5 Data Room reports to protect your deal

When navigating a transaction, nothing can be left to chance. The amount of time, effort, and communication that goes into making a deal successful can not be understated. 

But even if the documents have been organized and the bidders have been given access, now is not the time to kick your feet up and wait for an offer to come in. Collating different metrics and interpreting their results will help you make faster and more effective decisions in response to bidder behaviour, including rises or falls in interest, to keep the deal progressing.

Ansarada’s comprehensive Data Room software reporting provides transparency into which documents are garnering the most attention and which members of the room are the most active, with built-in features to safeguard your deal and your information while keeping things moving swiftly. In this article, we highlight some of our most popular reports to make sure you are getting the most out of your Data Room reporting. For a full list of available reports, click here.

Note: These reports are available for all Data Room Admins and Viewers
 

Activity Summary

The activity summary gives a high level overview of logins, documents viewed, and questions submitted by Data Room users. Accompanied with a line graph of activity, this report also provides a total percentage of questions submitted by individuals, indicating which bidders are most involved in the Q&A process. This report can be run at the team or individual level, giving you complete oversight of all activity in the room and a full audit trail. It’s a great starting point before you need to drill down into the audit trails of a document or bidder. 
 

Activity Log by Person

For a more granular look into individual activity, the activity log by person contains a total history of all activity an individual has taken within the Virtual Data Room. This log shows the date and time of each login, question submitted or viewed, document view, and bulk download. Even if a user had downloaded a document from the room, and opened it up from their desktop without logging back into the room, the document view will still be recorded in this log, so long as you have applied Data Room security to the document.

Documents viewed by person can allow you to assess their levels of engagement and spot suspicious activity before things go any further. A bidder who seems very interested may be a competitor, or only be in the Data Room to scope out specific documents. In one major transaction, an ‘interested’ party had only viewed 2 documents multiple times - which included salaries of two high profile employees. This report enabled the advisors to kick them out early and ultimately, close the deal in record time for a record price. More on documents viewed in the next report.
 

Document Views Summary

The Document Views Summary report gives you a full overview of all the activity occurring on document files, including a full audit trail of each individual’s activity. It functions like a heat map of bidder interest, and helps you spot key areas to drill down on and learn more. For example, if one party has stalled, you can look into their searches, and perhaps spot information they are seeking that hasn’t been provided yet. This allows you to stay proactive in nurturing as many bidders through as possible, maintaining key competitive tension.

Being able to review documents viewed outside of the Data Room is another important feature. As there are no plugins or special viewers with Ansarada to interrupt the bidder experience, you are more likely to witness natural bidder behaviour. In one classic example, a bidder claimed to have no interest in one of the assets for sale. Yet the deal team could see from their activity that they had meticulously gone through every document relating to this asset outside of the room after bulk downloading onto a USB stick. Growing more certain everyday that the bidder’s “lack of interest” was strategic, gave the deal team confidence to counter his offer with a large premium and close the deal. Ansarada’s tools are designed to give you that extra edge, to help you perform at your best.
 

Aged Questions

The Q&A tool available within Ansarada Data Rooms provides a streamlined, central location for due diligence Q&A. With the ability to prioritize questions and design your workflow with different Q&A roles, you’re able to save time that was previously spent searching through and organizing questions sent to you via email.

The aged questions report allows you to filter questions by their current status, as well as by how many days ago they were submitted. This report helps you determine which questions require immediate attention so you can act quickly to prioritize them. Adding Ansarada Q&A to your deal workflow can save as much as 50% from your timeline.
 

Insights / Bidder Engagement Score

All of the above mentioned reports allow visibility into different facets of the Data Room experience, allowing you to make your own determinations regarding bidder engagement. However, we’ve taken that a step further with our AI-powered Bidder Engagement Score. 

Many dealmakers would agree that by 6 weeks into a deal, after viewing reports, taking calls - dealmakers have a strong gut instinct around who is hot (and who isn’t). But can a machine get you to that point faster? So you can stay on the front foot, instead of reacting?

The Bidder Engagement Score is an algorithm trained on tens of thousands of deals to help you understand who is engaged, and who isn’t, with up to 97% accuracy by day 7 of a deal. It allows you to validate your gut instinct with real data while there’s still time to impact the outcome.

When activated, the score arrives in your inbox weekly as a percentage, with anything over 50% representing an engaged bidder. You’ll also see the trend week on week to see if they are improving or not, and the top 3 factors that are impacting their score. This helps you eliminate time wasted on disengaged bidders and focus your efforts on the ones most likely to convert, so you can get the deal done faster.