How To Plan a Divestiture From an Accounting Perspective

Last week was a great interview with Neil McNamara, Co-founder of Virtas Partners, which is an advisory firm specializing in preparing companies financially and operationally for M&A. The topic of discussion is how to plan divestiture from an accounting perspective. First thing that you should do is set up your deal perimeter. Clearly define what you're selling so that you can create the structure of the financial data needed to get the deal done. The complexity of the financial data varies depending on what type of exit you are doing.  Carve outs can be very difficult because most of the time, you are selling something that has never been looked at as a standalone entity. Therefore, you will have to build a standalone financial statement without any financial historical information.