How it plays out on a deal
Before secure web platforms, diligence meant booking time slots in a physical room, signing in, reading under supervision and requesting copies. It limited the number of bidders, slowed every round and made it hard to tell who had read what.
Physical rooms are rare now, but the comparison is still useful when judging software. A virtual room should beat the paper version on every control that mattered there: who came in, what they looked at, what they took away. If a platform cannot say who opened a file, it has lost a control the paper room had.
What to check in a review or demo
- 1Whether the audit trail records opens, prints and downloads per person with timestamps.
- 2Whether access can be limited to set dates, in the way a physical room had visiting hours.
- 3Whether printing can be switched off entirely for sensitive folders.
Read alongside
- Virtual data room (VDR)Deal software that lets one side publish sensitive files to a vetted audience, such as bidders, lenders or a fund's analysts, while deciding folder by folder who may open what and logging each open.
- Audit trailThe room's running log of who did what and when.
- Access expiryA preset end date or time after which a user, group or document is no longer accessible, without the administrator having to remove it manually.
- Download and print controlsSettings that decide whether a user may save or print a document, often with options such as download as protected PDF, original format or not at all.