The only question is when — and on whose clock.
Reactive
Found during diligence, after the LOI
Prepared
Found before the listing goes out
The buyer discovers the debt schedule is missing.
The seller produces it. It costs an afternoon.
The buyer discovers the building is rented from the seller, below market.
The CIM discloses it, with the normalization already applied.
The buyer challenges the add-backs. Weeks of email.
Every add-back arrives with its evidence attached.
The buyer prices in the uncertainty and retrades.
Negotiation begins from a documented position.
The seller looks like he was hiding something.
The seller looks like he was ahead of it.
The work gets done either way. The only variable is who finds the problems, and what it costs when they do.
- 01
Upload
P&Ls, tax returns, and add-back schedules. PDFs or spreadsheets. Messy books are the normal case.
- 02
Review
Financial data is extracted, organized, and reconciled across the documents provided. You see what came from a document and what still needs verification.
- 03
Resolve
Include an adjustment, exclude it, or leave it undecided. The earnings range moves as you decide.
- 04
Report
A structured financial review with the earnings bridge, risk flags, contradictions, unresolved questions, and a prioritized evidence-request list.
Financial diligence that shows its work.
An undecided item is not an incomplete report. It is the report doing its job.
When the evidence can't support a treatment, TrueQoE leaves the item unresolved, names the document that would close it, and shows what each answer is worth. The alternative — picking a treatment the evidence doesn't support — produces a number that looks precise and isn't. A buyer who discovers that later discounts everything else in the file.
Finding F-05
Related-party equipment purchase at unknown market pricing
What we found
The company recorded an $18,500 equipment purchase from Coastal Equipment Partners LLC, an entity in which the seller holds a 40% ownership interest. The transaction is identifiable in the records, but the current file does not establish whether the purchase price was consistent with market rates.
Why it matters
A related-party transaction can be entirely legitimate and still require additional support. If the equipment was purchased above market, part of the cost may represent a transfer of value rather than an ordinary operating expense. If it was purchased at market, no adjustment may be warranted. Without pricing support, the earnings effect cannot be resolved responsibly.
Source-linked figures
Every number traces to the document it came from.
Deterministic calculations
The math runs in code, not in a language model. Same inputs, same outputs, every time.
Visible uncertainty
Extraction, calculation, and human judgment stay separated. The system doesn't resolve a judgment call by guessing.
Missing evidence is a finding
Debt service on the P&L with no debt schedule provided appears as a gap, not a silent assumption.
Why not just use ChatGPT?
General-purpose AI is very good at summarizing financial documents. It isn't built to preserve evidence, separate extraction from inference, or produce consistent calculations. TrueQoE uses AI where it's strongest — reading and classifying documents — and purpose-built software everywhere the numbers have to hold up.
Prepare stronger listings. Defend the numbers faster.
Know what a buyer will challenge before you take the listing to market. Support the recast with evidence that's already assembled. Give the CPA a focused list instead of a pile of documents.
TrueQoE doesn't replace your judgment, the seller's CPA, or a formal Quality of Earnings engagement. It replaces the weeks of tracing figures across records to find out whether the recast holds.
Experience behind the platform
Built by Mark Hirsch, whose career spans corporate development, acquisition due diligence, operating leadership, and advising lower middle market businesses through growth and transaction events.
It came out of the work — reviewing targets where the marketing package and the underlying records told two different stories.
“When I first mentioned we were interested in possibly selling our company after 32 years, he immediately gave me checklists and insights on how to best position our company for maximum value — what questions to ask, how to prepare for due diligence, how to put our best foot forward.”
Nothing Is Stored
TrueQoE does not retain uploaded documents, extracted financial data, or generated reports. Documents are processed to produce your analysis and are not written to a database, to disk, or to browser storage.
Third-Party Processing
Document analysis uses the Anthropic API. Anthropic retains inputs and outputs for 30 days for safety and security purposes, then deletes them. This data is not used to train models.
Every Number Is Traceable
Every adjustment, calculation, and conclusion links to the supporting document and the reconciliation record.
Decision Support — Not a Substitute
Built for brokers, buyers, sellers, CPAs, and lenders. The platform organizes evidence and performs deterministic calculations. It does not replace professional judgment.
TrueQoE provides decision-support analysis. It is not a certified Quality of Earnings engagement, audit, appraisal, or credit decision. Final transaction decisions remain the responsibility of you and your professional advisors.
See the software analyze a business.
No slides. No obligation. A live walkthrough using synthetic financials — the same workflow the software runs on real records.