When a deal closes, the acquired company’s numbers rarely tell the whole story straight away. What should a CFO review after an acquisition? The honest answer is: more than the signed accounts suggest. Due diligence gives Group Finance a snapshot based on data the target’s own team chose to present. Once the deal is signed, Group Finance owns the numbers directly — and the first 30 days determine whether the acquired entity’s financial information can be trusted for board reporting, lender covenants, and the next Group close.
This article sets out the areas a Group CFO or Financial Controller should review immediately after closing, with a practical checklist and a worked example of what an early trial balance review can uncover.
TL;DR
- Review the trial balance and general ledger for unsupported or stale balances before relying on the acquired company’s reported numbers.
- Check AR and AP aging separately from the headline balance — old items hide inside a clean-looking total.
- Reconcile intercompany balances against the counterparty’s own books, not just the acquired entity’s ledger.
- Confirm the close calendar the acquired entity can realistically meet, not the one assumed in the deal model.
- Map the local chart of accounts to the Group chart of accounts before the first Group reporting deadline.
In this article:
Why the First Days After Closing Matter
Financial due diligence is built on sampling and management-prepared schedules. It answers whether a deal is worth doing, not whether every balance on the target’s trial balance is supported by documentation. Once the transaction closes, Group Finance has full access to the general ledger, and reporting responsibility shifts from the deal team to the CFO’s own function.
Issues that due diligence treated as low-risk because they were small or one-off can turn into recurring problems once the acquired entity is expected to close on the Group’s timetable and to Group standards for supporting documentation. See our separate comparison of financial due diligence versus a post-acquisition finance review for how the two exercises differ in scope. The first 30 days is the point where Group Finance can still separate what happened before completion from what happens under new ownership — a distinction that gets harder to draw the longer it is left.
The Immediate Review: Seven Areas to Check First
Seven areas consistently surface issues in the early weeks of an acquisition. None require a full audit — a focused review against each is usually enough to flag what needs escalation to the Group Controller.
1. Trial Balance and General Ledger Integrity
Pull the trial balance and scan for balances with no supporting documentation, suspense or “other” accounts with meaningful values, and round-number entries booked to close a period quickly. Balances that have not moved in over 12 months are a common early flag, and so are accounts whose description no longer matches what they actually hold. Our guide to post-acquisition balance sheet review covers this in more depth.
2. Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable Aging
Pull AR and AP aging separately from the headline balance sheet figure. A trade receivables balance can look clean in total while a meaningful share sits over 90 days old. As a rule of thumb, if more than 10–15% of gross AR is over 90 days, treat the headline balance with caution until it has been reviewed customer by customer. Our dedicated piece on reviewing accounts receivable after an acquisition walks through the process.
3. Intercompany Balances
Check that intercompany balances reconcile against the counterparty’s own books, not only against the acquired entity’s ledger. Mismatches are common where the two entities used different cut-off dates, currencies, or recharge policies before the acquisition. Our intercompany reconciliation after an acquisition guide sets out a working method.
4. Cash Position and Bank Reconciliations
Confirm bank reconciliations are current as of completion date, and look for long-outstanding reconciling items that were never cleared. Also confirm that bank signatories and online banking access have actually transferred — a surprisingly common gap that can delay payments in week one.
5. Statutory Accounts vs Management Accounts
Compare the last filed statutory accounts against the management accounts used in the deal model. Adjustments made only at year-end (provisions, accruals, one-off write-offs) sometimes never make it into monthly management reporting, which means the “clean” monthly numbers Group Finance inherited may not reflect the full picture.
6. Local Chart of Accounts vs Group Chart of Accounts
Map the acquired entity’s chart of accounts to the Group’s before the first Group reporting deadline, not after. A rushed mapping done under deadline pressure is where misclassifications between capex and opex, or between cost centres, tend to originate. See our guide to mapping a local chart of accounts to a Group chart of accounts.
7. Close Calendar and Reporting Capacity
Confirm how many working days the acquired entity’s finance team actually needs to close a month, and compare that to what the Group close calendar requires. A team used to closing in 15–20 working days will struggle to meet a 5-day Group deadline without support in the first few cycles. Our article on assessing the month-end closing process of an acquired company covers this area specifically.
Illustrative Example: A 30-Day Trial Balance Review
The following is an illustrative example built from patterns we see repeatedly, not a real client engagement or real figures. A European group acquired a regional distribution business with a trial balance that appeared clean at completion. A first-30-days review of the general ledger found four items that changed the picture materially:
| Balance sheet line | Reported at completion | What the review found |
|---|---|---|
| Trade receivables | €2,400,000 | €340,000 with no supporting invoice or over 180 days old |
| Suspense / other | €0 (netted into “other”) | €95,000 unexplained, spread across 14 entries |
| Intercompany payable | €1,150,000 | €1,245,000 per the counterparty’s ledger — a €95,000 mismatch |
| Accrued expenses | €180,000 | €260,000 once unrecorded supplier invoices were identified — an €80,000 gap |
None of these items individually would stop a deal. Together, they shifted reported net assets by roughly €515,000 within the first month — enough to matter for the opening balance sheet used in Group consolidation, and enough that the Group Controller needed to know before, not during, the first quarterly close.
A First 30-Day CFO Review Checklist
- Week 1: Pull the trial balance, AR aging, AP aging, and latest bank reconciliations. Confirm banking access has transferred.
- Week 1: Request the last two filed statutory accounts and compare against the management accounts used in the deal model.
- Weeks 2–3: Reconcile intercompany balances against counterparty books. Log every discrepancy over a defined threshold (for example, €10,000).
- Weeks 2–3: Map the local chart of accounts to the Group chart of accounts and flag unmapped or ambiguous accounts.
- Week 4: Agree a realistic close calendar with the local finance team for the next two reporting cycles, with interim support if the gap to the Group deadline is large.
- Week 4: Consolidate findings into a single action tracker with an owner and a date for each item, rather than several informal lists.
When Group Finance Needs Additional Capacity
This review is straightforward in principle and time-consuming in practice, and it typically lands on a Group Controller who is also running business-as-usual close for the rest of the Group. Data quality gaps in underlying reporting systems are common even in established finance functions, not just newly acquired ones, which is exactly why this initial review deserves dedicated attention rather than being assumed away.
In practice, value on a deal is rarely lost through one major failure — it erodes through an accumulation of smaller issues that go unaddressed. That is exactly why the seven areas above deserve a deliberate 30-day review rather than being folded into an already-stretched close cycle.
Some groups choose to bring in additional operational finance capacity for this initial review period, so the Group Controller is not reviewing an acquired entity’s ledger for the first time in the middle of a live close. For the full sequence beyond this initial review, see our first 100 days finance integration roadmap.
FAQ
What should a CFO review first after an acquisition closes?
Start with the trial balance and general ledger, AR and AP aging, and bank reconciliations. These four areas surface most of the unsupported balances and stale items that due diligence sampling can miss, and they set the baseline for everything else.
How long should the initial post-acquisition finance review take?
A focused review of the seven areas covered here typically takes 30 days with a dedicated resource. Full integration into Group reporting standards usually takes longer, but the initial review should be complete before the first Group close involving the new entity.
Is a post-acquisition finance review the same as financial due diligence?
No. Due diligence assesses deal risk before completion using sampled, management-prepared data. A post-acquisition finance review happens after closing, uses full system access, and focuses on making the numbers reliable for ongoing Group reporting rather than deal risk.
What is the biggest risk of not reviewing the trial balance early?
Unsupported or stale balances get carried into the opening balance sheet used for Group consolidation. Correcting them later usually means a prior-period adjustment, which is harder to explain to the board or lenders than catching the issue in month one.
Who should lead the post-acquisition finance review?
Ownership usually sits with the Group Controller or Finance Integration Manager, working directly with the acquired entity’s local finance lead. See our article on who should own finance integration after an acquisition for how groups typically structure this.
Need additional finance capacity during an acquisition integration? Discuss your finance integration project with our team.
Brahim Rami | Member of institute of chartered accountants in Morocco
He is a CPA and tax advisor, founder of NeoExpertise.net, a Legal and Tax firm helping foreign companies with business setup, due diligence, payroll, and tax compliance in Morocco and Africa.
