Precedent Transaction Screener

⚠️ **Finance warning / Avertissement finance** : informational only, not investment advice. Past deal multiples describe what buyers paid under past conditions, not what a target is worth today: a precedent set built on a different credit cycle can anchor a bid badly wrong, there is a real risk of loss in any transaction, and no range here is a promise of return. Curated by Skill Harbor: the precedent transaction screener skill at the root of andreworia/claude-finance-skills. Distinct from the precedent transactions skill of the investment banking pack (lot 86): this screener is built around screening discipline, cycle and structure adjustments and synergy calibration, and its governing principle is that a precedent is only useful if you would redo the deal at the same multiple today, otherwise adjust it or discard it. Use it when building the precedent page of a valuation deck, pressure testing a control premium thesis, or framing a buy-side bid against historical comparables. Every precedent in the final set must pass five filters with explicit justification on borderline cases: business comparability, scale comparability, geography and regulatory comparability, deal structure comparability, and cycle comparability; one missed filter makes a footnote, two make noise. The workflow defines the screen in writing before pulling any list (sector taxonomy, geography, a size band of roughly half to three times the expected deal size, control deals only, a timeframe of three to five years in stable sectors and as short as 12 to 24 months in repricing ones, with related party, distressed and court approved sales excluded), pulls the raw list from at least two databases and reconciles their disagreements on value, dates, metrics and earnout treatment, then goes back to primary sources for every shortlisted deal because a multiple that cannot be rebuilt from filings and deal documents is not used. Each precedent is calibrated to announcement date economics, tagged on the dimensions that move the multiple (buyer type, process type, consideration mix, strategic rationale, cycle position, credit conditions, target situation, synergy disclosure and contingent consideration), cycle adjusted by an index method and a cohort method with both adjusted and unadjusted multiples shown, and tiered into direct, analog and reference sets, with the tier one median and interquartile range as the working range. The premium and the synergy logic are read separately, since a high multiple with a low premium, or a premium roughly equal to the present value of disclosed synergies, tells a different story than the headline. From the andreworia/claude-finance-skills repository (MIT). Honest caveats: database access and primary deal documents are yours to source, and every multiple, premium and synergy figure must be verified by you; announced deals also carry survivorship bias, since walked away processes never print. Skill Harbor never reviews the code, review it yourself before use.