Considering buying a small business?

The listing says $218,000.The P&L supports $124,000.

With Verity

  • Every number is either supported, claimed, or missing — and Verity tells you which.
  • When a number matters, Verity does the math — the AI only reads it out.
  • Every figure tied to the source it came from. Every answer shows what it's based on.
  • Verity reads all the info, every time, the same way — and never forgets.
  • One simple workspace for your whole pipeline — deal beside deal.
Analyze your first deal freeFirst analysis free — then $20 a deal. No subscription.

Thinking of just using a chatbot — or reading it yourself? Fair questions ↓

From one seller P&LExample
Seller P&L · FY2025 · page 2
SDE — as listed$218,000 Claimed
SDE — the P&L supports$124,000 Supported
Revenue FY2025$1,240,000 Supported
Owner hours per week Missing
The gap−$94,000
Owner add-back — "manager role"$94,000
The owner runs operations. Replacing that role is a cost the add-back puts back into profit.
Owner hours — missing ask for: weekly hours and role
VERITY ANALYZED: 1 DOCUMENT
2 supported · 4 on the seller's word · 1 missing
Two fair questions

Why not just paste the CIM into a chatbot?

The step that checks whether your documents agree with each other is plain arithmetic, done the same way every time. It lines up every year of every number across the tax returns, the P&L, the bank statements, and the seller's own worksheet — and when two of them disagree, it tells you both figures and where each came from. A chatbot reads and summarizes; it has no step like this.

When Verity reads a document, it has to put each fact into a fixed slot — this year's revenue, this year's owner pay, and so on. If the document doesn't say, the slot stays empty. A chatbot writes whatever reads well.

So Verity computes rankings and totals itself and hands them to the AI to read out. The AI never redoes the arithmetic. The full case study — what went wrong and what we changed — is on our DIY-with-AI page.

The same number appears the same way on every screen. If the P&L says SDE is $124,000, that's the number in the summary, in the open questions, in the model, and in the brief you send your lender. A chatbot can tell you two different things in the same conversation.

Your deals, your documents, what was found, what you resolved, what's still open — all of it stays, on any device, for as long as you want. A chat ends when the window closes.

It won't show you a profitability number until it has checked whether the deal fits you and whether the numbers hold up — so an impressive figure can't anchor you before it's earned. It treats "not stated" as "not stated," never as zero. And it never tells you whether to buy; it tells you what's true, what's claimed, and what nobody has shown you yet.

Every paid step is disclosed before it runs. Nothing is charged if a step fails. Refund an unused purchase and it reverses on its own.

A brief with every number and its source, a link you can share, and a note if a newer version exists. Not a paragraph to copy and paste.

Your files are locked to your account, uploads are checked before they're accepted, and our security page says exactly what's in place — in the same three buckets we use on your deals: supported, claimed, not yet.

To be fair — a chatbot is still better at a few things. You can drop in a whole folder at once, ask it open-ended questions about SBA rules or add-backs, and there's nothing new to learn. We'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Why not just read it myself?

A person reads the CIM and the last two tax returns and skims the rest — nobody has the attention for forty documents. Verity reads every one and checks every number against every other. It isn't smarter; it just doesn't skip.

Document thirty gets the same read as document one. Nobody's attention lasts that long.

People see $218,000 on page one and never fully let go of it. Verity holds back the big numbers until it knows how solid they are, and puts the warning on the number itself — so a precise figure can't win you over on its own.

Two good analysts, same folder, two different SDE builds — that's normal, and it's nobody's fault. Verity produces the same result from the same documents every time.

A buyer who wants the deal reads the add-backs generously. An advisor who wants the engagement reads them harshly. Verity doesn't care which way the deal goes — it works for the buyer and no one else in the deal.

A person's note says "SDE looks high." Verity's says which document, which page, both figures, and what to ask the seller for.

The worst ten days are the ten after the CIM lands. A team needs an engagement letter and weeks. Verity is there at 2 a.m. — the first analysis of each deal is free, and each further deal is $20.

Everything you found, asked, and resolved stays with each deal — and you can ask questions across them.

What to decide first, what to upload, what the documents support, what to ask for next, who needs to do what, what to send your lender. Plain English at every step — and the next move is always yours.

What a person has that Verity doesn't — and Verity won't claim: judgment about whether to buy, a feel for the industry, negotiation instinct, and a phone call to the seller.

And one limit, stated plainly: Verity can only be as complete as the package — which is exactly why it tells you what the package is missing.

"So do I still need a Quality of Earnings?"

Verity — before you commit
Reading every document · reconciling every number · writing the questions
A QoE firm — if the deal earns it
Testing the books · interviewing management · signing the report

Verity is the analytical half of a QoE, done before you decide whether the deal deserves the other half. And the biggest saving isn't a cheaper QoE — it's the one you don't buy on the deal that died at reconciliation.

Truth should not be a luxury in business acquisition.
FREE first analysis · $20 per deal · no subscription
THE PROCESS

Your criteria. Your decision.

One journey from listing to call — read against what you said matters, with every figure traced to its page.

  1. You define what matters.

    During onboarding you tell Verity exactly what you're looking for — business type, size, revenue, deal structure, risk tolerance. These aren't generic filters: they become your personal acquisition criteria, and every deal is read against them.

  2. Upload the seller package.

    PDF, financials, or paste the CIM text directly into Verity.

  3. Verity reads everything — and checks it.

    Every financial line. Every add-back claim. Every assumption the seller made in their favor. Contradictions and red flags surface automatically, scored against your buy box.

  4. You make the call.

    A Pass means the deal fits what you told us matters; a Fail means it doesn't. You negotiate with conviction — or walk away early and save the months you'd have spent finding out the hard way.

Verity gives you structured analysis, not a directive. The decision — and the responsibility for it — is yours. That's how it should be.

Verity provides calculation tools and AI analysis — not financial, investment, or legal advice. Better than the alternative. Not the most complete and verified information.

How Verity Protects Your Deal Documents →
THE QUESTION EVERY BUYER ASKS

Couldn't I just use my own AI?

It's a fair question — ask it before you pay for anything. You could drop all ten PDFs into a chatbot tonight. Or wire an AI up to every document in your deal, hand it an expert prompt, and let it rip. Plenty of buyers do, and the tools that help you do it are multiplying. The AI is genuinely capable: it reads financials, answers in plain English, and never gets tired. So here's the honest version of what happens — and the one thing none of it fixes.

More context makes an AI better informed. It doesn't make it accountable.

Every one of those tools does the same thing at its core: feed a general-purpose AI more of your deal so its answers get more relevant. That's real, and it's useful. But relevance isn't reliability. The mistake that costs you money isn't the AI knowing too little — it's the AI being fluently, confidently wrong about what it does know. More context doesn't remove that risk. It can hide it, by making the wrong answer read even better.

A chatbot is a brilliant generalist, tuned above all to be helpful and fluent. Diligence is the one job where helpful and fluent works against you. Ask it to make sense of a messy deal and it does exactly what it's built to do: hand you one clean, confident, readable answer. To get there, it will quietly fill the gaps, smooth over the numbers that don't agree, and carry the seller's figures into its summary as if they'd been checked. It isn't lying. It's being helpful. In diligence, that's the risk.

FROM VERITY'S OWN TEST LOG · AUGUST 31, 2026

We gave our own AI everything. It still named the wrong deal. Twice.

A test workspace held four deals with four asking prices — $2.40M · $1.99M · $540K · $410K — all of them in front of the model. We asked one question with one right answer: which deal has the highest asking price?

THE SETUP
Four asking prices. One question with one right answer.
$2.40M · $1.99M · $540K · $410K
RUN 1 — WRONG, THEN A SAVE
It opened with $1.99M, then caught itself mid-sentence and switched to $2.40M.
RUN 2 — WRONG, WITH CONFIDENCE
Tighter instructions. Same wrong answer, delivered smoothly — $1.99M named as highest, with $2.40M sitting two lines below in its own list.
RUN 3 — RIGHT, STRUCTURALLY
After the fix: correct on the first try, and the thousandth.

Here's the part that matters. It didn't get this wrong because it lacked context — it had all of it, four numbers on one screen. We tried to instruct our way out and got the same wrong answer with better posture. Polish and correctness are independent. The fix wasn't a smarter prompt; it was taking the arithmetic away from the AI entirely. Now the software computes the answer before any AI touches the conversation — the model's job is language, not counting.

Every buyer wiring an AI to their deal documents is running this exact experiment — on a real deal, with real money, and no second run to catch the miss.

Every AI tool is a Clerk. Verity adds the Guard and the Judge.

Reading documents is the Clerk's job — and every AI does it, yours and ours alike, on the same class of model. Reading was never the hard part. The part that catches a lie is checking every number in every document against every other one, the same way every time, and refusing to pick a favorite when two of them disagree. That's the Guard — and the Guard is software, not AI. It can't be charmed, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't invent. When your tax return and your CIM state a different SDE, it keeps both and shows you which file each came from, instead of quietly choosing one. Only once the count is settled does the Judge — AI again — explain what it means for your deal. The Judge can flag, contextualize, and advise on what to ask next. It can never add to, remove from, or reword the count.

That's the whole difference. Not a smarter model — a model with a Guard standing over it.

See how the Clerk, the Guard, and the Judge work together →

And yes — Verity is also a real workspace: your deals, documents, and findings stay put across sessions and devices, and every analysis becomes a sourced brief you can hand your lender. Table stakes. We just wouldn't skip them.

SO — DIY OR NOT?

The honest answer: for a quick gut-check on a single listing, your own AI is genuinely useful — same model, fast, nearly free. Use it. Verity is for the moment the decision gets real — when several documents, real money on the line, a call you can't take back — when the one thing you can't afford is a confident summary that quietly trusted the seller.

That's the moment you want a Guard.

Analyze your first deal free — then $20 a deal. No subscription.
HOW VERITY WORKS

The AI reads. The code counts.

Verity runs a deal through three parts that keep each other honest. Two of them are the AI. The one in the middle — the one that produces the number you act on — is not. That's on purpose.

THE CLERKreads your documents (free)

The AI transcribes exactly what each document says and keeps the document's own words as proof. Blanks stay blank — never filled with a guess about what “a business like this usually” looks like. A quiet listing is made to look neither better nor worse than one that spelled everything out.

THE GUARDruns the checks (software code, not AI)

Your open items and contradictions come from a fixed set of checks written in software — run identically on every deal, every time. The Guard can't be persuaded and doesn't decide what “seems important”; it checks what it always checks. When two documents state equipment value differently, it keeps both figures and shows them side by side instead of quietly picking one. The same documents produce the same findings, every time — measured in production, not promised on a slide. And if the count ever can't be verified, the Guard says so rather than showing you a confident wrong list.

THE JUDGEexplains the deal

With the count already settled, the AI reads the same record and adds what models are actually good for: context, patterns, what a figure means for your deal. It can flag something worth a closer look — but it can never add to, remove from, or reword the count.

The Clerk and the Judge are the AI. They read and they comment. But the count comes from the Guard — and the Guard is software code, not judgment. Reading your documents is free; the analysis — the count and the explanation — is what you pay for.

PRICING

Choose the plan that fits your deal flow.

PAY AS YOU GO — PER DEAL

$20
per deal · one-time · no subscription
Analyze deals as they come. No monthly commitment.
  • Every buyer feature — same as the plans
  • 1 deal slot + 10 analysis credits, per deal
  • Credits never expire
Your first analysis of every deal is free. This gives you the full verdict — does it fit your buy box, can you trust the numbers, is it profitable — with every figure traced to its source.

SEARCHER

$97
/ month
Every buyer deserves the same honest intelligence.
  • Every buyer feature — deal pipeline, document archive, Verity deal verdict, financial modeler, due diligence checklist, bundle modeler, market map, community Q&A, integration playbook, strategy notes, connected services, and Verity Brain
  • 50 analysis credits per month
  • 5 active deal slots
First analysis of every deal is free

OPERATOR

$297
/ month
For operators running a portfolio with a team.
  • Everything in Searcher, plus:
  • 200 analysis credits per month
  • 20 active deal slots
  • Up to 3 team members
  • Portfolio-scale AI across all your deals
First analysis of every deal is free

ADVISOR

$597
/ month
For advisors and small firms managing client portfolios.
  • Everything in Operator, plus:
  • 250 pooled analysis credits per month
  • 10 client workspaces
  • 200 active deals
  • White-label branding
  • Priority support
First analysis of every deal is free
First analysis of every deal is free — no credit card required to sign up.
HONEST BILLING

You only pay for real AI.

Verity does a lot of work on every deal, but we only charge for the part that runs on artificial intelligence — reading your documents and answering your questions. Our scoring, fit logic, and evaluation tools are ours, and you use them freely.

Capability
Uses AI?
Cost
Analyze an uploaded document
Yes (reads it AND judges fit)
1 credit
Ask Verity Brain a question
Yes
1 credit
View or run a Buy-Box Score
No
Free
Use the Opportunity Evaluator
No
Free
See Key Strengths / Key Risks
No
Free
See what's missing on a deal
No
Free
Save an evaluation
No
Free
THE FOUNDING STORY

Why Verity exists.

A few years ago I was evaluating a small business acquisition. A twenty-minute conversation with a broker who'd seen hundreds of these deals reframed everything the seller package had me believing. I needed a co-analyst that would sort every figure into supported, claimed, or missing — and never invent anything to fill a gap. It didn't exist, so I built it.

Read the full story →

Truth should not be a luxury in business.

YOUR DATA

Works for you. Only you.

Documents you upload, answers you provide, and questions you ask are processed exclusively within Verity's contracted infrastructure — Supabase for secure storage, Anthropic for AI processing — to generate your results. Your information is never used to train AI models, never shared with third parties, never sold, and never used to benefit anyone other than you.

What goes into Verity stays in Verity's ecosystem — and leaves only when you choose to export it.