Curated marketplaces do meaningful work before a listing goes live, and a buyer should give that credit. The distinction worth understanding is between verification and analysis: confirming that a reported figure reconciles to its source is a different exercise from confirming that the figure was the right one to compute.
TL;DR: Curated marketplaces verify that reported figures reconcile to source data. That is not the same as verifying that churn was defined correctly. Here is the gap and how to close it.
Curated marketplace with pre-listing review, small to lower mid-market. That shape determines what a buyer can expect to be given and what has to be requested, which is most of what changes between one acquisition channel and another.
Curated listings typically arrive with financials that have been reconciled against source systems, a structured profit-and-loss presentation, and a consistent disclosure format across listings. The consistency is genuinely useful, because it makes listings comparable in a way open marketplaces cannot.
Reconciliation confirms that the numbers tie out. It does not decide whether churn should have been measured on customers or dollars, whether free accounts belonged in the denominator, whether annual plans were treated as unable to churn in non-renewal months, or when the renewal cliff falls. Those are analytical choices, and a verified figure computed under an unfavourable definition is still a figure you need to recompute.
This is the central risk on a curated marketplace and it works in the buyer's blind spot. A reconciled churn figure carries real credibility, which makes it less likely to be recomputed. Recompute it anyway, under your own definition, and expect the number to move even when nothing is wrong with the underlying data.
Consistent listing formats require normalising different businesses into one template, and normalisation makes choices. Ask specifically how annual contracts, deferred revenue and one-time fees were treated in the presented figures, because the template had to decide something.
Marketplace P&L presentations often centre on an adjusted earnings figure. Those adjustments are usually reasonable and they are still adjustments. Ask for the unadjusted figures alongside them and form your own view of which add-backs survive under your ownership.
Verification is about amounts, not about schedule. The renewal calendar is almost never part of a listing package at any marketplace, and it is the artifact that determines your first year. Build it yourself from the subscription export.
In order, and stopping early if any step produces a blocker:
Getting a usable export is its own problem, and the request wording that works differs by billing platform. The export guides cover eighteen platforms with the exact wording to send and the status values that mislead on each. Once you have the file, the seller-claims pages give the arithmetic for each specific claim, and the 23-point checklist is the short version of the whole process.
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ChurnLens is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a partner of any marketplace or broker named on this page. Listing formats, disclosure practices and terms change; treat the descriptions here as a starting point and verify current specifics with the marketplace itself. Nothing here is investment, legal or tax advice.
Every check on this page can be run by hand in a spreadsheet, and if you have the time you should. If you would rather not: send us the target's subscription export and we run the full human-reviewed analysis — logo churn, revenue churn, customer concentration, annual-plan decay, zombie MRR and an A–F revenue-quality grade. The free Starter tier covers one CSV per month, which is enough to check a single deal.
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Curation typically verifies that reported figures reconcile to source systems, which is real and useful work. It does not usually decide whether the churn figure was defined the way a buyer would define it — customers versus dollars, whether free accounts sat in the denominator, how annual plans were handled. Verification and analysis are different exercises, and only the first is normally done for you.
Yes, and it should be aimed differently. Vetting reduces the risk of figures that do not tie out, so your effort is better spent on the analytical questions no listing package answers: renewal timing, concentration on parent entities, the recurring share of revenue, and recomputing retention under your own definition.
The renewal calendar, almost always. Listings present amounts, and a renewal calendar is a schedule — which month each annual contract comes up, and therefore how much revenue is decided in a single month. It is the artifact that most shapes a buyer's first year and it is rarely included anywhere.