The seller's P&L is the seller's story.
Small business buyers often see only the spreadsheet the seller chose to share. Tax returns and bank statements tell a different story, and you only get those after you've already signed an LOI.
AI due diligence for small business buyers
Don't sign your business deal until you're safe.
BizScore analyzes the seller's financials in minutes and tells you if the price is fair, the books are clean, and the deal is safe. All before you sign.
Every deal gets a single BizScore, 0 to 100, from Safe to Danger.
One-time payment · No subscription · Refund if we can't complete the analysis
Why BizScore matters, by the numbers
20 to 30%
of small-business listings contain material misrepresentations
Industry surveys of first-time business buyers
$500K+
average asking price of a gas station or convenience store deal
BizBuySell + BizQuest 2024 to 2025 listings
2 to 5 min
typical end-to-end analysis time once your documents upload
Median across our pre-launch eval corpus
45+
due-diligence checklist items in every Full Report
Across financial, legal, operational, environmental, lease, location, inspections, franchise
Why small business buyers lose money
The seller has done this before. Most buyers haven't.
That asymmetry is where deals go bad. BizScore closes it.
Industry benchmarks are buried in trade journals.
What's a fair price-to-SDE multiple for a single-bay gas station in Ohio? What's a normal COGS percentage for a Maverik-branded location? You need that context before you negotiate, not after you close.
A bad deal is hard to walk away from once you're in.
After you've spent $5K on an attorney, $3K on an accountant, two months emotionally invested, and told your family this is happening, the price of saying no goes up every week. The cheapest 'no' is the early one.
How BizScore works
From upload to report in 2 to 5 minutes.
No back-and-forth, no phone calls, no scheduling. You pay once, you get the analysis.
Step 1
Upload the seller's documents
P&L, tax returns, bank statements, supplier invoices, whatever you've got. PDF, Excel, CSV, Word. Up to 10 files, 25MB each.
Encrypted at rest. Auto-deleted after 90 days.
Step 2
AI analyzes against industry benchmarks
Our AI reads every page, computes SDE and EBITDA, compares the expense breakdown to gas station and c-store benchmarks, and surfaces red flags by severity.
Every finding cites the exact source document it came from: evidence you can check yourself.
Step 3
Get a BizScore Report with a clear score
Big color-coded score at the top (SAFE / CAUTION / RISKY / DANGER), then financial health, red flags, valuation range, and the full pre-LOI checklist.
Read on screen or download as PDF. Bring it to your attorney.
Buying a gas station or convenience store? See exactly what BizScore checks for your deal: gas station due diligence · convenience store due diligence.
What you actually get
A report you can hand to your attorney.
Color-coded score, evidence-cited red flags, valuation range against the asking price, and a 45+ item checklist. Below is a redacted preview from a real Quick Scan.
BizScore Score
68/ 100
Caution
Worth pursuing, but several items need clarification before LOI.
- Financial Consistency23 / 30
- Price Fairness17 / 25
- Documentation15 / 20
- Red Flag Severity8 / 15
- Business Stability5 / 10
Cash deposits don't match reported revenue
What we found: The bank is showing $190k less than the P&L claims for 2024. Either the seller's P&L is overstated, or significant cash is going somewhere besides the business account.
Finding: Bank deposits sum to $620k; P&L reports $810k.
Evidence: Wells Fargo statements (Jan to Dec 2024) + Seller P&L 2024.
Next step: Request 3 years of federal tax returns before signing the LOI. If the seller declines, walk.
Valuation · SDE-based range
Asking $750,000: Above fair range
$400,000$600,000
Industry multiple range 2.0× to 3.0× SDE. With an SDE of $200K, fair value lands $400K to $600K with $500K as the midpoint. The ask sits 25% above the top of the band. Negotiate or walk.
Pricing
One-time payment. No subscription. No upsell.
Quick Scan catches the deal-breakers. Full Report is what your attorney will want to see before you sign an LOI.
Quick Scan
First-pass safety check before you spend on a lawyer.
$49one-time
- Financial Health analysisSDE, EBITDA, P/E ratio, expense trends vs. industry benchmarks.
- Red flags with evidenceCRITICAL → LOW, each with document citation + confidence + action.
- Valuation vs. asking priceMulti-method range with overlap analysis: overpriced, fair, value.
- Limits of Analysis sectionHonest list of what we did NOT assess so you know where to dig.
Good to know
- Your report is ready in 2 to 5 minutes.
- Automatic full refund if we can't complete the analysis.
- Most buyers scan two or three deals before picking one to pursue.
Secure checkout. One-time payment, no subscription.
Full Report
Everything you need before signing a Letter of Intent.
$199one-time
- Financial Health analysisSDE, EBITDA, P/E ratio, expense trends vs. industry benchmarks.
- Red flags with evidenceCRITICAL → LOW, each with document citation + confidence + action.
- Valuation vs. asking priceMulti-method range with overlap analysis: overpriced, fair, value.
- Limits of Analysis sectionHonest list of what we did NOT assess so you know where to dig.
- 45+ item Due Diligence ChecklistAcross financial, legal, operational, environmental, lease, location, inspections, franchise.
- 20 to 25 Seller QuestionsTargeted questions derived from the red flags in your deal. Bring them to the next call.
- State-specific Legal SummaryPermits, licenses, environmental notes, and what to ask your attorney about (not legal advice).
Includes everything in Quick Scan.
Not sure which? If this is your first look at the deal, start with the Quick Scan. If you're preparing an offer or about to sign an LOI, get the Full Report.
We're an information service, not a broker. We don't list businesses for sale. We don't take seller fees. We only work for the buyer.
Why BizScore exists
A family lost everything on a deal they thought was safe.
In 2023, someone close to me bought a small business with their entire life savings. The seller's spreadsheets looked great. The broker said the deal was clean. Six months in, the real numbers came out — the books had been padded for two years to inflate the sale price. By the time we found out, the money was gone and the loan was personally guaranteed.
The information they needed existed. It was in the tax returns the seller never volunteered. It was in industry benchmarks a broker would never share. It would have taken a competent due-diligence firm two weeks and $15,000 to surface. They didn't have the time or the money.
BizScore is what I wish they'd had. A $49 first-pass that catches the deal-breakers before you spend on a lawyer. A $199 full report when you're ready to sign. It's AI that shows its evidence — every red flag cites the document it came from — scoped to the two business types we know cold, and honest about what it can't tell you.
The BizScore founding team
First-time buyers ourselves. Building what we needed.
Honest framing, up front
What BizScore doesn't assess.
Every report ends with a Limits-of-Analysis section. We surface it here too, so you know exactly where our analysis ends and where your own legwork begins.
Physical condition of equipment, the facility, or inventory. We don't visit the site.
Employee morale, retention risk, or key-person dependency. We don't interview staff.
Hidden litigation or undisclosed disputes not surfaced in the documents you provide.
Real-time market dynamics: competitive shifts, fuel-margin changes, or local economic events since the document period.
The seller's true motivation for selling beyond what they have stated.
Customer concentration, supplier relationships, or contract terms beyond what appears in financial records.
Pending regulatory changes or legislation not yet in force.
For everything on this list, you need on-site visits, your attorney, your accountant, or a direct conversation with the seller. BizScore makes the rest of the deal cheaper to evaluate so you can spend your time and money on these.
Common questions
The questions every small business buyer asks.
The seller's P&L, federal tax returns, and bank statements are the high-value documents. Supplier invoices, lease agreements, and POS reports help too. Anything you don't have, BizScore explicitly calls out as 'INSUFFICIENT_DATA' in the report. We never silently guess.
Don't sign your LOI until you've seen the report.
The cheapest mistake is the one you never make. Start a Quick Scan and find out what's really in the seller's books in the next 5 minutes.
Not ready yet?
Get a sample BizScore Report by email.
We'll email you a sample Quick Scan report for a demo convenience-store deal: the exact format you'd get, delivered in seconds, with no marketing follow-ups.
We treat your email as transactional, not marketing. See Privacy.