This is the tier most buyers actually need, so it deserves a slow explanation rather than a sales page. I will tell you what happens after you pay, what the document contains, what it costs me to be honest in it, and the three situations where you should keep your €550.
One word first, because everything below depends on it. A memo here just means a short written report — two pages of conclusions, plus an annex listing every source I looked at and the date I looked. Nothing more mysterious than that.
What this tier is for
You have found one business you are serious about. Not three you are comparing — one. You have not paid a deposit yet. What you want to know is simple to say and hard to answer alone: is there anything in the public record that could kill this deal, and what should I be demanding from the seller before I put money down?
That is the whole job. The scan at €99 tells you what a listing is doing in its market. This tier is where a person sits down and reads the record behind a named business.
What actually happens, step by step
Step one: you tell me what you have. The listing link and the saved text of the advertisement. Ideally the name of the business or the street address of the premises — one of those two is what makes everything else possible. Whatever the seller has told you, in his words. Your deadline, and how far along you are.
Step two: I check whether the job can be done at all. If the target cannot be pinned down even with what you have given me, I tell you before the clock starts, not after. That is not politeness. A screen of a business nobody can identify is a screen of nothing, and charging €550 for it would be taking money for an impossible task.
Step three: the clock starts. It begins only when three things are true together: your payment is confirmed, everything I need has arrived, and I have written to you listing exactly what will be examined. From that moment you have 48 hours.
Two days rather than a week, and that is deliberate rather than hurried. The registers either answer or they do not; reading them longer does not make a silent register speak. What a longer wait would buy is the seller's documents — and those belong to a different tier, not to a slower version of this one. If a source is temporarily unreachable, the memo says so with the date, and I re-run it rather than hold your report hostage to it.
Step four: I read the record. Not one pass, not a summary. The company register and the history behind it — who owned this company, what the share capital was, which changes were filed and on what date. Insolvency and bankruptcy registers. Court databases. Sanctions lists. Municipal licensing and terrace registers, where the town hall publishes them. The business's own public footprint. Every source is logged with the date I read it, including the ones that would not open.
Step five: the competition count. For any business tied to a physical location this is mandatory, never a sentence in passing. The comparable venues around the premises are counted and dated, and then tested against the revenue the seller claims. A café claiming a certain turnover in a street with four stronger competitors is telling you something different from the same café alone on its corner.
Step six: you get two pages and an annex, signed. Written by a person, reviewed by a person, and signed with a name — mine.
What is inside the two pages
One conclusion, chosen from four. We call it the verdict, which sounds courtroom-like; it simply means the single line at the top that says what I think you are looking at. Not a score, not a percentage. Either Walk — leave this deal. Or Only-If — go on, but only once named conditions are met. Or Resolve-first — something has to be settled before the deal can even be judged properly. Or no public-record blocker found, which means exactly what those words say and nothing wider.
Next to the verdict sits a box for the deposit decision: up to three numbered conditions, and the triggers that would make me walk away in your position.
Up to ten numbered findings. Each one follows the same shape, so nothing hides in prose: what was observed → the source and the date it was read → what it means in money, with the arithmetic printed where money can honestly be shown → the action it calls for. Each finding carries a severity: settle it first, negotiate on it, or keep an eye on it.
A checklist of what to demand before any deposit, with every item tied to the finding that produced it. Not a generic list of documents — the ones your deal needs.
Traffic lights, a coverage meter and a blind-spot box. The coverage meter tells you how much of the ground was actually reachable. The blind-spot box names what was not.
The evidence annex. Every source, its retrieval date and how strong it is. You or your lawyer can run the same path again and land on the same documents. A finding you cannot re-check is a claim, not a finding.
Why one honest answer is "we cannot settle this question"
Some questions come back unanswered, and the most common one is who held this business before your seller. The public record does not always say.
When that happens, the memo prints cannot clear against that one question — plain words for it: the public record does not answer this, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is not a fifth conclusion; the verdict at the top is still one of the four. It is a refusal to turn silence into reassurance. A report that treats "I found nothing" as "there is nothing" is the single most expensive kind of report you can buy, because it sells you confidence that was never purchased with evidence.
This costs me something to say out loud, and I say it before you pay rather than after.
What the memo owes you, in writing
Four elements, every time: the verdict; the risk finding; the demand checklist; the dated list of sources. If any of those four is missing from what you receive, tell me within seven days. I fix it within two working days, and if I do not, you choose between a full refund or a credit. Refunds reach your original payment method within ten business days; credits do not expire and can be used on any tier.
Read carefully what that promise is about, because the difference matters more than the words suggest. It is a promise about the document — that those four things will be in it. It is not a promise about the deal. Nobody can promise you that a business will do well, that nothing will surface after you buy, or that the seller has told you everything. Anyone who does is selling you a feeling rather than a document.
"These registers are public. Why would I pay someone to read them?"
It is the right question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a slogan. You can read all of them yourself. They are open, most of them are free, and nothing stops you.
What you are paying for is four things, and if none of them applies to you, then you should not pay.
Knowing which registers exist for this exact case. There is no single database. The one that matters depends on the country, on the activity, and often on the town — a bar in a Spanish city and a guesthouse in rural Portugal are answered by different offices holding different papers. Most of the time the hard part is not reading a register. It is knowing which four you should have opened.
Reading them in their own language, in their own wording. These are administrative documents written in Spanish and Portuguese legal phrasing, where a single word decides whether something transfers to you or stays with the seller. A translation tool will give you the sentence. It will not tell you which sentence carried the consequence.
The discipline of recording what could not be reached. This is the part that is genuinely hard to do for yourself, and it has nothing to do with skill. When you look up your own deal, an empty result feels like good news, because you want the deal to work. Every source I open gets logged with its date whether it answered or not, and the ones that stayed shut are printed in the memo. That habit exists to protect you from a comfortable reading of silence — including mine.
A name on the conclusion. The memo is signed. Someone with a reputation to lose has written down what he thinks and can be shown the document afterwards. That is worth something or it is worth nothing to you, and only you can say which.
So the honest version: if you read Spanish or Portuguese comfortably, already know which registers apply to your activity and region, and have the patience to log what you find with dates — do it yourself, and keep the €550. The buyers this is built for are the ones checking a business in a country whose paperwork they do not read, from several hundred kilometres away, on a deadline set by someone else.
What this tier never includes
None of the seller's private numbers. No accounts, no bank statements, no reconstruction of what the business earns. This is deliberate. At this tier those documents are not on the table, and building arithmetic on numbers nobody has checked would produce a confident-looking answer resting on air. What the memo does instead is tell you precisely which documents to demand — so that the next tier, or your own accountant, can do that work on real papers.
No valuation. The memo will say that a price rests on revenue nobody has confirmed. It will not tell you the business is worth a particular figure. Those are different statements and only one of them is honest without documents.
No authentication of documents, and no legal or tax advice. I am not your lawyer and do not replace one. This tier exists to tell you whether a deal deserves your lawyer's hours at all.
No contact with the seller or the broker. Ever. Not at any tier, not for any reason. Everything is read from the outside, which is why nothing you are considering is ever disturbed by my looking at it.
And three things no tier reaches at any price, anywhere. Who ultimately owns a company behind its registered holders. Lawsuits that have been filed but not yet decided. Private credit records. These are limits of what is public, not limits of effort, and the memo names them as blind spots for your lawyer instead of passing over them in silence.
Three situations where you should not buy a Deal Screen
- You are still comparing several listings. Screening one business properly is expensive precisely because it is thorough. If you have three candidates and no favourite, the €99 scan gives you a report on each and costs a fraction — and it credits toward this tier within thirty days if one of them turns serious.
- The seller has already handed you accounts and bank statements. Then your bottleneck is no longer the public record — it is whether those numbers hold. That is the €950 tier, and this one would leave your main question untouched.
- You have already decided to buy and want the contract drawn. Go to a lawyer. A screen is a filter before that step. Once the decision is made, a filter is a delay you are paying for.
What it costs and how the money moves
€550, final price, with no VAT added — a small-business exemption applies, and the exact article is cited on the pricing page rather than asserted here. If you paid for a €99 scan within the previous thirty days, that €99 comes off. If you later want the full numbers work, this €550 counts toward it and you pay the €400 difference, within thirty days of delivery.
One more thing worth knowing before you buy anything online in the EU. You normally have fourteen days to change your mind. Because your memo arrives within 48 hours, at checkout you are asked to confirm you want work to start immediately and that you understand the right to change your mind ends once the memo has been fully delivered. Until it is delivered you can still cancel and would owe only the proportional part of the work already done.
Where this sits. Quick Scan (€99) reads the advertisement and places it against the market it came from — up to three listings, one report each, in minutes. Deal Screen (€550) is a person reading the public record behind one named business: two pages in 48 hours, signed. Reality Check (€950) is where the seller's own numbers are tested against his own documents.
Check my deal →This note describes the scope, delivery and limits of one service as they stand on 3 August 2026; the binding wording is in the terms and on the pricing page, and where this note and those documents differ, those documents govern. General information and commercial opinion, not legal, tax or financial advice, and not a statement about any particular transaction.