The 30-Question Test That Tells You If Your RIA Is Diligence-Ready
- Alex Roe
- Jun 18
- 4 min read
Most growing RIAs find out their finance function isn't ready at the worst possible moment.
It's the week of the SEC exam, and the document request letter is asking for a level of detail nobody has produced before. It's three months into M&A diligence, and the quality-of-earnings team has flagged seven items in partner accounting alone. It's the lender review, and the cash forecast has been a spreadsheet maintained by one person for two years.
None of those are catastrophic. All of them are slow, expensive, and disproportionately distracting at exactly the moment leadership needs to be focused elsewhere.
The reason the surprise keeps happening is structural: finance functions tend to scale with the firm informally, and the gap between "this works for us" and "this would hold up to outside scrutiny" widens quietly until something forces it into the open. Most principals only see the gap when they're already inside the event that exposes it.
We built the Diligence-Ready RIA Checklist to flip that timing.
What the checklist does
The checklist is a 30-question diagnostic organized around the five areas where finance functions most often break under diligence:
Monthly close and books integrity: the cadence, completeness, and audit trail of the foundation everything else sits on.
Revenue, fees, and client billing: the advisory fee mechanics that examiners and acquirers stress-test most aggressively.
Partner economics and owner accounting: in our experience the most common diligence finding for growing RIAs, and the cleanest tell that finance hasn't yet matured.
Cash, capital, and forecasting: where finance moves from looking backward to looking forward, and where acquirers and lenders look hardest.
SEC, audit, and M&A readiness: the integrative test that pulls the prior four together.
Each section is six questions, scored yes, in progress, or no. Only a yes counts toward your score, and the bar for a yes is deliberately high: in place, documented, and able to hold up to outside scrutiny today.
The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes to score honestly, and the totals map to a four-tier readout: diligence-ready; strong foundation, meaningful gaps; working, but exposed; or rebuild required.
It's built on the same diagnostic we run when a growing RIA asks for an outside read on its finance function. The only difference is we usually charge for the read, and the checklist is free.
Who it's for
If you run finance, operations, or the firm itself at an RIA between roughly $500M and $5B in AUM, the checklist will tell you something useful. Below that range, the questions are still relevant but the urgency tends to be lower. Above it, the checklist stops being a diagnostic and becomes a confirmation: at that scale, every one of these should already be a yes, and any section that isn't deserves an urgent conversation, because the strategic events that expose these gaps are no longer hypothetical.
The questions are written for the principal, managing partner, or COO. That's deliberate: the people who build and run the books are too close to them to score objectively, the same way nobody proofreads their own writing well. The most useful version of this exercise is leadership scoring it first, then comparing notes with the finance team. Where the two scores diverge is usually where the real gap is.
What you'll find
Most growing RIAs we've worked with score in the 10 to 17 range on the first pass. That's "working, but exposed": the finance function runs the firm, but it isn't yet built for outside scrutiny. An SEC exam, audit, or M&A conversation in the next 12 months would be a fire drill.
That's not a bad result. It's an honest one, and it points directly to the two or three areas where the work would have the most leverage. The firms that score higher have usually invested deliberately in finance for a reason: preparing for a recap, professionalizing after a partner transition, responding to an examiner finding from a previous cycle, or partners deciding it's time to run the firm strategically and actually understand their margins, their capacity, and what each line of business earns.
Either way, the value of the exercise is the same. Fifteen minutes of honest scoring gives you a clear read on where your finance function would absorb the most time, attention, and valuation drag at the next event, and where the work to close those gaps would have the most strategic payoff.
Download the checklist
The Diligence-Ready RIA Checklist is free and built to be marked up directly. Print it, score it, share it with your CFO or your CCO if useful, and bring it to your next leadership meeting.
If your score surfaces gaps you'd like to talk through, we'd be glad to walk through them on a 30-minute call. There's nothing to prepare. Bring the scorecard.
Vaerifi designs, implements, and operates financial infrastructure for growing RIAs — built to support SEC examination, M&A diligence, and long-term strategic flexibility. Learn more about our RIA practice or read about getting your RIA books ready for an SEC exam.