Reported SDE tells you what a business earned. Gut Check connects directly to Shopify and Stripe and shows how much of it actually converted to cash — in minutes, not weeks, at a price that makes sense for sub-$2M deals. Same report either side of the table.
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Gut Check doesn't produce a seller's version and a buyer's version. It produces one reconciliation, generated the same way every time, from data pulled directly from the source. What changes is when you run it.
Sellers and brokers run Gut Check during listing prep. Every discrepancy the report finds is one a buyer would have found in week three of diligence — except now it's disclosed up front with an explanation attached, instead of surfacing as a re-trade or a dead deal. Most gaps in sub-$2M e-commerce aren't fraud. They're bookkeeping. Explaining them early is worth more than hoping nobody looks.
Buyers run Gut Check before committing. Every figure is traced to its source, and the report states exactly how each data point arrived — live read-only platform connection, or seller-provided upload. You see the provenance, not just the conclusion.
After spending time in the micro-acquisition space, one thing becomes clear quickly: small e-commerce financials are frequently inaccurate. Accounting practices vary widely, and the selling platforms themselves produce confusing, overlapping reports.
The problem is that the tools capable of actually verifying those numbers cost thousands of dollars and take weeks to deliver results. That's a reasonable trade-off if you're making one carefully selected offer. It's completely untenable if you're evaluating twenty deals to find the right one.
The cost lands on everyone. Buyers overpay or walk. Sellers watch clean deals die over gaps they could have explained in a week. Brokers eat months of advisory time on listings that were never going to survive diligence. Sub-$2M deals deserve the same verification standard that private equity gets — at a price and speed that matches the transaction size. That's what Gut Check is built to be.
Manual P&L rebuilds. Forensic review by a real analyst. Credible results — if you have three weeks and a few thousand dollars per engagement.
AI-powered document analysis built for PE firms reviewing VDRs on $10M+ transactions. Priced accordingly. Completely mismatched to your deal size.
Connect to seller platforms directly. Get a reconciliation report in minutes. Pay a fraction of what human diligence costs. Run it on a listing before it goes live, or on a deal before you wire. Priced so it's worth running early, not just once.
Add the monthly P&L figures from the listing materials or the books. Twelve to twenty-four line items, and you're done.
Guided entryGrant read-only access to Shopify and Stripe. Nothing is written, nothing is changed, and access can be revoked at any time. Every figure pulled this way is stamped with its source and timestamp in the report.
Shopify · Stripe · Read-onlyGut Check reconciles reported revenue against source data month by month, attributes every variance to a cause, and restates earnings for working capital movement. You get a branded PDF with the methodology stated, every data source cited, and a clear line between what was verified and what wasn't.
PDF report · Downloadable · ShareableCross-reference reported revenue against actual platform transaction data and payment processor records, month by month. Gut Check surfaces every period where the numbers diverge, by how much, and what's driving it — and marks any figure it could not trace to a source rather than assuming it's correct.
Reported SDE is what the business earned. It isn't necessarily what the owner took home. In DTC e-commerce, receivables are near zero and payables are thin, which makes inventory almost the whole of working capital — so every dollar of inventory growth is a dollar of earnings that never reached anyone's pocket. Gut Check measures how much of reported earnings actually converted to cash.
Dozens of factual claims get made across listings, emails, and calls. Gut Check will build a register of every assertion and sort it into what the financial data can verify and what has to be carried by representation and warranty instead — so both sides know where the purchase agreement has to do work the diligence can't.
SDE calculation, debt service capacity, and owner salary modeling — run against cash-converted earnings rather than reported ones, so the debt math reflects the cash that actually shows up.
Connecting directly to Shopify and Stripe means the data comes straight from the source — not from a spreadsheet prepared for the listing. That distinction is the entire point.
Each figure in a Gut Check report is stamped with how it arrived: live read-only platform connection with a timestamp, or self-reported upload. A reader can tell at a glance which parts of the report were verified against source data and which were taken on someone's word. That distinction is what makes a report credible no matter who paid for it.
Gut Check uses a combination of AI models selected specifically for financial reconciliation accuracy. We continuously evaluate which tools produce the most reliable output — so you don't have to wonder whether pasting a CSV into a chatbot is good enough. It isn't.
That matters for sellers and brokers who need to know their data stays private. We use enterprise-licensed AI with training turned off — the financials you enter and the platform data you connect are used to generate your report, and nothing else. It's also why connections are read-only and revocable.
No figure is adjustable by whoever commissioned it. The analysis runs identically whether it's requested by an operator preparing a listing, an advisor screening one, or a buyer evaluating one — which is the only reason a report paid for by one side is worth anything to the other.
Join the waitlist. Be first to access self-service financial verification for sub-$2M deals.
No credit card. No spam. Early access when we launch.
We'll reach out when early access opens. In the meantime, feel free to share this page with anyone else who'd find it useful.