Mergers and acquisitions software describes four products with four different buyers, and they get compared against each other constantly because they share a name. The data room is bought by counsel. The deal record is bought by the desk. The diligence tracker is bought by whoever is chasing the list. Integration planning is bought by the acquirer's operations team. This page separates them and identifies which one is actually missing on most small desks.
The data room, bought by counsel
Permissions, watermarking, expiry and an audit trail of who opened what. It is a mature market with real competition, and on most deals the choice is made by the buyer's or the seller's lawyers rather than by the adviser. If this is your gap, it is a separate purchase and a separate comparison from everything else here.
The deal record, bought by the desk
Which mandates are live, at what stage, with which buyers approached and where each got to. This is the gap on most small desks, because a spreadsheet covers it right up to the week its author is away. It is also the one a general sales CRM cannot model without somebody configuring objects for it.
The diligence tracker, bought by whoever chases
Hundreds of requests with owners, dates and states. It can live in the data room or in a shared sheet, and either works if somebody owns the chase. The cost of nobody owning it is measurable: $228 per request left open six weeks on this site's worked example, and $15,595.20 across a list of 180.
Integration planning, bought by the acquirer
Workstreams, day-one readiness, synergy tracking. It belongs to the operations team of the buying company, not to the adviser who ran the process, and advisers who buy it almost never use it because by the time it matters they have been paid and moved on.
Questions people ask about mergers and acquisitions software
Which of the four is the usual gap?
The deal record. The data room gets chosen by counsel, the diligence list can live in a sheet, and integration belongs to the buyer.
Can one product do all four?
Some claim to. They are either expensive or doing three of them thinly, and the four have genuinely different buyers.
What does the diligence chase cost?
$228 per request left open for six weeks on the worked example here, and $15,595.20 across a list of 180 that is 62% answered.