SAMPLE ASSESSMENT — modeled company, not a client
Halcyon Wealth Management is a modeled business created to demonstrate this assessment. Both sides of this comparison are synthetic: the owner's answers were authored to demonstrate the questionnaire, and the source documents behind the Validation column were generated to a spec. Both are scored by the same engine, against the same criteria used for real engagements — so the method is real and the company is not. Nothing here describes an actual business, and this is not a case study of client work.

Halcyon Wealth Management

Accounting  ·  Assessment vs Validation  ·  every company here is fictional
Assessment · questionnaireNo overall score — self-reported44/44 answered · 0 documents · 15 capped at 6
Validation · documentsNo overall score — insufficient documents2 documents ingested

Where the answers and the notes diverge

Nothing flagged. This owner's answers and their own written notes agree throughout. The verification layer is silent here because there is nothing to verify against — which is what makes a flag worth reading on the companies that have one. No divergence is invented to fill this space.

The eight domains, both ways

The Assessment column is what the owner reported and how urgently it reads for them. The Validation column is what the documents support. Where Validation is blank, the evidence did not reach the threshold to score it.

DomainReportedOwner’s priorityVerified
Diligence Risk6.9Moderate5.7/10
Owner Risk8.0Low
Customer Quality10.0Low
Operational Scalability7.2Moderate
Financial Readiness7.0Moderate
Legal & Regulatory Compliance8.4Low
Technology & Systems Maturity8.2Low
Human Capital6.0Moderate

What moves you from one to the other

Both tiers declined to publish a number for this company, and that is the whole point of the pair. The self-report was withheld because an answer cannot corroborate itself; the Validation run was withheld because 2 documents are not an evidence base either. Nothing here is broken — evidence is simply the only thing that produces a score, and there was not enough of it on either side.

Severity below is calculated from what you reported, not from what your scores were held to. A criterion answered strongly is treated as strong here even where the score was capped for want of a document — the cap is a statement about evidence, not about your business.

Validation verifies each of these against your documents, scopes the remediation to what your records actually show, and computes your valuation gap from your real EBITDA — the substantiation and the figures a self-reported assessment cannot produce. Engagement pricing comes out of a scoping conversation, once there is a document set to scope against.