Acquisition deal screen

A worksheet for brokers screening business acquisitions under $2M. Enter the deal's cash flow and the proposed capital stack — buyer equity, seller note, standby terms, and bank/SBA debt — and see whether the entered structure can carry its modeled debt service against the coverage benchmark you set.

This is a screening calculation, not lender underwriting. It does not predict or influence any lending decision, determine whether a buyer will obtain financing, value a business, or provide legal, tax, or accounting advice. How every figure is calculated

Your numbers stay in your browser.

Deal figures you enter are not saved, not sent to CloserToDone, and never included in analytics.
Usage analytics accept only a fixed allow-list of non-financial fields, so no amount, rate, payment, or calculated result can be sent.
The live chat is separate from the worksheet calculations and never receives your figures.
Anything you write — feedback, chat, email — goes to a person, not to analytics, and carries none of your numbers with it.

Privacy has the rest: every event measured, the anonymous pilot invitation token, and how long pilot usage data is kept.

New here? What the Founding Broker Pilot is — free, no obligation, and what it does and doesn't do to your deal and your client.

Deal

Deal or listing name (optional)

Asking price

Cash flow

Cash available for debt service = SDE − buyer owner compensation − other subtractions. Both of those fields reduce the cash left to cover debt service, so enter each as a positive amount to subtract — never as a negative number to add cash back.

Seller's discretionary earnings (SDE)

As reported for the business, before the two subtractions beside it.

Buyer owner compensation

What the buyer intends to pay themselves to run the business. Subtracted from SDE, so a larger figure leaves less cash for debt service.

Other subtractions from SDE (optional)

Anything else you judge the SDE figure should not keep — capex, deferred maintenance, an add-back you do not accept. Also subtracted, so this too leaves less cash for debt service. This screen applies no accounting rule of its own here: it subtracts exactly what you enter.

Capital stack

Enter the two sources the buyer brings: their own cash and any seller note. The bank/SBA loan is not entered — it is whatever is left to fund.

Buyer equity

Dollar amount% of asking price

Seller note (leave blank if none)

Dollar amount% of asking price

Bank/SBA debt — calculated, not entered

There is no bank/SBA amount to enter: it is whatever the deal still needs after the buyer's own cash and the seller note. Total uses of funds (asking price + working capital + closing costs) − buyer equity − seller note = the bank/SBA loan. Enter the rate and term that loan would carry.

Bank/SBA annual rate

Bank/SBA term (years)

Optional assumptions (working capital, closing costs)

Working capital

Added to the total uses of funds and carried by the bank loan, not treated as cash on hand.

Closing costs and fees

Also added to the total uses of funds and carried by the bank loan.

Benchmark

Set this to the threshold the lender on this deal actually uses. SBA program guidance changes over time — confirm the threshold and treatment applicable to this deal.

Coverage benchmark

A multiple, not a percentage — 1.25 means 1.25×.

Benchmark source (optional)

Where this threshold came from, in your words. It is printed on the screening summary exactly as you type it, so leave it blank rather than guessing — the summary will say no source was entered.

Modeling: buyer equity + bank/SBA debt. No seller note entered.

We don't have enough information to screen this deal yet.

Still needed:

the asking price
the seller's discretionary earnings (SDE)
the buyer's owner compensation
the buyer equity amount or percentage

Was this useful for screening a real deal?

Two taps. We read every reply — it shapes what we build next for the Founding Broker Pilot.

Need something specific for your brokerage?

During the pilot we're exploring lightweight customizations to this worksheet — a field, a default, a summary layout that fits how your office screens deals. Tell us what would make it work better for you.

What goes where

The two buttons above record one category — useful or not useful — through the same analytics allow-list as the other pilot events. No deal figures, no free text.
Anything you write in chat or email reaches a person at CloserToDone. Free text cannot enter analytics at all — the allow-list has no field that could carry it.
The worksheet sends nothing to any of them. Your figures stay in your browser, and none of these channels can read them.

The Founding Broker Pilot

The worksheet above is free to use, pilot or not. The pilot is simply the group of business brokers the worksheet is being built with — brokers screening business acquisitions under $2M who are willing to say what the screening math gets wrong.

What you can use: The acquisition deal screen, the printable client summary, the published methodology behind every figure, and the live chat on this page.
What we ask for: After you run a real deal: whether the worksheet was useful, and what it got wrong, missed, or made harder than it should be. The feedback prompt on this page, the chat, or email — whichever you prefer.
What it costs: Nothing. No account, no payment details, no exclusivity, and no obligation — not to give feedback, and not to keep using it.

What it does to your deal: screens it, doesn't judge it

The worksheet takes the structure you enter and reports the arithmetic: the debt service it implies, whether it clears the coverage benchmark you set, and where price or structure would have to land to reach that benchmark. It makes no recommendation about whether your client should do the deal, does not value the business, and does not underwrite or predict any lender's decision.

Elsewhere on this site, consumer tools tell a business owner plainly when the math points toward borrowing less or waiting. The broker worksheet does not do that. It answers the coverage question you asked it and stops; the transaction judgment stays between you and your client.

What it does to your client: nothing

The worksheet asks for no login, no email, and no buyer contact details — there is nothing here that captures a client. There are no lender or provider partner integrations in the product, so there is nobody for CloserToDone to hand a buyer to, and no financing is marketed to anyone you send here. The deal figures themselves never leave the browser.

Send a buyer the summary or the worksheet link without it becoming someone else's lead. Privacy has the full account; questions and pilot inquiries go to raphael@closertodone.com.