Online Data Room Due Diligence
Speed up the due diligence process and close deals faster with iDeals virtual data rooms
Considerations for choosing virtual data rooms for due diligence
Choosing a due diligence data room is key to starting the project. Typically, this selection process is handled by project teams and dealmakers tirelessly reviewing the many available providers, which could be a confusing and time-consuming task.
Making this decision doesn’t have to be complex. To help you, we addressed the most frequently asked questions when choosing the right due diligence virtual data room.
Does the data room provider have experience working within your industry?
In technology, experience does not relate to age. Modern data room providers combine new and agile technology with expertise working in most industries. The industry experience will determine possible use cases, features, workflows, and compliance policies that a data room must offer for due diligence. Be prepared with relevant questions when talking to a prospective vendor.
Financial services
The financial industry is highly regulated, with companies around the globe struggling to comply with the ever-changing norms. For instance, if your target operates in the US, you may need to set up a virtual data room for reporting to regulatory bodies such as FINRA. Ensuring that the virtual data room providers comply with industry standards is a game changer.
Biotech
In the biotech industry, virtual data rooms improve security and efficiency during due diligence, R&D projects, clinical trials, and licensing. Retaining control over intellectual property and personal health records by keeping due diligence information safe is critical. This helps narrow the list of potential due diligence data room providers to only those compliant with the most robust security standards and local regulations such as HIPAA.
Energy
The highly-competitive energy industry is constantly tightening due diligence requirements and implementing new regulations, this means a vast amount of data exchange. During due diligence, typical oil and gas projects include transferring seismic data and well logs. Similarly, renewable energy projects, a fast-growing sub-sector with numerous investment opportunities, require plant data sharing. Whether it is capital raising, licensing, or a merger deal — a virtual data room for your project It needs to supports the proper file formats and be easy and quick to set up to help facilitate your project.
Legal services
Legal advisers often deal with either buy-side or sell-side M&A. As a result, they are often involved in numerous parallel projects, dealing with hundreds of clients simultaneously. Hence, they must keep their records safe and organized and ensure that collaboration is streamlined and confidential. With a VDR and its in-built Q&A module, legal firms centralize documents and manage all communications seamlessly and securely. Additionally, they can customize the layout of the dataroom due diligence with their corporate branding, and this is another advantage over other common cloud solutions or physical data rooms.
Information technology (IT)
The IT industry has grown significantly over the last decade. This growth has led to an increase in M&A, venture capital deals, and IPOs. Millions of technology startups are raising capital every day, and none of them should miss a funding opportunity because of the complexity of a platform. In such a competitive environment, there is a need for an easy-to-use and plugin-free data room for due diligence with 24/7 support to assure smooth deal execution.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure industry often uses virtual data rooms to manage a project’s financial documents. Most construction and building projects are long-term, so they often require continual interactions with investors, banks, and other lending institutions. Therefore, it’s crucial to have the ability to share sensitive financial and engineering data as well as other confidential documents. It is also worth considering that not all virtual data room providers support non-office file types.
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Can the data room vendor provide a due diligence index for your project?
Every industry has specific standards that affect the due diligence structure, so working with a virtual data room that provides automatic indexing and bulk-structure import is crucial. VDR providers can also assist with a checklist that helps dealmakers navigate the complexities of structure-building.
Due diligence checklists by type:
Financial (accounting) due diligence
The main purpose of conducting due diligence is to investigate the financial performance of a target company, which includes, for example, checking balance sheets, profit and loss statements (P&L), and other supporting financial documents.
Legal due diligence
Legal due diligence aims to determine whether a target company is involved in any litigation proceeding or has any risky legal liabilities.
IT due diligence
The due diligence process for an IT company determines whether spending is at an appropriate level for the company’s size. The investigation also helps to establish if the company can meet planned growth projections.
Commercial due diligence
Commercial due diligence helps to identify potential opportunities and the company’s position within the industry. Findings are based on the overall attractiveness of the industry and long-term commercial prospects.
Tax due diligence
Financial statements, tax returns, and audits are typical examples of documents usually examined during tax due diligence. This process identifies a company’s current and potential tax liabilities.
Operational due diligence
Operational due diligence analyzes the manufacturing process and the company’s supply chain and distribution to uncover any possible capital risks.
FAQ
Typically you can invite users by emailing them an invitation. To save time and ensure users access to your project, the iDeals virtual data room allows you to invite users in bulk, and the system automatically alerts you if an invitation has not been delivered.
Most corporate IT departments forbid employees to install additional software on their company computers for data security purposes to increase security. Most advanced due diligence data rooms, such as iDeals, do not require any extra software and are easy-to-deploy solutions. However, some versions still require plugins. It's worth double-checking your company policies and vendors' offers.
You can configure granular access for uploaded documents by setting up different access levels for various user groups. With iDeals virtual data room, you have eight different permission levels, and it is extremely easy to authorize and control access rights. Regarding document access, you can set up restricted viewing or manipulation of excel reports with or without formulas. For other documents, users can upload, download original, download PDF, print, download encrypted documents, view, fence view, and restrict permissions.
With the help of complete audit trails implemented on iDeals virtual data rooms, you can always check the number of documents users reviewed. On the colorful "heat map", every document is filled with a specific color with the relevant percentage ratio, reflecting the number of pages a particular user has viewed. This helps to understand the stage of your due diligence progress and your prospective partners' areas of interest.
Depending upon the industry and deal, required documents may be uploaded to the virtual data room in specific file formats to meet compliance regulations. The most important goal of the due diligence process is to exchange confidential information in the fastest and safest way. So having a list of requirements, a preset folder structure, and index templates can help to save time and keep your data room workspace organized. iDeals Solutions has assisted with thousands of deals and projects and provides professional virtual data room due diligence indexes for different industries.
How can I give a professional look to my data room’s workspace and inspire confidence in my clients?
Customizing a data room with your company's logo and brand colors gives it a professional and unique look. This can't be done with a physical data room, and it is still not offered by most virtual data room platforms nowadays. The iDeals virtual data room allows you to apply your logo and color schemes, making it feel and look like your company's interface without extra charges.
Most providers state that they provide 24/7 support, but most do not have their performance standards defined in the service-level agreement (SLA). The iDeals customer support team guarantees an immediate response via phone or chat and a 15-minute response time via email. Our quality support is outstanding and has been recognized by our customers’ reviews on G2 and Capterra. More than 93% of our email requests are answered within 5 minutes. Our 24/7 customer support team is always happy to assist our clients in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese.
Document encryption is an industry standard. In addition to multilayered data encryption, the iDeals virtual data room provides extra security features. For example, “Fence View” prevents documents from being photographed and provides the most reliable protection against unauthorized copying in combination with dynamic watermarks.
When it comes to data due diligence, security is one of the most important aspects. So it is strongly advised to check if a data room provider complies with some of the most common security compliance standards. For example, an iDeals virtual data room complies with the most rigorous industry standards, such as ISO 27001:2013, SOC II, and Safe Harbor.
You can request an archive containing all necessary records, such as uploaded and deleted files with previous versions, and activity logs by Flash or DVD drive.
Why choose iDeals virtual data room?
Since our beginning in 2008, we have tasked ourselves to create technology advances and deliver outstanding customer experience. We are dedicated to designing a robust, secure, and yet highly user-friendly solution to support project teams and dealmakers. Our platform offers effective document and user management features, real-time activity tracking, granular reports, and in-built collaboration tools in a intuitive way. As a result, we’ve successfully supported over 1,000,000 professionals from 175,000 companies to conduct their projects and deals more efficiently and securely.
What our clients say about us
We are in long-term cooperation with Ideals as a data room provider, supporting our business with high-quality, first-rate technical help. The Ideals data rooms are user-friendly and offer a range of tools for simplifying and accelerating our M&A transactions. The Ideals team meets all of our requirements and needs which helps us to be more efficient.
Sebastian Scherkl
Group Head IT
Aquila Capital
Aquila Capital
Ideals was one of the few virtual data-room suppliers that were able to comply with the high cyber-security standards of the Saudi Arabian Government when it comes to hosting data. The data needed to be hosted within Saudi Arabia and Ideals' ability to deploy their servers on-premise for our client in the Kingdom was impressive.
Dhyan Biddappa
Vice President - IB Advisory
BNP Paribas Corporate
BNP Paribas Corporate
We chose Ideals Virtual Data Room for M&A transactions by conducting a tender between 5 providers. Our goal was to find the most appropriate solution for such type of a deal, and we could not be happier with our choice. The whole process of working with Ideals VDR went very smoothly. What I can specify is that it’s pretty intuitive to work with the framework provided, and the team is great, ready to help fast and exactly when needed. The price of the service was for our сlient's goods as well.
David Strycek
Senior Consultant
Ernst & Young
Ernst & Young
We continually use virtual data rooms provided by Ideals, the interface is friendly, everything works fine. I am willing to recommend Ideals as a reliable and responsible partner.
Hakon L. Akerlund
IT Security
Landsbankinn
Landsbankinn
