M&A: the operating model, the comps refresh and the ARR waterfall in one workspace

An M&A mandate produces a lot of artefacts that are supposed to agree with each other: the operating model, the comps, the customer analysis, the pitchbook and the discussion materials. They usually live in separate files, owned by different people, and they drift. The late-night job before every meeting is making them agree again.

This playbook describes how a deal team runs the same work in Aqmen, where those pieces live in one place and read from each other. Four properties hold: model, comps and materials in one workspace; new data in, the book updates; every figure in the pitchbook traces to its cell; and the next mandate starts from the last.

Set up

The mandate is a project in the client's workspace, its brief in the project notes. Collections hold the operating model, valuation, customer analysis and materials. Every input the client or the data room provides (historicals, customer files, the management case) is a source, stored in the workspace and cited.

Workstream 1: the operating model

The target's model runs from drivers to cash in a spreadsheet, in your template: your architecture, your formatting, your links. It is connected to the historicals as datasets, so the actuals columns are read from the data, not typed in.

Business plan analysis

EBITDA, 2024 to 2027

The plan assumes 14% a year. The market grows 5.7%: the plan outruns it.

1. 1Illustrative target. Base case against the management plan.

Two practices change how the model survives review:

• Cases are scenarios, not copies. The base case, the management case and a downside are named sets of assumptions on one model. There is one file to maintain, and any case can be explained by listing what it changes.
• Review notes become named assumptions. When a senior reviewer says "take 200 basis points off the margin ramp", that becomes an assumption with a name, a reason and an author, not an overwritten cell. The history of the model is the history of its decisions.

Checks sit on what must tie: the balance sheet, the cash bridge, the revenue build against the reported total.

Workstream 2: the valuation refresh

Trading and transaction multiples are datasets with their sources, and the multiples are calculated under calendarisation and screening rules stated once. When a peer reports, or the deal team changes the set, you replace the data, the medians follow, and the football field redraws under the same rules.

• Multiples cite their filings.
• Calendarisation and screening are stated once, applied to every peer.
• The field redraws when the peer set changes.

There is no live market-data feed: prices and consensus arrive as files you load or as your assistant's research, cited and dated either way.

Workstream 3: the ARR waterfall

Customer data is where M&A models get messy. Billing exports, CRM extracts and contract lists disagree on names, dates and amounts, and the ARR bridge depends on reconciling them.

In Aqmen, each file is cleaned before it is loaded and arrives as a dataset citing its source. Combining them is a derived dataset with the method on record: which keys match customers across files, how duplicates are resolved, how a contract is annualised, which date a movement is booked on. The method is stored with the result, so the reconciliation can be reviewed and re-run when the next month's export arrives.

From that one reconciled table:

• the waterfall splits ARR into new, expansion, contraction and churn, as a chart drawn from the data;
• cohort and retention cuts (net and gross retention by vintage, by segment, by product) come from the same table, so they cannot disagree with the waterfall;
• the operating model's revenue build reads the same figures.

Messy source data, clean lineage.

The pitchbook and the discussion materials

The materials are a deck built in Aqmen. Every chart and figure is added by source, from the model, the comps or the customer analysis, never typed or pasted. When the data behind a slide changes, the slide is flagged before the meeting, not after.

Deck · slides tied to the model

03 · Where the market grows

Southern Europe and DACH add two thirds of the growth

Southern

DACH

Western

CEE

Nordics

Chart added by source, from the modelSlide 5 · its source changed

The deck exports editable, in your house style, for the last mile of formatting. Every figure in it still walks back to its cell, and from the cell to its source.

Where did that number come from?

Each figure in the book has an origin on the record: the cell, the dataset behind it, the method that derived it, and the document that dataset cites. A confidence is stated where an input is a proxy or an estimate. Before you replace a source, you can see every model cell, chart and slide it touches. When the buyer's team asks how the net retention figure was computed, the answer is the reconciliation method, as it was run.

Hand over the workspace, not a file

The pitchbook and the discussion materials still come out as files. The client can also join the workspace as a guest: read the pages, open the model, follow a figure to its source, and ask the next question through their own assistant, from the same data.

Chat, workbook or workspace

What it runs on

Aqmen works inside the assistant your team already uses (Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP-capable assistant). The step-by-step practice is in the open Aqmen skills. Models, documents and decks export editable. The workspace is private to your organization and never used to train models.

If your team spends the night before every meeting making the files agree, talk to our team.