Know the cost of the deal while you can still act on it.
Advilink is live cost and scope control for M&A diligence. It reads the fee letters, engagement letters and invoices as they arrive, keeps committed and actual spend current against scope, and drafts the IC-ready cost story, without chasing anyone.
Advilink is the live operating layer for diligence cost. Set the deal up once. Advilink then reads each advisor update, fee letter and invoice as it lands, and keeps budgeted, committed and actual spend current against scope.
One deal. Every workstream, advisor and pound, in one current view.
Advisory fees run to 3–8% of deal value. Most of it is tracked in spreadsheets and inboxes.
When you run diligence on a deal, you hire legal, tax, financial, commercial and environmental advisors. The fees are large, and the true cost position is usually unknown until the invoices land, often after the deal has closed.
Spend lives in spreadsheets, emails and invoice PDFs
Budget vs. actual is reconstructed by hand, under time pressure, from scattered sources that are always slightly out of date.
Scope changes are agreed verbally, then tracked informally, if at all
By the time a change shows up on an invoice, the work is done and the leverage to challenge it is gone.
Invoices arrive after close, too late to challenge
Overruns are discovered after they happen, not while there is still time to act on them.
The deal lead becomes the one chasing advisors for numbers
Time that should go to the relationship and the deal goes to commercial follow-up and assembling a cost story for the IC from hindsight.
One job, done thoroughly: advisory cost and scope control.
Not a data room. Not a project tracker. Not a billing platform. A live operating layer for the commercial side of diligence, with the reading and drafting built into it.
Budgeted vs. committed vs. actual, by workstream, always current
Advilink pulls the committed and actual figures out of the source documents itself, so every line carries budget, committed, actual and forecast, with variance and a Red / Amber / Green status. You see the cost position of the whole deal at a glance, and where it is heading.
- RAG status per budget line, rolled up to the deal
- Forecast spend, not just spend to date
- Variance against budget, in cash and as a signal
Turn verbal scope changes into a record with a cost impact
Advilink reads each advisor update for work that was never in the original scope and drafts the change with its cost impact and an approval status, so a change is no longer just a conversation. Catch scope creep early, while you can still challenge it.
- Cost impact and rationale attached to every change
- Approval status: requested, approved, declined
- Out-of-scope work surfaced before it is invoiced
Structured spend updates, with an overrun-risk signal
Forward the advisor's email and Advilink extracts the spend to date, the forecast and the overrun risk, showing the sentence each figure came from. Nothing reaches the budget until you have checked it, so tracking happens around the relationship, not on top of it.
- Every figure traceable to the line it was read from
- Overrun-risk signal before the number is final
- Reviewed by you before anything is applied
- No new tooling for advisors to adopt
The IC-ready cost story, generated rather than assembled by hand
Advilink drafts the cost story from the live position: approach, scope, costs, variance and the rationale behind each change, as an IC-ready summary, with the budget-vs-actual schedule as Excel for finance. Hand partners and the investment committee a clean, current picture in minutes.
- IC-ready summary: approach, scope, spend, variance, rationale
- Excel export for finance and reconciliation
- Always reflects the current position, not stale estimates
Catch one scope change and the tool has paid for itself.
The cost of control is a rounding error against the cost of not having it.
A neutral operating layer, built for confidential deal data.
Advilink sits between deal leads and advisors without taking sides, and treats deal information the way deal teams expect: enterprise-grade controls by default, data minimised to what cost control needs.
Take control of the diligence budget on your next deal.
We're onboarding a small group of design partners: private equity, independent sponsors and corp dev teams who run their own diligence. Tell us about a live or upcoming deal.