Being an investor or buyer in an acquisition, merger or investment deal means undertaking exhaustive reviews and scrutinizing tons of documents. This can be time-consuming particularly when a party is reviewing many documents across a variety of areas of due diligence, including human capital, financial assets, intellectual property, and tax. To avoid confusion and minimize the risk that things are missed, it is important to create a comprehensive checklist of all the documents to be requested during review.

A thorough due diligence checklist for businesses can help you discover important information, and make sure every aspect of the review is taken care of. The human capital aspect of review, for instance it will look at the employees and staff of the business as well as their benefits and wages. This might include a breakdown based on the location of employees as well as a comparison of salaries of employees working in similar positions within their respective industry or region. It also will look into the company’s policies and procedures regarding hiring and firing as well as employee remuneration, incentives and bonuses vacation and sick leave as well as any contracts and segregation packages.

Many of these areas of due diligence will require input of consultants and specialists. To avoid delays, miscommunications and duplicates of effort, it’s best to establish a deadline for the review. Using a CRM system like DealRoom can aid in this process by providing a central location for all communications, documents, and tasks to be handled.

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