Check a pitchbook in six passes, not one read through: story, valuation integrity, comps and market data, confidentiality and compliance, brand and format, and the final file. Thirty five checks.
The reason for passes is that your attention cannot hold six different quality questions at once and defaults to the easiest. That is why a reviewer who starts at page one and works forward produces a beautifully consistent book whose central recommendation was never examined.
The order below is roughly how an experienced reviewer actually works, which is not the order the pages are in.
Pass 1: the story and the recommendation
Do this before formatting exists. Formatting a page that should not be in the book is pure waste.
- Read the page titles in sequence as text. Do they make an argument?
- Is there one clear recommendation, and is it on the first substantive page?
- Does each title state a conclusion rather than name a topic?
- Does the book answer the client's actual question, or the topic around it?
- Is there a page that exists only because you had it? Remove it.
- Would the client's most sceptical stakeholder find their objection addressed?
- Does the executive summary stand alone if nobody reads further?
Pass 2: valuation and financial integrity
The slowest pass and the one that protects your credibility.
- Does every financial figure resolve to a source, model version and as of date?
- Do figures agree between the summary, the body and the appendix?
- Are calculation conventions identical throughout: fiscal versus calendar year, currency conversion date, net debt definition, diluted versus basic?
- Are exceptional items treated consistently across all entities in a comparison?
- Do valuation ranges reconcile with the methodology pages that produced them?
- Does the football field match the underlying method outputs?
- Are units, currencies and scales consistent, including millions versus thousands?
- Do percentages state a base, and is the base the same throughout?
- Do sensitivity tables use the stated assumptions, and are the assumptions on the page?
Check ten is the one that most reliably breaks in a book built by several people. Two analysts each make a reasonable choice about currency conversion, and the resulting multiples are not comparable. Nobody notices because both pages look correct.
Pass 3: comps and market data
- Does the peer set have a documented rationale for inclusion and exclusion?
- Would you defend the peer set to a client who challenges it?
- Do all peers use identical metric definitions and adjustments?
- Does every figure carry a source and an as of date?
- Is market data current, and is the date visible on the page?
- Are transaction comps complete for the stated criteria, or is the screen selective?
- Are third party statistics correctly attributed, and does the source actually say what you claim?
- Are outliers explained rather than silently excluded?
Check twenty two deserves emphasis because it is where credibility is quietly lost. If your transaction screen excludes deals that would move the range unhelpfully, a client who runs their own screen will find them, and the conversation stops being about valuation.
Pass 4: confidentiality and compliance
- Is any material from another client or another deal present anywhere in the file?
- Are speaker notes, hidden slides and comments cleaned or deliberately retained?
- Has document metadata been checked, including author, company and revision history?
- Has restricted list status been confirmed for every name in the book?
- Are disclaimers, legal notices and required statements present and unedited?
- Is the confidentiality marking correct for the intended distribution?
- Are named individuals' details accurate, current and appropriate?
Checks twenty six and twenty seven are the classic leaks and both take under two minutes. Speaker notes from the internal version, a hidden page from a previous client, or metadata naming a competitor as the original author. All three have caused real incidents.
Pass 5: brand and format
- Does the book use the current approved master, with no foreign or orphaned layouts?
- Are all charts and tables native objects rather than pasted images?
- Are fonts, colours, number formats and chart styles from the template rather than local overrides?
Three checks because most of this pass should be automated. It is entirely deterministic, and humans are unreliable at deterministic checking at the hours pitchbooks get finished.
Pass 6: the final file
- Open the exported PDF, page through it completely, and confirm the filename, version, recipient and that any portal upload was acknowledged.
One check, and it catches a disproportionate share of the incidents that actually reach a client. Exports substitute fonts, reflow tables, drop charts and occasionally omit a page. Nobody notices because nobody opened the file they sent.
Three extra checks for AI assembled books
If any part of the book was assembled by an AI system, add these before pass six.
Every figure resolves to a real source. Confident, well formatted invention is the characteristic failure mode. The number will be plausible, consistent with the surrounding pages, and wrong.
No gap markers remain. If your workflow marks unresolved evidence, search the file. An unresolved marker reaching a client is worse than a missing page.
Disclaimers match the approved wording verbatim. Compare character by character rather than by eye. A paraphrase reads correctly and can mean something legally different, and this is the one place where close enough has consequences.
How to use this without slowing the book down
Automate passes two, three and five. Number reconciliation, cross page consistency, convention checking, source presence, master compliance, chart nativeness. All machine checkable, all currently done badly by tired people.
Keep passes one and four human. Argument quality and confidentiality judgement need a person, and they are where a reviewer's attention is worth the most.
Budget review time against claims, not pages. A thirty page book with sixty figures takes longer than an eighty page book that is mostly profiles.
Use a second reader. The final pass belongs to someone who did not build the book, ideally someone attending the meeting. Delivery accountability changes how carefully a person reads.
Where offgen fits
Most of passes two, three and five are automatable, and that is where the time goes back to the team. In offgen, source references and as of dates survive into the book, so check eight takes seconds. Native charts carry their data, so check thirty three is a property rather than a check. Lockable elements keep disclaimers from being paraphrased. Brand governance handles pass five during generation.
Output stays natively editable, which matters because pitchbooks get corrected up to the moment they are sent, by people who did not build them.
More on the sector view is on our banking page.
The habit worth building: pass one before anyone formats a page. Twenty minutes, before the sunk cost of a finished looking book makes everybody defensive, and it saves more than the other five passes combined.
Frequently asked questions
What should you check in a pitchbook before sending it?
Work in six passes: the story and recommendation, valuation and financial integrity, comps and market data, confidentiality and compliance, brand and format, and the final exported file. Reading front to back once catches far less than checking in passes.
What are the most common pitchbook errors?
Figures that disagree between the summary and the appendix, comps built on inconsistent calculation conventions, market data with no as of date, a stale tombstone or team page, disclaimers copied from an old book, and a final PDF that differs from the working file.
How do you check comparable company tables?
Confirm the peer set has a documented rationale, that calculation conventions are identical across all peers, that every figure carries a source and date, that adjustments are applied consistently, and that the resulting multiples reconcile with the valuation summary elsewhere in the book.
What confidentiality checks belong in a pitchbook review?
Whether any material from another client or deal is present, whether speaker notes and hidden slides are clean, whether document metadata was checked, whether restricted list status was confirmed, and whether the distribution and confidentiality marking match the intended recipients.
How is checking an AI assembled pitchbook different?
Add three checks: every figure resolves to a real source, no gap markers were left unresolved, and disclaimers match the approved wording verbatim rather than being paraphrased. Confident, well formatted invention is the characteristic failure mode.
Who should perform the final pitchbook check?
Someone other than the person who built it, and ideally someone who will be in the room. Authors read what they intended to write. A second reader with delivery accountability reads differently and catches more.
Sources
- 01Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (General Data Protection Regulation) — EUR-Lex, 2016-04-27. Accessed 26 August 2026.
- 02Editable templates — offgen. Accessed 26 August 2026.
- 03Banking industry solutions — offgen. Accessed 26 August 2026.
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About the author
Florian Ploszczyk
Co-Founder and COO, MD
Florian writes about consulting workflows, professional presentations, company knowledge, and the controlled adoption of agentic AI.