Guide: How to make the most of your data room

Planning, planning and more planning! 
During, and even before initial set-up, you should try to think about the long-term management of your data room, ask yourself:

• Will you need to add documents throughout the process
• Where will your documents go?
• How should your documents be named so they’re easy to find?
• How can you make life easier for bidders?

Our regular users tell us that including questions like these in their planning stage is vital to running a smooth, fast process. It will help you to minimise any unnecessary back and forth between parties. Our project management team are experts in this area and are always available to help your through the planning stage.

Use all of the available features
Client feedback drives our feature road-map. Long sought-after features are now included in your data room including:

• Drag and drop
• Project e-mail
• Page-level reporting
• Redaction
• Mobile App

While these developments will save you countless hours, if any task is taking you longer than you’d like, your project management team are always happy to help out.

Regular account management meetings and demonstrations
When you need a data room, you’re likely to be running on a tight schedule so it makes sense to make sure everyone is trained on the system before the need is there. Having regular catch-ups with your account manager for team refresher training before your set-up is needed will mean everyone in the team can be efficient from the get go.

Q&A
Managing the Q&A process has traditionally been done using excel. However, utilising the data room for this gives you a centralised point for all due diligence, which is great for compliance! You can set up a customised workflow, with different approval levels, auto-routed questions and bulk uploading of questions and answers from excel.

Easily apply flexible access rights and user permissions
Is someone asking to be able to download a document, but you’re worried about giving them full access? You can use the ‘timebomb’ feature to grant them full access for a defined time period, after which they will no longer have access to that document. Or, maybe need HR to upload documents but you don’t want them to have full access to the data room? You can give them upload access to only one folder so all they see are the documents that they are uploading. There are countless ways to set-up your permissions to work for you, if you have any questions then just ask the project management team about how best to set it up!

Monitor how people access and use files
Utilising the reporting feature fully gives complete insight into everything happening in the data room. This enables you to monitor user activity and help with insights into their behavior and thoughts.