The Net Proceeds Bridge
The single chart that reconciles what a deal looks like on the term sheet with what a seller actually walks away with.
The net proceeds bridge starts at the headline sale price and walks down — and back up — through every adjustment that separates a press-release number from cash in the bank: stranded costs, dis-synergies, and the value recovered by mitigating them.
- Headline sale price — the number in the term sheet
- Less: stranded costs — corporate overhead that doesn't leave with the divested unit
- Less: dis-synergies — revenue and operating value lost in the split
- Add: recovery actions — TSA renegotiation, vendor repricing, and other mitigations the deal team can actually execute
- = True net proceeds — presented as a range, not a point estimate
Reading the Golden Hour bridge: In the demo deal, a $200M headline price nets to a $165M–$185M true range once stranded costs and dis-synergies are weighed against recovery actions. That gap between headline and reality is exactly what this bridge is built to surface before signing, not after.
See How the Net Proceeds Bridge Is Calculated for how DiligenceDesk derives each line from the underlying cost driver data rather than a single hardcoded estimate.
Stranded Costs
Fixed costs that don't shrink when a business is divested — the single biggest driver of the gap between headline price and true proceeds.
Revenue & Operating Dis-Synergies
Value that quietly disappears after close: lost cross-sell, weaker purchasing scale, and go-to-market disruption that no line item captures on its own.
How the Net Proceeds Bridge Is Calculated
The bridge isn't hand-typed per report — it's derived once from cost driver data so every screen and export agree.