Automated company due diligence briefs for your deal desk

Every weekday at 8am, produce a due diligence brief for each company waiting in my Google Sheets intake queue.

Start by reading the intake queue with the Google Sheets Get Values operation. The queue has one row per target company, and each row carries at least a company name, a country or jurisdiction, and a status column. Process only the rows whose status is pending, and skip anything already marked done.

OpenCorporates identifies a company by the pair of jurisdiction code and company number rather than by a single id, so resolve each queue row to that pair before researching it. Use Search Companies with the company name, narrowed by the jurisdiction implied by the country column, then confirm the match with Get Company to pull the core record: legal name, company number, jurisdiction code, incorporation date, current status, company type, and registered address. If several companies match a name and the row is genuinely ambiguous, pick the closest match and say plainly in the brief that the match was ambiguous rather than guessing silently.

Then map the ownership picture. Call Get Company Network to retrieve parent, subsidiary, and controlling entity relationships so you can describe the corporate family. Call Search Control Statements to pull the ownership and control statements that indicate who ultimately controls the entity. Call Search Officers to list the current directors and officers, and to find the other boards those same people sit on.

Write a short structured brief per company with these sections: a one paragraph overview of the entity, the corporate family covering parents, subsidiaries, and sibling entities, who ultimately controls it based on the control statements, the current directors along with any notable other directorships, and a risk flags section.

Raise a risk flag when any of these appear: the entity or one of its parents is incorporated in a recognised secrecy jurisdiction, the entity was incorporated within the last 12 months, or a director sits on an unusually large number of boards. Treat all of these strictly as heuristics that prompt human review. They are signals worth a second look, not a compliance determination, and the brief must state that explicitly so no reader mistakes it for a cleared verdict.

Cite the jurisdiction code and company number for every entity you mention, including parent companies, subsidiaries, and the other companies a director is tied to, so the reader can verify each claim against the source register. Where a fact comes from a control statement rather than the company record itself, note that.

Post each finished brief to the deal desk channel in Slack as its own message using the Slack Bot Send a Message operation, formatted with Slack markdown so the sections and flags are easy to scan.

Finally, append a one line summary for each company back to the Google Sheets queue using Append Values. The line should carry the company name, the jurisdiction code and company number, the date, a short verdict such as clear, review, or escalate, and the headline reason. This marks the row as done so the next run does not pick it up again.

If a company cannot be found in OpenCorporates at all, still write a short brief saying the entity could not be matched, post it, and append a row with a not found verdict so the queue stays accurate. OpenCorporates enforces a daily and monthly request quota, so if the queue is unusually long, process the oldest pending rows first and note in the final Slack message which companies were left for the next run.