Revenue is the most lied-about number in small-business sales, and screenshots are the easiest evidence to fake. A serious buyer never accepts a screenshot as proof. Instead, verify revenue from three independent sources and make sure they agree: the payment processor, the bank account, and the business's own analytics or accounting system. If all three tell the same story, the numbers are probably real. If they disagree, you have found your first problem.

Start with the payment processor, usually Stripe or PayPal. Ask the seller to add you as a read-only user, or to share a live screen recording while they log in and walk through the dashboard. Look at gross volume over twelve months, then drill into refunds, disputes, and failed payments — a business with 15% refund rates is a different asset from one with 2%. Check the MRR movement too: new, expanded, churned, and contracted revenue month by month. A flat MRR line propped up by one big customer is a concentration risk, not stability.

Next, match the processor data against bank statements. Download or request statements for the same twelve months and confirm that the deposits line up with the processor payouts, allowing for the usual two-to-three-day lag. This is the step that catches the most fraud, because faking a Stripe dashboard is easy and faking a year's bank statements is hard. Any gap between claimed revenue and banked cash needs an explanation in writing — legitimate reasons exist, such as annual plans paid upfront, but undocumented revenue is unverifiable revenue.

Then check the traffic and customer side. Analytics should show the visitor numbers that could plausibly produce the claimed sales, and the customer list should show plan, start date, and status for each account. Ask to see cohort data: groups of customers who joined in the same month, and how many are still paying a year later. If the seller cannot produce a customer list or cohort view, the business may be smaller than claimed, or the seller may not actually control the customer relationship.

Finally, treat responsiveness as data. A seller who takes twelve days to answer a first enquiry will take three weeks to produce revenue records and two months to complete a transfer. Move fast on listings with verified revenue — marketplaces that confirm figures through a direct Stripe integration remove one major source of risk before you ask a single question. Verification is not distrust; it is the price of a clean deal, and honest sellers expect it.

A serious buyer asks for a specific document set, and a serious seller has it ready. The list is short: profit-and-loss statements for the last 24 to 36 months, tax returns for the same period, bank statements, Stripe or PayPal exports showing gross volume, refunds, and disputes, and a customer or subscriber report with plan, start date, and status. For content sites, add Google Analytics and Search Console access; for SaaS, add cohort retention reports and a churn breakdown; for e-commerce, add supplier invoices and inventory records. Ask for everything under a signed NDA before you make an offer, and give the seller a deadline — a week is fair. A seller who produces the documents quickly and completely is signalling an honest business. A seller who stalls, redacts, or produces screenshots instead of exports is signalling the opposite, and you should price that signal into your offer or walk away. Verification takes a few days and costs nothing, while an unverified purchase can cost everything, so never skip it, however good the listing looks.