The L3VLUP tool suite

A tombstone is the small block naming one deal: target, acquirer, value, and the role the bank played. A credentials page is a grid of them, and it is the slide that argues why this bank should run the mandate. Built by hand it is dozens of boxes that all have to sit on the same grid and stay there when one is added.

A football field stacks one horizontal bar per valuation method, so trading comps, transaction comps, a DCF and the 52-week range sit above each other and the overlap between them is visible at a glance. It is the most-used chart in a sell-side pitch and among the most tedious to build from a spreadsheet.

Boxes and lines showing who reports to whom, or which bankers sit on which workstream. Presentation software has no native version worth using, so these get drawn box by box and redrawn every time somebody joins or leaves.

A waterfall shows how a number got from one period to the next: last year's revenue, then one bar per driver such as price, volume, currency and acquisitions, then this year's. It turns a variance table into something a committee reads in ten seconds.

The contents page at the front of a pitchbook, and the divider before each section, with page numbers that stay correct when a section moves. Done manually, reordering a deck means renumbering all of it by hand.

Two versions of the same model compared cell by cell: which formulas changed, which values changed, and which rows are new. It answers the question you have when a model comes back from somebody else and you cannot see what they touched.

The convention every bank uses: blue for hardcoded inputs, black for formulas, green for links to another sheet. It exists so a reviewer can see at a glance where the assumptions live. Applying it by hand across a finished model takes an evening.

Flags the things that quietly break models: a hardcoded number buried inside a formula, a broken reference, a row where one column calculates differently from its neighbours. These are the errors that survive a read-through and surface in a diligence session.

An automated audit plus the written review an associate would give an analyst: what is wrong, what is fragile, and what a reviewer will ask about first.

Company overview and industry pages drafted from a company name, so a first version of the boilerplate exists before you start editing. The research and the judgement stay yours; the blank page does not.