Compare / A full data room
When you need a full data room, and when you do not.
Dedicated virtual data rooms exist because some transactions genuinely need them. Docsroom does a narrower job for a much wider set of people. This page is about telling those two situations apart, including the ones where we are the wrong answer.
Stannard Holdings sale
Indexed · 6 sections · 3 parties admitted
39 of 50 provided11 outstanding
Corporate
12 documents · all provided
Financial
14 documents · 3 outstanding
Contracts
9 documents · 5 outstanding
Where we are not the answer
Controls a dedicated room has and we do not
These are real requirements, and if you have them you should pay for a product built around them rather than make ours stretch.
Every page has to carry the reader’s name
Dynamic watermarking, so a leaked page says who leaked it. On a contested deal this is not a nicety. Docsroom does not do it.
Documents must be readable but not takeable
A viewer that will not download, print or copy. Docsroom shares files as files: read only, logged, but a bidder who can read a document can keep it.
Redaction has to happen inside the room
Blacking out a salary or a name before a bidder sees it. Redact before you upload, or use a product that does it for you.
And three more
Situations that name another tool
If one of these is you, use what your process already says. None of it is worth an argument.
Somebody must be reachable at three in the morning
A live desk through a completion weekend, in the buyer’s time zone. We answer our own email in office hours.
The deal is very large, or regulated in a way that names a tool
If your adviser’s process or your regulator specifies a platform, use that platform.
You need a formal index numbering scheme you control
Docsroom numbers sections and requests as 1.1, 2.3 and so on, but the scheme is ours rather than yours.
Where we are
Use Docsroom when
Most of the rooms that get opened are not a nine-figure auction. They are a sale of a business somebody has run for thirty years, a refinancing, or a bundle going to the other side’s solicitor.
The everyday version of the same job
The reason a small deal is painful is rarely that the tooling lacked watermarking. It is that the seller could not tell you what was still missing.
- The room opens in an afternoon, not after a procurement conversation
- One price, not a price per page or per megabyte
- The seller’s side is a list of requests, so you can see what is outstanding
- A party for each bidder, who never see one another
- Terms of access accepted before anything opens
- Every download recorded against the party that took it
- Questions that arrive as work, with an owner and a date
- The same tool you already use for everyday requests, so nobody learns a second one
Side by side
What each one is actually for
Nothing here is a criticism of a dedicated data room: they are built for a harder problem than ours.
Built for
A dedicated data room: One transaction at a time, at scale
Docsroom: Every request, deals included
Watermarking
A dedicated data room: Usually per reader
Docsroom: No
View without download
A dedicated data room: Yes
Docsroom: Read only and logged, but downloadable
Redaction in the room
A dedicated data room: Usually
Docsroom: Redact before uploading
Blind parties, one per bidder
A dedicated data room: Yes
Docsroom: Yes
Questions kept to their party
A dedicated data room: Yes
Docsroom: Yes
Terms accepted before access
A dedicated data room: Yes
Docsroom: Yes
Downloads recorded by party
A dedicated data room: Yes
Docsroom: Yes
Chasing the seller’s missing items
A dedicated data room: Not usually the point
Docsroom: It is the point
The rest of your year
A dedicated data room: The tool closes with the room
Docsroom: Onboarding, enrolments, property sales
Support
A dedicated data room: Often around the clock
Docsroom: Office hours, from the people who make it
The honest summary
If you are running a competitive auction where a leaked page would cost real money, buy the product that watermarks every page and will not let a document be downloaded. That is not us, and we would rather say so now than at completion.
If you are selling a company for a few million pounds, or handing a bundle to the other side, or refinancing, the thing that actually goes wrong is that nobody can say what is still outstanding and the answers end up in four inboxes. That is the thing Docsroom was built for, and it costs about what one hour of the work you are avoiding costs.
Open a room and see whether it is enough.
Free for 14 days, no card. If it is not enough, we will tell you.