IPO Readiness Assessment

⚠️ **Finance warning / Avertissement finance** : informational only, not investment advice. A readiness assessment is a structured judgment, not a filing, a legal opinion or a guarantee that a listing will succeed or price well; market windows open and close on forces no checklist controls, and no output here is a promise of return. Curated by Skill Harbor: the IPO readiness assessment skill of the investment banking pack in andreworia/claude-finance-skills, written to say without flattery whether a company is ready. Use it when a board asks for a listing window, a sponsor tests an IPO against a sale, or a company has been told it is twelve months away for three years running, and do it before the equity story, because a good story on a base that cannot survive diligence fails. The assessment covers five dimensions: the history of financial statements and their audit status, the control environment, reporting capability, board and governance, and KPI definition discipline. The method runs in eight steps. It counts the audit runway (how many years exist on the listing standard and by whom, noting that a review is not an audit and that re-doing an early year on the listing standard is a long-lead item), tests controls the way an external auditor will (segregation of duties, revenue cut-off, IT general controls, each weakness classified by severity, with the note that a material weakness disclosed at listing is survivable and one found afterwards is a different conversation), times the close against public reporting deadlines, and checks the board against exchange phase-in rules, committee structure and related-party clean-up. KPI discipline is imposed hard: every metric gets a written definition, one owner, and must be reperformable from the ledger and recomputed on an unflattering basis before an underwriter does it. Forecasting capability (four to six quarters of budget versus actual), the cap table, equity compensation and systems plumbing are tested too. The output closes with a gap list carrying an owner, a cost and a duration per gap, sequenced into a critical path rather than summed, with an honest statement of which gaps cannot close inside the desired window. The worked example in the file is fictional and illustrative. From the andreworia/claude-finance-skills repository (MIT). Honest caveats: the evidence (financial statements, close calendar, board composition, KPI calculations, budget history) is yours to supply, and the assessment is only as honest as that evidence. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use.