Build a deal sheet that wins TS interviews: what to include, how to talk about confidential work, and how to turn thin audit or internship experience into credible stories.
Two candidates sit the same Transaction Services interview. The first, asked "talk me through something you've worked on," hunts around for a memory, lands on a vague audit engagement, and narrates tasks. The second reaches for a single sheet of paper, points to a line, and says: "This one — a €40m carve-out of a manufacturing division. I owned the working capital analysis, and the interesting finding was a €1.2m seasonal swing the seller hadn't flagged." Same experience level. Completely different impression. The difference is a deal sheet.
A deal sheet is a one-page summary of the transactions, engagements or projects you've worked on, framed in the language the interviewer cares about. It signals that you think in deals, not tasks — and it hands you a structure you control. Most candidates never prepare one, which is precisely why it works. And here's the reassuring part: you do not need a fistful of completed M&A mandates to build a credible one. Auditors, interns and graduates all have raw material. The skill is in selecting it, framing it, and holding your nerve when the interviewer probes.
In banking and advisory, a deal sheet is a standard artefact: a running list of live and closed transactions a professional has touched. Bringing your own version to a TS interview does three things at once.
First, it reframes your experience in deal terms. An interviewer scanning an audit-heavy CV sees compliance work. A deal sheet re-expresses that same work as diligence-relevant analysis — the same shift you'll make daily if you move from audit to TS.
Second, it gives you narrative control. Instead of being marched through generic behavioural questions, you steer the conversation onto ground you've rehearsed. You choose which stories get told.
Third, it demonstrates commercial literacy before you've answered a single technical question. A candidate who can summarise an engagement by deal type, size, their own role and the key finding is already speaking the dialect of the desk.
A deal sheet is not your CV in prose. The CV says where you worked and for how long; the deal sheet drills into what you did on specific engagements and what you found. Think of it as the evidence base behind every competency answer you'll give — the spine the whole interview hangs off.
A deal sheet doesn't invent experience you don't have. It packages the experience you do have so a busy interviewer can see its relevance in ten seconds instead of ten minutes.
Every entry answers the same handful of questions. Keep it disciplined — one or two lines per field, not a paragraph. The six load-bearing fields are: deal type, sector, size, your role, key finding, and outcome.
| Field | What it answers | Weak version | Strong version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deal / engagement | What was it? | "Audit client" | "Buy-side FDD on a €40m carve-out of a plastics division" |
| Sector | What industry? | "Industrials" | "Speciality chemicals, B2B, mid-market" |
| Size | How big? | "A big client" | "€40m EV, ~€6m EBITDA, 180 staff" |
| Your role | What did you own? | "Helped the team" | "Owned the net working capital analysis end-to-end" |
| Key finding | What did you discover? | "Found some issues" | "Identified a €1.2m seasonal NWC swing not in the IM" |
| Outcome / relevance | So what? | "Client was happy" | "Informed the buyer's price-adjustment ask" |
Notice the pattern in the strong column: specific, quantified, and framed from the buyer's or seller's perspective. Numbers do the persuading. The two fields candidates skip — your role and key finding — are precisely the two interviewers care about most. "I worked on the audit of a software company" tells them nothing. "I owned revenue recognition testing and found €1.2m of subscription revenue recognised early, which fed a deferred-revenue adjustment" tells them you can do the job. If you owned a piece of net working capital analysis or helped build an EBITDA bridge, that's a headline entry, not a footnote.
Most candidates who fret about deal sheets are auditors, interns or graduates convinced they have "nothing to put on it." They almost always do. The trick is translation.
If you're an auditor: your raw material is stronger than you think. Revenue testing is a proxy for quality-of-earnings work — you already probe cut-off, recognition and one-offs, which is the heart of QoE. Your review of accruals and provisions maps onto normalised working capital analysis. Your debt and provisions work connects to net debt and debt-like items. Reframe a statutory audit of a manufacturer as "assessed revenue recognition and stock provisioning for a €30m-turnover industrials business" — true, and instantly relevant.
If you're an intern: you probably supported a workstream — a databook, a trading-analysis section, a management-accounts tidy-up. That's a legitimate entry, provided you're honest about your level. "Supported the FDD team on a retail deal; built the monthly EBITDA trend analysis from management accounts" is credible and checkable.
If you're a student with no transaction experience: use a proxy. A dissertation, a valuation of a listed company, a case competition, a personal analysis of a company's net debt. Label it honestly as academic or self-directed, but show you can carry a piece of analysis end-to-end.
The honest principle: never invent a deal, but always frame real work in deal language. A reconciliation you built becomes "supported the working-capital analysis feeding the price adjustment." That's presentation, not fabrication — and the fastest way to blow it is to inflate. "I built the model" when you formatted three tabs is the quickest route to being exposed under questioning. Own precisely what you did, and let the framing carry the weight.
Most of what you've worked on is confidential, and interviewers know it — they operate under the same constraints. They're not testing whether you'll leak; they're testing whether you have the judgement to discuss work without breaching it. Get this wrong and it's an instant red flag.
The convention is simple: anonymise and generalise.
A clean line you can reuse: "I can't name the target as it was a confidential mandate, but it was a roughly €40m-revenue logistics business, and my piece was the working-capital build." That sentence proves discretion and gives the interviewer everything they need.
Handled well, confidentiality is a plus, not a limit. An interviewer who sees you instinctively anonymise a client is watching someone they can safely put in front of their clients next month.
A deal sheet is bait. Put "€1.2m seasonal NWC swing" on the page and you will be asked to explain it. That's the point — you've chosen the ground — but it means every entry must survive interrogation. Expect the funnel to go:
These are behavioural questions anchored to real evidence, which makes them harder to bluff and more rewarding to answer well. Prepare a STAR narrative — Situation, Task, Action, Result — for each entry, but lead with the analysis, because TS interviewers want technical substance alongside the soft skills. The failure mode is putting something on the sheet you can't defend at level three. If you can't explain how a number was derived, take it off the sheet. A shorter sheet you can defend beats a longer one that collapses under a second question. This is where wider interview preparation pays off — the deal sheet and the technical prep reinforce each other.
Draft it on a single page, three to five entries, strongest first. Use this skeleton for each entry, then rehearse out loud.
DEAL SHEET — [Your Name]
1. Buy-side FDD — Carve-out, Speciality Chemicals
Size: ~€40m EV, ~€6m EBITDA
Role: Owned NWC analysis; supported net debt schedule
Finding: €1.2m seasonal working capital swing not in the IM
So what: Fed the buyer's completion-mechanism negotiation
2. Statutory audit → QoE-relevant, Industrials
Size: ~€30m turnover
Role: Revenue recognition & provisions testing
Finding: Aggressive cut-off inflating one period's revenue
So what: Directly analogous to a QoE run-rate adjustment
3. Academic valuation — Listed Retailer
Size: Public company, self-directed
Role: Full DCF + comparables; net debt bridge
Finding: Off-balance-sheet leases materially changed leverage
So what: Demonstrates equity-vs-enterprise-value fluency
To build yours:
Two format notes. Keep it to one page — it's a prompt, not a portfolio. And tailor the ordering to the firm: lead with a carve-out for a firm known for boutique carve-out work, or with a clean audit-to-diligence story where that's your genuine strength.
You rarely hand the sheet over — you keep it in front of you as a memory aid and use it to answer the inevitable "tell me about something you've worked on." Here's a model answer for an audit-background candidate:
"The engagement I'd point to was a buy-side financial due diligence on a carve-out — a speciality chemicals division being sold out of a larger group, around €40m enterprise value. I owned the net working capital analysis and supported the net debt schedule. The interesting finding was a seasonal working capital swing of roughly €1.2m that hadn't been flagged in the information memorandum — the business built stock ahead of a quarterly demand peak, so a month-end snapshot understated the funding requirement. That mattered because the buyer was proposing a completion mechanism based on a normalised working capital target, and our finding shifted where that target should sit. If I'd had more time, I'd have pushed for two more years of monthly data to test whether the seasonality was stable or drifting."
Notice what that answer does. It's anonymised. It's quantified but banded. It names a specific role and finding, connects it to a working capital target — a real commercial consequence — and ends on judgement. That's the shape every deal-sheet answer should take.
The best time to build a deal sheet is now, while the details are fresh — not the night before an interview when a two-year-old engagement has blurred into "some audit thing." Open a document today and draft three entries. Force each through the six fields. Say each aloud, then hand the sheet to a friend and ask them to play interviewer down the funnel: walk me through it, why did it matter, how did you work it out. The gaps that exercise exposes are exactly the gaps a real interviewer will find — better to find them first. Do that, and you'll walk in with the one thing most candidates lack: a plan for the question you know is coming.
The Transaction Services Interview Programme (€119.99, one-time) includes a deal-sheet builder with worked examples for audit, internship and graduate backgrounds, plus a bank of interviewer probes so every entry survives interrogation. Enrol today.
Hundreds of candidates prepared their interviews with this programme. Those who landed the role have one thing in common: they worked the cases before walking into the room.