Method & sources

Where the criteria come from

The 72 criteria are derived from the illustrative objectives in ICAEW TECH 14/14CFF, “Guidance on financial position and prospects procedures”, Appendix 1, sections A–H — the guidance a reporting accountant follows when scoping an FPPP engagement. Each criterion carries the objective it derives from and the rule it hangs on, so the checklist can be cross-read against the standard rather than taken on trust.

Rule citations are to the UK Listing Rules and the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules as they stand at 2026-08-28. The regime was rewritten in July 2024 and continues to move; a citation without an as-of date is a liability, so every report carries one.

How a self-assessment can be falsified

A questionnaire that only reflects your answers back at you is worth nothing. This one can contradict you, because the criteria are not independent. Some are impossible to satisfy without another: you cannot assign risk owners on a register that does not exist, and you cannot run an inside-information process without the committee that decides what is inside information.

There are 35 such dependencies in the pack, 14 of them reachable from the 31-question free scan. The bar for including one is impossibility, not correlation — “both are good practice” is not a dependency, and a false accusation costs more credibility than a missed finding.

Group readiness is the weakest entity

Readiness is not one number for one company. It is N legal entities × nine areas × 72 criteria, with a perimeter that moves while pre-IPO restructuring is still under way. So for any criterion that must hold at every entity, group readiness is the minimum across the perimeter, not the average. A group Code of Ethics that three subsidiaries never adopted is not sixty per cent done.

What the free scan does not do

It observes nothing. There is no document, no filing and no register behind any answer, so no line in the report claims to be verified — every “yes” is marked self-declared, and the only findings are collisions between your own answers. A sponsor will not accept a self-assessment as evidence, and the report says so on its face.

The full diagnostic asks for the artefact behind each criterion and tests it against the acceptance condition published on the criteria page. That is the difference between a questionnaire and an evidence file.

What this is not

Privacy

The scan runs entirely in your browser. The rule pack, the cross-check and the scoring engine are pure functions shipped with the page, so your answers are never sent anywhere, never logged and never stored. That is the architecture, not a policy — which matters when the input is a pre-IPO issuer’s own list of unremediated gaps.