A simple way to help prepare a software business for sale or investment

If your business creates any software or code, chances are it’s quite technical.

If you’re applying to the bank for a loan or overdraft, seeking investment or looking to sell the business or even just instructing an accountant or solicitor, you’ll need to educate people about your business and its assets pretty quickly.

One thing you can do to help with this education process is to prepare product summary sheets – a one or two page document that explains the software, its history and perhaps your future plans for it.

Recently we helped a client with this exercise, on each summary sheet we set out:

• the name of the software product, any old names for it and any derivative products associated with it;
• product logos, registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks;
• the history of the product, being who developed it or how the business came to acquire it – the main thing here is to show how you own the software product;
• whether any third party software was incorporated in the product and, if so, details of how it was licensed; and
• any other relevant information, such as significant commercial arrangements associated with the product.

You could also go one step further and add key financial data, such as the annual revenue arising from that product.

You can download an example of a summary sheet here.

This sort of exercise should save you time and money and make everyone’s lives easier!