Three financial years are reconstructed to IPO standard. That means revenue recognition policies that survive interrogation — no premature booking, no channel stuffing, cut-off discipline that holds. Related-party transactions identified in full, documented, and benchmarked to arm's length, because the DRHP will disclose every one of them and the exchange will ask about the pricing. Provisions that are adequate rather than optimistic. Contingent liabilities disclosed instead of buried. Consistent accounting policies across all three years, with prior-period errors corrected properly rather than absorbed quietly.
Then the findings get fixed. Restatement always surfaces things: unrecorded liabilities, personal expenditure sitting in the company, revenue recognised a quarter early, related-party balances with no agreements behind them. Each one needs remediation before it can be disclosed — agreements executed, balances settled, policies rewritten. This is slow, forensic work, and there is no shortcut that doesn't detonate later.
Four to six months for a typical SME. Longer if records are thin — reconstructing three years of supporting documentation where it doesn't exist is archaeology, and archaeology doesn't hurry.
Where companies stumble: underestimating this stage by half. The promoter who says "our books are clean, our auditor never raised anything" is usually describing a different standard. The other classic: starting banker conversations before restatement is done, then watching the timeline slip while diligence rediscovers every issue the restatement would have caught. Restatement first. Always.
Everything. The banker's comfort, the DRHP's credibility, the valuation, the exchange's observations — all of it stands on these numbers. Companies that do this stage properly find the rest of the process uneventful. Companies that don't, find out why at the worst possible moment.
Take the scorecard, then let's talk about the gaps — with a dated plan, not a sales pitch.
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