One tool. Five kinds of deal team that own the budget.
AdviLink is live cost and scope control for M&A diligence. The product does not change from one buyer to the next. What changes is the deal context, the workstreams, and who carries the cost of an overrun. Below is how the same control reads for each.
Several live deals at once, each with its own budget to defend to LPs
A fund runs diligence on more than one target at a time, with broken-deal cost a live risk on every one. The partner needs the cost position of each deal current, not reconstructed the week the invoices land, and a clean read across the portfolio for the IC and for LPs who ask where the management fee went.
- Budget vs. committed vs. actual vs. forecast per deal, rolled up to a RAG status
- The IC-ready cost story exported rather than assembled by hand under deadline
- Broken-deal exposure visible while there is still room to pull spend
No committed fund behind you. Every pound of fees is spent at risk, before close.
Diligence costs are carried personally or by backers until the deal closes — and if it breaks, they are a straight loss. Fee discipline is not housekeeping; it is capital efficiency, and the case you make to the capital partner depends on it.
Spend is committed before there is certainty the deal completes
Legal and financial fees mount through diligence while the outcome is still open, with no fund to absorb an overrun.
A scope change agreed verbally becomes a fee you cannot recover
Capture the change with its cost impact at the moment it is agreed, while there is still leverage to challenge or decline it.
The capital partner expects a defensible cost position, not an estimate
A current budget-vs-actual schedule is the difference between a confident raise and a hand-wave.
The two capabilities that earn their place here: scope-change capture before the invoice, so out-of-scope work is challenged while it is still a conversation; and a live cost position you can put in front of a backer. Catch one scope change and the tool has paid for itself.
A lean team — often one buyer — and no back office to chase advisors
The searcher is running the deal, the model and the relationships at once, with no finance function behind them. Tracking advisor spend by hand is the first thing that slips, and it is the thing that decides whether the first acquisition starts on budget or already behind it.
- Structured spend and status updates from advisors, so chasing for numbers stops
- An overrun-risk signal before the forecast is final, not after the invoice
- No tracker to build from scratch on the busiest deal of your career
The diligence budget is a line the board signed off — and will ask about
Corp dev answers to an internal investment committee and a finance function with their own controls. The spend is approved against a number, and the question after close is always whether it held. The cost story has to be clean, current and defensible without a week of reconciliation.
- Budget vs. actual against the approved number, with variance and rationale attached
- An IC-ready PDF and an Excel schedule finance can reconcile against the ledger
- Every scope change and approval recorded, so the audit trail writes itself
Long diligence, many technical workstreams, advisory bills to match
Infrastructure deals run technical, environmental, regulatory and commercial diligence over months, with specialist advisors on each and fees that dwarf a typical mid-market deal. Spend-to-date tells you little; the question is where each workstream is heading.
Cost is spread across many specialist workstreams, each with its own cap
Technical, environmental, regulatory and commercial advisors all run in parallel — the aggregate is only legible if every line carries its own budget and status.
Over a long diligence, spend-to-date hides where it ends up
A workstream can read comfortable at the half-way mark and finish well over. Forecast, not just actuals, is what flags the overrun in time.
A single technical workstream can quietly absorb the whole contingency
Per-line RAG rolled up to the deal surfaces the one workstream drifting before it becomes the number the IC asks about.
The capabilities that matter most here: per-workstream RAG rolled up to the deal, so the one line that is drifting is visible against the dozen that are fine; and forecast spend rather than spend-to-date, so a long diligence is judged on where it lands, not where it stands today.
The budget is yours to defend. Take control of it on the next deal.
We're onboarding a small group of design partners across private equity, independent sponsors, search funds and corp dev. Tell us about a live or upcoming deal and we'll show you the cost position you'd have on it.