I am in agreement with Siva on the benefits of the “Clean Team”. We had one for our last M&A that was a 3rd party vendor and that seemed to work well; however, they weren’t allowed to share that information below a certain level based on our agreement, so post-close we had to ask for it all again. We developed a list and templates that we provided to the company we were acquiring that had all the information we needed. They could fill out the items they felt comfortable with pre-close and send it to us, then day 1 would provide the rest. This seemed to work well in our case, but depending on the information you need – it might not.
