Short answer: a traditional lower middle market quality of earnings engagement runs about three to six weeks from the day the data arrives. QoEAgent returns a complete proof of cash within 24 hours of data ingestion and GAAP-formatted financial statements, including reported EBITDA, within 48.
The review items themselves are in our quality of earnings checklist.
Scope drives price as much as timing does; see quality of earnings report cost for the fee ranges.
The gap between those two numbers is not a difference in effort. It is a difference in what is being automated.
Where the weeks actually go
Ask anyone who has run a QoE where the time went and the answer is almost never “the analysis.” It is two things.
Waiting for records. The seller has to produce bank statements, general ledger exports, trial balances, tax returns, leases, and merchant processor detail. In the lower middle market this is one person who is also running the business. A broker we spoke with put the normal turnaround at a week or two and said it had lately been taking a month.
Reconstructing them. Once the records arrive, somebody has to reconcile them. Multiple bank accounts, multiple months, statements that are scans rather than exports. This is the part that scales with record quality rather than deal size, and it is the part that automation actually changes.
What drives the clock
- Record quality. Native exports versus scanned PDFs is the single biggest variable. Cash-basis or hybrid books add rebuilding work before analysis can start.
- Number of accounts and entities. Each bank account is a separate reconciliation. Each entity is a separate set of books.
- Merchant processor detail. If the business takes cards and cannot produce settlement reports, reconciling to gross revenue stalls.
- Seller responsiveness. The most common cause of a slipped timeline is an unanswered information request.
- Scope. A proof of cash is faster than a full quality of earnings, which adds normalized EBITDA, working capital, concentration and change-of-control analysis.
What 24 and 48 hours actually mean
They are measured from data ingestion, not from engagement. Getting the records out of the seller is still a human process, and no software fixes that. What changes is that once the data lands, the reconstruction is not the bottleneck any more.
On a recent trailing-twelve-month engagement, ingestion meant 431 manually scanned bank statements across 36 bank accounts, from which the platform extracted 29,823 transactions — $100.7 million in deposits and $99.0 million in withdrawals. Revenue and expenses each reconciled to within one percent of bank statement cash receipts and disbursements, at a 99.4% average match rate, with a $32 difference at one location left flagged for a person. By hand, that is roughly four weeks of analyst time.
Why timing is leverage
In a competitive process, the buyer who can verify cash inside an exclusivity window has an advantage over the one who needs four weeks of analyst access. And when the diligence is required rather than optional — as it now is for SBA acquisitions at $3 million or more from October 1, 2026 — turnaround stops being a convenience and starts being a gating item in the credit process.
The useful move is to run the cash verification early, before the letter of intent, rather than late. It is cheaper, it is more diagnostic than a sampled review, and it kills bad deals at the point where killing them costs almost nothing. See do you need a full QoE for a small add-on?
Pricing is published: what a quality of earnings costs. Or get in touch to scope an engagement.