Documents needed to sell a business
- What assembling it costs in your own time
- $2,730
- Hours to assemble the whole pack
- $36.40
- Hours a week to be ready in time
- $4.55
Every figure here comes from the figures you enter and the method stated beside it: your document count, your own hourly worth, your expected price. This site publishes no valuation, no tax position and no legal opinion; what a clause means for your deal is your solicitor's and your accountant's.
A buyer's diligence list is the first real work of a sale, and it arrives as a list of things you are expected to already have. Most owners have perhaps two thirds of it to hand and discover the rest by looking. What follows is what the pack usually contains, why it is worth assembling before a buyer asks rather than after, and what a record of it has to hold once more than one party is asking.
Open the Selling a business checklist Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
List what will be asked for, before anybody asks
Corporate records, financial statements and returns, contracts with customers and suppliers, leases, employment records, and anything the business depends on to keep operating. Written as a list, it stops being a surprise.
Find out which ones you do not actually hold
This is where the time goes. A document you know the location of is minutes; one that has to be requested from a landlord, a registry or a former adviser is weeks, and finding out which is which early is the whole point of starting before a buyer exists.
Keep the pack as a record, not a folder
Once more than one party is asking, the useful questions become what is outstanding, who asked for it and which version they were given. A folder answers none of the three; a record of requests against documents answers all of them.
Documents needed to sell a business: common questions
When should the pack be assembled?
Before going to market, because the items you cannot find are the ones that set the timetable. Assembling it after a buyer has asked turns a known delay into a visible one, which is a worse position to negotiate from.
Does this site tell me which documents my sale requires?
No. What a particular buyer asks for depends on the deal, the industry and their advisers, and what you must produce is a question for your own solicitor and accountant. This hub prices and tracks the work of assembling whatever list you are given.
What if a buyer asks for something we never had?
Record the request and the answer rather than leaving it open. An item that is genuinely absent, with a written explanation, is a far better position than one that stays outstanding because nobody closed it.
Exitvo Pro
Keeping what you make
The checklist is free. Pro is what happens once a buyer is actually asking: the documents go in as records, each request is tracked against the person who made it, and every version carries the date it was shared, so nobody has to remember which copy anybody has.
- Download the pack as a file you can send on
- Your packs and indexes without our name on them
- Save the sale file and open it again next week
- Your business name and logo on every pack and index
- Export the whole sale file in one go
- Send a document from inside the file rather than from your inbox
- Take a deposit without leaving the record
- Connect QuickBooks or Xero to your account
$24per month, one sale
Start Exitvo Pro PricingExitvo Pro is $24 per month, billed monthly, and renews each month at that price until you cancel. The price and renewal terms are shown again before checkout.
Will it do what you need for Documents needed to sell a business?
Tell us where you are in selling your business and what you are trying to keep track of.
Cite or embed this figure
On the worked example, a 42-document pack takes 36.4 hours to assemble and is worth $2,730 of the owner's own time at $75 an hour, from the figures entered and the method stated beside them.
Selling a business checklist (What assembling it costs in your own time): $2,730, Exitvo, worked example.
Cite as: "Documents needed to sell a business, Exitvo", updated 2026-09-04, https://exitvo.com/documents-needed-to-sell-a-business/.