Revenue is the number your entire price is built on, and it is the easiest number in the deal to overstate. Not usually by fraud — far more often by a seller genuinely believing a figure that includes things a buyer would exclude.
The hierarchy of proof
Evidence | Worth |
|---|---|
A number in the listing | Zero |
A spreadsheet | Near zero — trivially editable |
A screenshot of a dashboard | Low — trivially faked, and often cropped to a good month |
A screen recording of the live dashboard | Moderate — harder to fake, still curated |
Read-only access to the processor account | High |
A provider-verified figure pulled via OAuth | Highest — the seller never touches the number |
What to actually look at once you have access
Gross vs net. Gross volume includes refunds, chargebacks and processor fees. Net is what arrived. The gap is routinely 4–8%.
Recurring vs one-off. Filter for subscription charges specifically. Consulting income and lifetime deals are not MRR and should not be multiplied.
The month-by-month curve, 24 months if it exists. You are looking for the shape, not the total. A flat line with one enormous spike is a story you need told.
Failed payments. Involuntary churn hides here. A 9% failure rate with poor recovery is nearly a point of monthly churn on its own.
Refunds by month. A rising refund rate in the three months before a sale is worth a direct question.
New vs expansion vs reactivation. Growth that's entirely reactivation of lapsed users is a different business from growth that's new logos.
The questions that surface problems
"What's the single largest customer as a percentage of revenue?"
"Which month in the last two years was the worst, and what happened?"
"Has anything in this revenue been discounted, comped or invoiced outside the processor?"
"What's your involuntary churn, and what recovers it?"
"If I turned off all paid acquisition tomorrow, what does month three look like?"
None of these are hostile. A prepared seller answers all five in under ten minutes, and the ease of the answer tells you as much as its content.
When the seller won't give access
There are legitimate reasons to withhold raw processor access from a stranger — customer names and card data are in there. The fix is not to accept a screenshot instead; it's to ask for a read-only, redacted export or a provider-verified summary, which reveals the aggregate without exposing a single customer.
A seller who won't do that either has something to hide or hasn't done the work. Both are reasons to move on, and there is always another deal.