Due diligence request lists
What is a due diligence request list?
How it differs from a checklist, how it maps to evidence, and why "no answer" is a valid, important outcome.
01What is a due diligence request list?
A due diligence request list (DD request list) is a structured set of items a buyer's deal team needs to see or confirm about a target company, organised by workstream, before a transaction can proceed.
Each line is a specific ask — "schedule of all outstanding borrowings, terms, covenants, and collateral," not just "debt information" — and the whole diligence exercise is essentially the process of working through that list against whatever the target has actually disclosed.
02What's the difference between a request list and a checklist?
A checklist is typically generic — a standard set of items every deal in a category should cover. A request list is that checklist adapted to one specific transaction: tailored line items, assigned owners, and (critically) a live status showing what's actually been satisfied so far. In practice most teams start from a checklist template and turn it into a request list once a deal is live.
03How is a due diligence request list structured?
Request lists are almost always organised by workstream, since financial, legal, tax, commercial, and corporate reviewers are looking for different kinds of evidence:
| Workstream | Example request line |
|---|---|
| Financial | Audited standalone and consolidated financial statements, last three fiscal years |
| Tax | Transfer pricing study, if applicable to intercompany transactions |
| Legal | Schedule of all outstanding borrowings, terms, covenants, and collateral |
| Corporate | Confirmation of compliance with applicable regulatory filing requirements |
(These are illustrative example line items, the same ones used in Vaultrix's own product demo — not a specific real transaction.)
04How do requests get mapped to evidence?
Each request line gets compared against everything in the data room to determine whether it's actually been satisfied. Done manually, this means a reviewer reading through folders looking for a document that answers each specific line — slow, and easy to miss something in a room with hundreds of files. Done with Vaultrix, the AI Analyst runs this comparison automatically across the whole room and proposes a status for every line.
05What are the possible outcomes when mapping a request list?
Every request gets one of four outcomes: evidence found, partially supported, no evidence found, or conflicting. Don't just find what's in the room — find what's missing. Surfacing gaps during diligence, instead of after closing, is the entire point of doing this mapping systematically rather than as a final read-through.
| Outcome | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ✓ Evidence found | The room contains a document that directly satisfies the request. |
| ◖ Partially supported | Some, but not all, of what the request asks for is present — e.g. two of three required credit agreements are there, one pledge is missing. |
| ! Conflicting | Two source documents disagree on the same fact the request is asking about. |
| — No evidence found | Nothing in the room addresses the request at all. |
06Why does human review still matter once requests are mapped?
An automated status is a proposal, not a decision. A document can look like it satisfies a request and still miss the specific detail a reviewer would catch, and "no evidence found" sometimes means the document exists but wasn't uploaded, not that it doesn't exist at all. That's why a request list should never auto-close itself — a person confirms each status before it counts as resolved.
07How does Vaultrix map request lists to evidence?
Import your existing request list from Word or Excel — no need to rebuild it in a new format. Vaultrix maps every line against the uploaded data room, proposes one of the four outcomes above, and cites the exact page, slide, or cell behind each finding. Your team reviews and decides; Vaultrix never closes a request on its own. See it work in the request-list section of the homepage or the interactive demo.