How to use Pre-IPO Terminal, in three minutes

Listing on London's Main Market? Your sponsor has to confirm to the FCA that the directors have established procedures to make proper judgements on the company's financial position and prospects: FPPP, for short. Pre-IPO Terminal turns that confirmation into seventy-three criteria you can work through yourself. Here is how, in about three minutes.

This is the desk. On the left, the tools you can run. On the right, what changed in the listing rules and on the London market.

Before you type anything: where your data goes. Nowhere. The scan runs in your browser, with no database, no account and no server that receives your answers, and this page shows you how to check that yourself.

The free scan asks fifteen of the seventy-three criteria, across all nine areas. Let's run it for a made-up company. It is listing shares on the Main Market, with a sponsor.

It is incorporated in the UK, reports under IFRS, and has a board audit committee.

Each criterion is answered with how far it has got. Described, meaning written, approved and communicated, is the bar the FCA's guidance sets for the confirmation, so it counts as met.

There is no group risk register yet. And yet every risk on the register has a named owner, apparently already in use. Remember that one.

The rest goes quickly: budgets, KPIs and backups are covered, climate risk is not started, and nobody is sure how new accounting standards are picked up.

The result is undetermined, on purpose. The seven criteria that decide whether a sponsor can give the confirmation are not in the free scan, so it will not guess. It does show how much is met: eight of fifteen.

And it catches where your answers collide. Risk owners are in use, but there is no register to assign them on. One of the two answers is wrong, so that claim is not counted.

The open items come in the order worth doing them, with an owner and an effort band for each. The risk register comes first, because other criteria are impossible without it.

Take it away as a PDF, or as an Excel workbook to run as your tracker. Both are built in your browser, and the workbook opens here again next time.

The paid diagnostic runs all seventy-three, the seven gates included, with priority, effort, the order of work and an executive summary: five thousand pounds for thirty days' access. You can read a full worked example first.

On this fictional company, twenty-six criteria are open, five of them gates. But nine are consequences of others, so there are seventeen workstreams, not twenty-six.

Pre-IPO Terminal is a management tool, not an assurance opinion. Use it to reach your reporting accountant with no surprises. Start the free scan at preipo.uk.