Third-year analyst here. I’ve lost count of all-nighters spent fixing footer mismatches and broken links in pitch books. Heard whispers about senior teams using shared checklists to catch errors before MD reviews. Does anyone actually have a battle-tested system that works across deal teams? How do you balance thoroughness with speed when five people are editing simultaneously?
collab checklists are just more work for juniors. MDs only care if the numbers are right. Once had an ED rip out 20 pages because ‘the blue was wrong’. Save yourself the agony and focus on substance.
Pro tip: the real checklist is having an associate owe you a favor. Formatting errors vanish when you cover their model tweaks at 3am.
plz help! my checklist keeps missing appendices. anyone got a template from goldman or MS? i’ll venmo coffee!!
our team uses a shared doc but senior guys never update it. how do you get VPs to actually participate??
heard some groups use slack bots for QC. anyone tried automating this stuff?
At Morgan Stanley, we developed a dynamic checklist in Asana that tracks real-time edits. Every analyst owns a section, with validators from other deal teams. Reduced formatting reworks by 70% last fiscal year.
Key is institutionalizing the process. Assign a ‘Deck Captain’ weekly who maintains the master checklist and conducts pre-client reviews. Rotate this role to build responsibility.
Don’t lose hope! Our cross-team checklist took 6 months to perfect but now we finish decks 2 days faster! You’ve got this 
Remember pulling 3 all-nighters straight on a healthcare deal because our footers kept breaking. Finally made a crowdsourced checklist with the 3rd-year analysts – now we catch 90% of errors before MD eyes hit the deck. Lifesaver!
2023 IB survey showed teams using standardized checklists reduce formatting revisions by 58%. Top performers update checklists bi-weekly and include 12 core categories: page numbering, source footnotes, legal disclaimers, etc. Template version control is critical.