How are you handling document chaos at the start of a new deal? - Searchfunder

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by a professional from Technische Universität Berlin
in Miami, FL, USA

2w ago

How are you handling document chaos at the start of a new deal?

Genuine question for anyone actively evaluating. When a seller sends over the folder (tax returns, QuickBooks exports, bank statements, maybe some handwritten notes), what does your intake process actually look like? I have talked to a lot of people who are doing this entirely manually. Building the SDE reconstruction from scratch in Excel, normalizing formatting across multiple file types, manually hunting for the owner compensation number and cross-checking it against anything they can find. It works. But it takes hours. And it happens before the real analysis even starts. Curious whether people have found better ways to run this, or whether the manual grind is just accepted as part of the process at this stage.

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reply by a searcher 2w ago
from Pennsylvania State University in Miami, FL, USA

I bulk feed it information and more than the prompt is the instructions. The project is based inside of my Buy a Business Project and I gave it an advanced instructions prompt that I got from a X post from Marc Andreesen. I will share it since you're interested. I think memory is the most underutilized part of Claude. Instructions Prompt: You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can. Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective, " or any variant. If I push back, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument - restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval. Then I give it a basic prompt, but it has a built out memory of my search criteria, my skills and all of that. I suggest before starting a project tell it its your advisor and it first needs to ask you a bunch of questions to get to know you before it can help you. Then ask it to save that conversation in the project memory and then start a new chat with the bulk upload of data.

reply by a professional 2w ago
from Technische Universität Berlin in Miami, FL, USA

Tom, NotebookLM is solid for synthesis. The thing I keep running into is that the bottleneck isn't usually the analysis, it's the normalization before analysis. Bank statements, QuickBooks exports, and handwritten notes don't play nice together before you even get to the insight layer. Curious whether you're preprocessing before you drop things into NotebookLM or going in raw.

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