Reported EBITDA
$121,000
As presented in seller-prepared financials
Know what you're buying before you sign the LOI.
TrueQoE helps buyers understand what a business actually earns — what supports that conclusion, and what still needs to be resolved — before due diligence begins.
Most buyers don't overpay because they misread a P&L.
They overpay because they believed earnings that couldn't be defended.
An owner's salary added back with no cost booked for the person who'll replace them. A spouse on payroll with no documented role. Rent paid to the seller's own LLC at half the market rate. Equipment bought from a company the seller partly owns, at a price nobody checked. “One-time” expenses that show up every year.
Each one changes what the business actually earns. Each one requires judgment. And the problem isn't that these calls are subjective — it's that nobody writes down the reasoning. So every number turns into an argument, usually after you've already committed.
Before you decide what a business is worth, you have to know what it actually earns.
The seller's financials tell you what happened. The seller's recast — their adjusted version of the earnings — tells you what they think should count. Neither answers the question you're actually asking:
What does this business really earn — and how certain are we?
TrueQoE helps you answer that question with documented evidence. What changed, why it changed, what supports it, and what's still unresolved — shown as a range when the file can't support a single number.
Seller's Discretionary Earnings
$363,000
After owner-benefit addbacks · the marketed figure
Buyer-Adjusted SDE
$243,000
What a non-operating buyer underwrites
Unresolved range
Current buyer-underwritten earnings range
$243,000–$261,500
Leaving an item Undecided is a decision.
When the file can't support a treatment, TrueQoE doesn't guess. The item stays open, the review names the exact document that would close it, and the earnings figure becomes a range instead of a single number the evidence can't support.
You don't have to accept anyone's adjustments on faith. You can see where every number came from, what evidence supports it, and which questions are still unanswered — so you know the full spread of what you might be buying, and exactly what it would take to narrow it. That lets you decide whether the uncertainty is acceptable before it becomes a negotiation — or a surprise.
A-06 · Family payrollNeeds review
Spouse on payroll, no documented role
$38,000
You choose the treatment. The calculation updates.
You can see exactly where every number came from.
Every figure traces back to the document and page it was pulled from. The same inputs produce identical results, every time. And when something is missing, that's treated as a finding, not smoothed over: debt payments on the P&L with no debt schedule in the file show up as a gap, because that gap is exactly what your lender will ask about.
Unknowns stay unknowns. Nothing in the review is manufactured certainty.
What the review shows.
- The earnings bridge — from the earnings the seller reported, through each adjustment, to the number a buyer would actually underwrite. Every step traceable.
- The adjustment register — every proposed adjustment, how it was treated, and the evidence behind it.
- Risk flags and contradictions — the places where the documents disagree with each other, surfaced instead of smoothed over.
- The evidence-required list — what's missing from the file, and what each missing document blocks.
- Questions for the seller — what to ask the seller, generated from the findings in the review.
It arrives in minutes, not weeks — early enough to shape your Letter of Intent (LOI) instead of unwinding it.
Before you negotiate the price, know what you're negotiating.
If the earnings change, the value changes. If uncertainty remains, risk remains.
The goal isn't to prove the seller wrong. In many cases the issue isn't that anyone was hiding anything — it's that no one ever documented the reasoning the way a buyer needs to see it. The goal is to understand what you're buying, while you still have every option open.
Before the QoE — not instead of it.
A traditional Quality of Earnings engagement is thorough, professional, and expensive — and most buyers commission one after the LOI, when the deal already has momentum. TrueQoE helps you answer an earlier question: is this business ready for an LOI at all?
Run it before you commit. If the deal moves forward, your QoE provider starts from an organized evidence set instead of a pile of PDFs, and your CPA spends their hours on judgment instead of sorting.
The platform documents. You decide. TrueQoE is decision support — not a certified Quality of Earnings engagement, not an audit, not an appraisal — and it doesn't replace your professional advisors. It makes their work, and yours, start further ahead.
Know what you're buying.
See TrueQoE analyze a business — a live walkthrough on synthetic financials, twenty minutes, no obligation.