What the Acquidex Score means — and what it doesn't.

Calculators run numbers you already have through a formula and return a pass/fail verdict. The Acquidex Score reads the business behind the numbers: it evaluates earnings quality, transferability, lender-grade DSCR using SBA SOP 50 10 8 methodology, and industry-specific benchmarks to tell you what's actually going on, not just whether the numbers you entered clear an arbitrary threshold. A calculator tells you if a $500k ask with $150k SDE has a 1.4x DSCR. Acquidex tells you whether that $150k SDE is real, whether the DSCR survives normalization, whether the business can run without the seller, and what a lender is going to say when they look at it. Those are different products.

With caveats — and the caveats are visible in the score itself. When the score is built mostly from listing data and broker claims, the confidence interval is intentionally wide (often around ±14 points). As you enter more fields and replace claims with documents (tax returns, P&Ls, balance sheets, bank statements), the data quality improves and the score tightens (often to ~±4 points). The output surfaces what's verified vs assumed so you can calibrate how much weight to put on it. Use a high-confidence score to support an LOI; use a low-confidence score to decide whether it's worth spending diligence time.

Tell us. Every score is generated against a transparent methodology that can be audited, and the metrics breakdown shows the specific values that drove the result. If your disagreement is with an input we misread, we'll correct it and rescore. If your disagreement is with the benchmark we used, we'll show you the peer group and the data sources. If your disagreement is philosophical — if you think a 48% customer concentration is fine because you know the customer personally — that's a judgment call we can't make for you, and it's exactly the kind of thing Section 06 flags as belonging to human diligence. The score is one input. Your judgment is the decision.

Not necessarily. A low score means the current structure has problems a disciplined analyst would flag. Those problems are often fixable through negotiation — a different price, a seller note, an earn-out, a longer transition, a different working capital structure, a management hire before closing. The score surfaces the gaps so you can go back to the seller or the broker with specific, defensible asks. The deals that die in diligence are usually the ones where the gaps weren't identified until it was too late to restructure. The score's job is to identify them early.

No. A high score means the mechanical fundamentals are strong — pricing is defensible, fundability is high, earnings quality is clean, and transfer risk is manageable. It does not account for seller motivation, buyer-specific fit, customer loyalty depth, IP quality, legal exposure, or any of the other factors listed in Section 06. A strong deal on paper can still be the wrong deal for a specific buyer. Use the score to know whether the deal is worth pursuing; use your own judgment and advisors to decide whether it's the deal for you.

The Acquidex Score serves four parties, each differently. Buyers use it to pressure-test deals before signing an LOI. Sellers use it to prepare their business for sale and identify improvement areas before going to market. Brokers use it to structure listings and deals that actually close, and to have defensible conversations with both sides. Lenders use it to pre-screen acquisition loan applications and surface risk factors earlier in the underwriting pipeline. The score is the same across all four use cases; what changes is the conversation it enables.

Any small business with a NAICS code. The score adjusts its benchmarks — multiples, DSCR expectations, margin ranges, working capital norms — to the specific industry, because a 3.2x SDE multiple is generous for a restaurant and low for a SaaS business. The score uses peer-group data at the NAICS code level, so an HVAC company is scored against HVAC companies and a landscaping business is scored against landscaping businesses. Industries with thinner data will produce wider confidence intervals, and the score will indicate when that's happening.

The free score is the top-level Signal Score with the confidence band and the metrics breakdown — enough to screen a listing and decide whether it's worth pursuing. The paid analysis unpacks the full reasoning: the critical risks, the stress test, the capital stack modeling, the earnings reconciliation (including what your take-home actually looks like and what changes if you hire a manager), the diligence question list tailored to the specific deal, and the buyer target profile that tells you what kind of operator is positioned to make this deal work. If the free score gives you the verdict, the paid analysis gives you the playbook.

Yes — and you should. The score is designed to create shared language across all parties in a deal. A shareable link travels with the deal through the conversations that matter, and it means the buyer, seller, broker, and lender can all work from the same analytical baseline instead of three different spreadsheets. That's the alignment function the score is built for.

No. A valuation is a formal opinion about what a business is worth, produced by a qualified valuator under established standards for a specific purpose (sale, tax, litigation, estate planning). The Acquidex Score is an analytical composite that measures how a deal compares to institutional benchmarks at a point in time. It includes a "fundamentals gap" view that shows where the asking price sits relative to the industry range, but that's a reference band, not an appraisal. If you need a formal valuation — for legal, tax, or lending purposes — hire a qualified professional. Use the score to prepare for the conversation, not to replace it.

A score is a snapshot of the deal at a specific moment against the market conditions and methodology version at the time of generation. For active deals moving through diligence, we recommend rescoring any time material new information surfaces — verified financials, updated working capital figures, a renegotiated price, a changed transition plan. For listings older than 90 days, we recommend a freshness rescore before making any decisions, because market conditions and our benchmarks may have shifted.

Trust the methodology for what it is: a transparent, repeatable translation of how disciplined SMB underwriting is typically done. Acquidex encodes lender mechanics based on SBA SOP 50 10 8, uses NAICS-level peer benchmarks for industry comparisons, and organizes risk into explicit categories (fundability, earnings quality, value, transferability) that map to the reasons deals most often fail in diligence. The key is that the logic is inspectable: the Metrics Breakdown shows the exact inputs and benchmark rails used, and the score surfaces what is verified vs assumed so you can calibrate confidence. It's designed to be defensible and auditable — not a black box, and not a substitute for documents or professional advice.