Working Capital Due Diligence: A Rigorous Framework for M&A Professionals

Working capital represents the lifeblood of a company's daily operations. In a transaction context, the goal of due diligence is to ensure the buyer receives a business with sufficient liquidity to operate without immediate capital injections. According to Bain's 2026 Global M&A Report, working capital disputes remain one of the top three causes of post-closing litigation in mid-market deals. This underscores the necessity of a precise, data-driven approach to defining 'normal' working capital.

The analysis typically focuses on Operating Working Capital (OWC), which excludes financing items like interest-bearing debt and cash. By isolating accounts receivable, inventory, and accounts payable, deal teams can assess the cash conversion cycle (CCC). A lengthening CCC often indicates deteriorating bargaining power with suppliers or slowing customer collections. In 30+ industry verticals, Plausity applies tailored risk frameworks to benchmark these metrics against sector peers, surfacing anomalies that warrant deeper investigation.

Beyond the numbers, working capital due diligence reveals management's operational philosophy. A lean inventory strategy might suggest high efficiency, but it could also indicate a risk of stock-outs that could hamper growth post-acquisition. Financial advisors must triangulate these findings with commercial due diligence to understand if the current working capital levels can support the projected revenue growth in the management's business plan.

The 'peg' is the target level of working capital that the seller is expected to deliver at closing. Setting this peg requires normalizing the historical data to remove distortions. Normalization adjustments are critical because the balance sheet on the day of the transaction rarely represents the average requirements of the business. Common adjustments include the removal of non-operating items, the correction of accounting policy inconsistencies, and the smoothing of seasonal peaks and troughs.

Determining the peg is often a point of intense negotiation. Sellers prefer a lower peg to maximize the chance of a positive adjustment at closing, while buyers seek a higher peg to ensure they are not funding the target's operations on day one. A robust FDD report provides the evidence needed to defend these adjustments. Plausity's AI Analysis Engine assists by cross-referencing management accounts against audited financials to detect inconsistencies in how working capital components have been categorized over time. This level of source traceability ensures that every adjustment is backed by specific document references, reducing friction during SPA negotiations.

Sophisticated sellers may engage in 'window dressing' to make the company's liquidity appear stronger than it is. This often involves delaying payments to suppliers (stretching payables) or offering aggressive discounts to customers for early payment (pulling forward AR). Without granular analysis, these tactics can artificially inflate cash and deflate working capital requirements. A key red flag is a sudden improvement in the cash conversion cycle in the six months leading up to a sale process.

• Inventory Obsolescence: Slow-moving or dead stock that has not been written down can overstate assets.
• AR Aging: A high percentage of receivables over 90 days suggests collection issues or potential bad debt.
• Unrecorded Liabilities: Accrued expenses or employee bonuses that have not been properly recognized in the current liabilities.
• Customer Concentration: If a single customer drives the majority of AR, their payment behavior dictates the company's liquidity.

Plausity's Risk Radar scans the data room for these specific patterns. By analyzing thousands of invoices and ledger entries simultaneously, the platform identifies anomalies that a manual sample-based review might miss. For instance, it can detect if the aging profile of accounts payable has shifted significantly compared to historical norms, signaling a potential attempt to preserve cash at the expense of supplier relationships. This automated risk scoring allows deal leads to focus their attention on the most material exposures.

Working capital does not exist in a vacuum. Findings in the financial workstream often have significant implications for legal, tax, and commercial DD. For example, a discovery of significant overdue payables might trigger a review of supplier contracts for default clauses or late payment penalties. Similarly, high levels of inventory in foreign jurisdictions can raise complex transfer pricing questions for the tax workstream.

Plausity is designed as an AI-native workspace that runs 9 DD workstreams simultaneously. This architecture allows for cross-workstream reasoning that traditional siloed approaches cannot match. If the legal team identifies a change-of-control clause in a major customer contract, the platform can immediately flag the associated accounts receivable as a potential risk in the financial workstream. This integrated view ensures that the deal team understands the full ripple effect of every finding.

Working Capital DD Checklist for Deal Leads:

1. Verify the consistency of accounting policies across all historical periods.
2. Analyze the monthly fluctuations in OWC to identify true seasonality.
3. Review the top 10 supplier terms and compare them to actual payment dates.
4. Assess the adequacy of the bad debt reserve based on historical write-offs.
5. Identify any 'trapped cash' or restricted cash that cannot be used for operations.

Traditional financial due diligence is often hampered by the manual effort required to normalize data and build bridges. Analysts spend days in Excel, manually mapping trial balances and investigating discrepancies. This manual overhead limits the depth of analysis and increases the risk of human error. Plausity transforms this workflow by automating the ingestion and classification of VDR documents, allowing the AI to perform the heavy lifting of data normalization and anomaly detection.

A Big Four Advisory partner recently utilized Plausity to compress a commercial and financial DD timeline from three weeks to five days on a mid-market transaction. This speed does not come at the expense of rigor. On the contrary, every finding generated by Plausity is linked to the specific document, page, and paragraph, providing full source traceability. This allows senior advisors to maintain control over the conclusions while the AI handles the analytical and operational work. The result is an investor-ready report that is both faster to produce and more robust in its findings.

The insights gained during working capital due diligence should form the foundation of the post-acquisition 100-day plan. If the DD process identified inefficiencies in inventory management or customer billing, these become immediate opportunities for value creation. By optimizing the cash conversion cycle, private equity funds can often 'self-fund' a portion of the acquisition cost through improved liquidity.

Plausity converts DD findings into scored, prioritized post-acquisition roadmaps. These roadmaps include financial impact estimates, allowing management teams to focus on the levers that will drive the greatest improvement in internal rate of return (IRR). For example, if the platform identifies that the target's DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) is 15 days higher than the industry benchmark, the value creation plan will prioritize a revamp of the collections process. This transition from risk identification to value capture is what distinguishes a top-tier M&A process in 2026.