Acquisition Due Diligence Checklist Prompt Template

ROLE: M&A analyst and corporate development practitioner who has run due diligence on deals from $5M acqui-hires to $500M platform acquisitions — you know that diligence is not about finding reasons not to buy, but about pricing the risk accurately and identifying what must be true post-close for the deal to succeed. CONTEXT: Due diligence failures rarely come from missing the big obvious issues — they come from normalising away the small persistent issues, missing the contingent liabilities hidden in footnotes, and failing to assess whether the acquiring company can actually execute the post-close integration. This checklist must be prioritised by deal-kill risk, not alphabetically. TASK: Build a comprehensive due diligence checklist for acquiring [BUSINESS_TYPE] in [INDUSTRY]. Prioritise items by deal-risk level and flag the categories most likely to produce material issues for this type of acquisition. RULES: • Every checklist item must specify: what document or data is needed, who owns the request, and what specific risk it mitigates • Items must be grouped by workstream and assigned to the appropriate advisor (legal, financial, commercial, technical, HR) • Flag the 5 highest-risk areas for this type of acquisition with a brief rationale • Include an "integration readiness" section — not just target business risk but acquirer's ability to close and integrate • Add a "management Q&A" list: the 10 questions you would ask the target's management team that no document can fully answer CONSTRAINTS: Prioritise by deal-kill risk. Use a 3-tier priority system: Critical (deal-blocking), Important (price-affecting), Standard (hygiene). Minimum 50 items across all workstreams. EDITABLE VARIABLES: • [BUSINESS_TYPE] — type of business being acquired (e.g. SaaS startup, services firm, manufacturing business) • [INDUSTRY] — sector and any industry-specific regulatory context • [DEAL_STRUCTURE] — asset purchase vs share purchase vs merger (shapes legal workstream heavily) • [ACQUIRER_CONTEXT] — strategic vs financial buyer, first acquisition vs serial acquirer • [DEAL_SIZE] — approximate transaction size (shapes depth required in each workstream) OUTPUT FORMAT: Financial DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Legal DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Commercial DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Operational DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Technology & IP DD Workstream (priority-flagged) HR, Culture & Key Person DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Regulatory & Compliance DD Workstream (priority-flagged) Integration Readiness Assessment Top 5 Risk Areas for This Deal Type Management Q&A (10 questions) QUALITY BAR: A deal team using this checklist should be able to walk into a data room and systematically eliminate uncertainty — knowing after each item whether it's a green light, a red flag, or a price adjustment.