What happens, in the order it happens.
Almost everything we take on has a date attached to it that will not move — a commissioning window, a tariff order, a drawdown a contractor is already building against. Once that date is fixed, the engagement is a scheduling problem: which document has to exist before which approval, and which of them can be built alongside a lender’s appraisal instead of ahead of it.
The other pages say what we work on. This one is the sequence, the documents we need from you at each point, and what you are left holding at the end.
It starts with what is fixed
The first conversation is not about scope. It is five questions: what date cannot move and what sets it; who the counterparty is and what has already been signed with them; which lenders or investors have already seen the file; what debt is already drawn and what it is secured on; and who inside your organisation can produce a document without waiting for a board meeting.
Those five answers decide whether we are useful to you. A nine-month commissioning window under a RESCO PPA with three months already spent is not the same engagement as the same window on the day of signing — the work is identical, the sequence is not, and in one of the two cases the honest answer is that the schedule no longer has room for a debt process. Saying so in the first conversation is worth more to you than a mandate letter.
What you provide
Documents, in whatever state they are actually in. Waiting until a file is complete before starting is the most expensive habit we see, because the missing items are almost always the ones with a four-week lead time — a registered lease deed, a tehsil NOC, a director’s ITR set — and they only start moving once somebody has named them.
We tell you which three items on that list decide the timeline, and those are the three we chase. The rest can arrive while the file is being built. What we do not do is send the list and wait for it — assembling the document set is the mandate, not a precondition to starting one.
What we produce
A file, arranged in the reading order of the person who decides. Credit teams read for the same things in roughly the same sequence, and a file organised the way the borrower thinks about the project rather than the way the appraisal note is written costs two weeks of queries that already had answers in it.
Cross-referenced has a specific meaning here. Three separate places state who the directors of an SPV are — the MCA record, the GST registration, and the KYC folder holding their documents — and they disagree more often than anyone expects, because a resignation is filed in one and not the others. So the three lists are reconciled against each other before the file goes anywhere: every name on MCA or GST has KYC behind it, every KYC file belongs to someone still on MCA or GST, and a name in one and not the others is resolved rather than noted. A lender finds that gap in week three of appraisal. It is cheaper to find it in week zero.
Past that, on a project financing: the land position stated plainly, with the plot area agreeing across the jamabandi, the lease deed and the DPR, and the part of it that is not yet clean named rather than left for someone to notice; a financial model where each assumption traces to a document in the file rather than to the model’s own history; the DPR read against the PPA it has to satisfy, so the obligations that carry dates — the performance bank guarantee under article 2.5, the irrevocable letter under article 3, the compliance status under article 4.1.1 — are tracked as project milestones instead of being discovered during appraisal; and the CMA-format working built in the template of the bank it is going to.
On a transaction it means the information memorandum and the data room, diligence responses written once and reused rather than re-answered per party, and findings quantified against price, against structure, or against a condition precedent — a list of observations is not a diligence output.
And a shortlist rather than a broadcast: the lenders who lend into that structure at that tenor, with the reason each one is on the list. A file declined by fifteen lenders is harder to place than the same file never shown to them, because declines circulate.
While the file is with a lender
Sequential is the default and it is what makes projects late: incorporation, then KYC, then the DPR, then approach a lender, each step queued behind the one before it. We run SPV formation, director KYC and the DPR alongside appraisal, so the credit team’s questions arrive against a file that is already being completed rather than one that has not been started.
Queries come back to us, not to you. Most of them are not credit questions at all — a schedule that does not tie to the return filed, a director’s address that differs across two documents, a lease deed whose area does not match the DPR. Held by someone with the whole file open, those are answered the same day. Relayed through three parties, each one costs a week.
Sanction is not the end of that work. Conditions precedent arrive as a list with no owners and no dates against them, and a facility sanctioned in one quarter and drawn two later usually has an unremarkable CP list behind it. We turn it into a schedule with a name and a date on every line, and we close the lines out.
How a mandate closes
On drawdown, or on completion. Not on sanction and not on signing — those are the points at which the work is nearly done, and the gap between nearly and actually is where the deadline usually goes.
What you are holding at that point is deliberate. The document file, current, in a state the next facility or the next round can be run from rather than rebuilt. The conditions precedent closed out with the evidence for each sitting against it. And the obligations that outlive the transaction — PPA compliance dates, covenant tests, the filings that follow a change in shareholding — as a register with an owner and a date on every line, handed to whoever inside your organisation is going to keep it.
Then we stop. Staying on as a permanent part of a finance function is a different service with a different shape, and it gets agreed as one rather than drifting into being one.
What we turn down
A file that has already been through a long list of lenders and was declined on credit rather than on presentation. We can usually tell you which of the two it was, and that is worth having, but repackaging does not fix the first one.
A window that has already closed, where taking the mandate would mean billing for a process that cannot finish in time.
Work that requires a registration we do not hold. We say so and point you at who does it, rather than taking the mandate and subcontracting the part that needed the licence.
In environmental markets, originating credits or trading them on our own book. We advise the client on registering a project and on raising funding against the credits it earns; the credits are theirs and stay theirs.
Where to start
The first conversation is the five questions above. If you can answer them, we can tell you inside that conversation whether we are useful to you and what the first fortnight would look like.