Financial due diligence request list: What to ask a seller for

Most diligence delays start with a vague request. "Send us your financials" gets you a PDF of last year's P&L and a balance sheet from whenever the bookkeeper last ran one. Then you spend two weeks asking for what you actually needed.

A good request list names each report, the period, the basis and the column layout. The seller's bookkeeper should be able to produce it without a phone call. This post walks through the standard QuickBooks reports one at a time: what each one tells you, what period to ask for, and the mistakes that come back most often.

Start with the period end

Every period in your list should hang off one date: the last closed month end. If the seller closed September on October 15, your period end is September 30, 2026. Write it at the top of the request.

Everything else is relative to that date. "Trailing twelve months" means the twelve months ending September 30. "Balance sheet as of period end" means September 30. When October closes, you move one date and the whole list moves with it.

Ask the seller when the books for that month were actually closed. A September that hasn't had bank reconciliations done is not a September you should be underwriting.

Profit and Loss

The P&L is where most of the valuation work happens, so ask for it twice.

Three complete fiscal years, by year. This gives you the trend and lets you compare against tax returns. Ask for one report with yearly columns, not three separate files. If the fiscal year doesn't follow the calendar, say "last three complete fiscal years" rather than naming calendar years, so nobody has to guess.

Trailing twelve months, by month. Twelve monthly columns ending at the period end. This is what you'll build adjusted EBITDA from, and monthly columns are where you spot seasonality, one-off spikes, and months where expenses were clearly booked late.

If you're doing a quality of earnings review, extend the monthly view to 36 months. A single monthly P&L covering October 2023 through September 2026 is easier to work with than three annual reports plus a TTM.

Balance Sheet

Ask for a balance sheet as of the period end. That's the minimum.

For anything beyond a first look, ask for monthly balance sheets over the same window as your monthly P&L. In QuickBooks this is a Balance Sheet run over a date range with columns by month: each column is the balance at that month end. You need these to calculate net working capital by month and set a peg. A single point-in-time balance sheet tells you almost nothing about what "normal" working capital looks like.

Check that it balances. Total Assets should equal Total Liabilities and Equity in every column. If it doesn't, something was edited after export.

General Ledger

The general ledger is every transaction posted to every account for the period. It's the report sellers least want to send and the one you most need. Without it you can't trace a P&L line back to the entries behind it, test whether owner expenses are running through the business, or check that revenue isn't padded with transfers.

Ask for the full GL for the same period as your monthly P&L, usually trailing twelve months at minimum. For a QoE, 36 months.

Two warnings. A GL for a busy company is large, and QuickBooks Online caps how much data one report response can hold, so a long GL run in one go can come back incomplete. And GLs are the report most likely to arrive with accounts filtered out. Compare the GL account totals to the P&L and balance sheet for the same period before you rely on it.

Trial Balance

The trial balance lists every account with its debit or credit balance. It's the bridge between the GL and the financial statements, and the quickest way to check that the books are internally consistent: total debits must equal total credits.

Ask for the trial balance for each complete fiscal year, plus the current year to date. Accountants preparing a QoE often want it by year so they can map every account to their own chart.

Accounts receivable and accounts payable aging

Ask for A/R Aging Detail and A/P Aging Detail as of the period end. The summary versions show totals by customer or vendor in aging buckets (current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90, over 90 days in QuickBooks' default layout). The detail versions list each open invoice or bill, which is what you need to see whether that "current" balance is real.

Aging reports are point-in-time only. There's no such thing as a trailing twelve month aging. If you want to see how AR moved, ask for agings as of several month ends.

Tie the aging totals to the A/R and A/P lines on the balance sheet as of the same date. A gap usually means unapplied payments, credits, or journal entries posted directly to the receivable account.

Sales by Customer

The Sales by Customer Summary shows revenue by customer for a period. You need it for concentration: what share of revenue comes from the top customer, the top five, the top ten. Lenders and buyers both care.

Ask for it over the same multi-year window as the P&L, with yearly columns, so you can see whether concentration is getting better or worse and which customers churned.

Statement of Cash Flows

The cash flow statement is less useful from a small company's books than from audited statements, but it's worth having. It shows whether reported profit is turning into cash, and where cash went: working capital, equipment, distributions, debt paydown.

Ask for it over the same window as the monthly P&L, with monthly columns.

Accrual or cash

Say which basis you want for every report that has one. QuickBooks can run the same report on either basis from the same books, and a bookkeeper who files taxes on cash basis will often default to it.

For valuation, ask for accrual basis unless you have a reason not to. Accrual matches revenue and expense to the period they belong to, which is what you're trying to measure. Cash basis can make a month look great because a big customer paid three invoices at once.

Ask for a cash basis P&L by month as well if you're doing a proof of cash, where you reconcile reported revenue to bank deposits. The two P&Ls side by side are informative on their own.

Aging reports and the cash flow statement don't take a basis setting. Don't ask for a "cash basis AR aging"; it will just confuse the person running it.

A sample request list

Here's a list for a lower middle market deal with a September 30, 2026 period end and a calendar fiscal year. Adjust the windows to the deal.

That's eleven reports. A seller can run all of them in QuickBooks Online in under an hour if they know exactly what's being asked. The list above is designed so they don't have to guess.

What to check when the files arrive

Before anyone starts building a model:

• Every report shows the company name, report title, dates and basis in its header or footer. If they are missing, ask how the file was produced.
• The balance sheet balances in every column.
• The trial balance debits equal credits.
• The P&L net income for each year matches the change in retained earnings, adjusted for distributions.
• Aging totals equal the A/R and A/P balances on the balance sheet at the same date.
• GL account totals for the period match the P&L.

If any of these fail, the problem is almost always in how the file was produced, not in the books. Exported spreadsheets get filtered, re-sorted and hand-corrected. That's the next problem to solve.

Getting the list filled without exports

FinShare exists for exactly this request list. You pick the reports, periods, basis and columns, and the business owner gets a link that shows them the list in plain language. They connect QuickBooks Online, confirm the company and approve. FinShare then reads the reports directly from QuickBooks, checks each one against QuickBooks' own totals and identities (assets equal liabilities plus equity, debits equal credits, subtotals roll up), and delivers Excel files. A report that doesn't tie out isn't delivered.

The general ledger is pulled month by month, and any month too large for a single QuickBooks response is split until it fits, so a long GL arrives complete. The built-in due diligence and quality of earnings packages start from lists much like the one above. Because every period is tied to the period end, you can roll the request forward when October closes, with the owner's approval.