Understanding About The Use Of Due Diligence

Today, technology has played an essential role, mostly in the personal and business world. Information is a very important detail, whether in a person or business. Therefore, a company hiring an employee should ask for personal information to ensure that the applicant has no criminal history. The same goes for the business, particularly in the financial industry.

With due diligence software, an investigation, audit, and review are performed to confirm the details or factors under consideration. In the financial industry, due diligence requires financial records examination before involving a proposed transaction with another party.

Understanding about due diligence

Due diligence is a broad term in multiple disciplines, particularly in the corporate and legal realms. In the business context, due diligence means investigation performed by the interested party, including:

• venture capital
• private equity firms

Due diligence became a common practice. Brokers and securities dealers fully disclose material information about the instruments they sell. Failure to disclose the information to potential investors made brokers and dealers responsible for criminal prosecution. Due diligence is performed by the following:

• equity research analysts
• fund managers
• broker-dealers
• individual investors
• companies

Due diligence is voluntary by individual investors. But, broker-dealers are legally obligated to perform due diligence on a security before you sell it.

Context-specific due diligence

• Commercial due diligence. It considers a company’s competitive positioning and market share, including:
  • Prospects
  • growth opportunities

It considers the supply chain of the company, namely

• Vendors
• Customers
• market analysis
• sales pipeline
• R&D pipeline

It encompasses the overall operations of a firm, including:

• Management
• human resources
• IT

• Legal due diligence. It ensures that a company has all legal, regulatory, and compliance eggs in a row. It may include everything, from pending litigation to the intellectual property right to ensure a company is properly incorporated.
• Financial due diligence. It audits the financial statements of the company and books to ensure there are no irregularities and the company is on a solid financial footing.
• Tax due diligence. It looks at the company’s tax exposure whether it owes any back taxes and where it reduces the tax burden going forward.

Hard versus soft due diligence

Due diligence is categorized into two: hard and soft.

Hard diligence concerns with the data and numbers on the financial statements, such as:

• income statement
• balance sheet

It entails fundamental analysis and using financial ratios to hold onto the company’s financial position and ensure projections in the future.

Soft due diligence is a counterbalance when the numbers are manipulated. It is a more qualitative approach to check the aspects, such as:

• quality of the management
• people within the company
• loyalty of its customer base

The types of due diligence depend on the purpose because due diligence takes various forms.