The Deal 2023: Behind the Scenes with Data’s Alice Manterfield

Every year, we bring you our annual report detailing all the deals from the previous year, and what that means for the year ahead. What you don’t see is the hours of hard work that goes into creating it—from data collection to painstakingly checking over 2,000 deals, to writing that up, designing it, and getting it into your hands.

This year, we give you a glimpse behind the scenes, and talk with Alice Manterfield, who oversaw the deal data collection process.

About Alice Manterfield

Alice has been with Beauhurst for almost six years, after joining in 2018 as a Data Curator. She now works as a Senior Curation Team Leader, managing her own curation sub-team. She studied at the University of Nottingham, where she took an MSci in Genetics.

Alice was one of the founding members of the Beauhurst Nottingham office.

The Q&A

How long have you been a part of creating Beauhurst’s annual reports?

I started working on the annual reports directly in 2019, but the work I’ve done since I began at Beauhurst in May 2018 has contributed towards the data that is used for The Deal.

When a share of our team starts working on the report, that leaves a smaller group of people left to handle our usual daily work, some of which will also be utilised for data that features in the yearly review.

My initial direct task involved working on a share of the deal data that is disclosed to us by our fund contacts—making sure that the data we have on the platform covers the deal data sent to us, and making amendments when necessary.

Now that I’ve transitioned into a managerial role, I’ve started doing a share of the fund contacting, as well as supervising the data collection.

What data is gathered manually? And how do you verify it?

A lot of the data that contributes to our reports is gathered via our usual daily work. This includes analysing company press releases, and processing share allotment forms filed with Companies House to find evidence of unannounced fundraising.

However, the extra work we conduct for these reports involves reaching out to over 20 of the most active funds in the UK to request that they disclose their deal data for the time period each report covers, just to make sure we’ve not missed anything.

We compare as many available sources as we can for each funding round on our platform. This includes SH01 filings (Share allotment forms filed with Companies House), press releases, and disclosed information from participants in the funding round.

We can also contact participants when things aren’t clear or sources conflict, and confirm our methodology with submitters to make sure we’re on the same page.

How many people were involved, and how long did it take?

Work for the deal involves direct work from ten people in the data curation team, and hard work by the remainder of the team to make sure all of our core daily work is finished while we are doing our work for the report. We also have another team who creates the sheets for the task, and helps to organise the flow of our work.

Guest answer: We use our own platform to pull all the data for the deal, could a customer/client replicate our report?

As The Deal is written by the marketing team (and this year by myself), I’ve taken the opportunity to answer this question.

The short answer is yes—with a Beauhurst subscription, you could extract all the data that’s been used for The Deal. What would be difficult, however, is to replicate all the hours of hard work that goes into analysing it. While you can gather this data, sifting through it, and making sense of it all takes a team. And what’s the point of doing all that work, if we’ve done it for you?

Are there ever any discrepancies between what deal data has been announced and what data we have?

Our deals get updated all the time, and we want the most up-to-date information we can get on the platform. So, of course, there are sometimes updates to deals that come in after the Deal report has been published, and we’d always update the platform with the latest data regardless.

However, we make sure we contact funds as close to the deadline as possible, so the chances of discrepancies are going to be minimal. Sometimes differences will just be down to differing use of terminology—so, for example, a disclosure may consider multiple tranches of a raise to be different rounds, whereas we often group together tranches that are close together as a larger single event.

What's your favourite and most challenging part of the process?

My favourite part of the report is the team camaraderie it creates, and seeing the report being published. I also love encouraging my team to be proud of it, and reading the physical printed copy when it arrives in our office. Plus, the quarterly exchanges I have with the numerous funds I regularly contact are something I greatly enjoy.

The most challenging part of the report would be surprises during the last few days before the deadline. For example, last-minute data submissions from the funds we reach out to can suddenly create a lot of urgent work—but this hasn’t happened now for a while!

Have you noticed any major trends or changes in the data since you’ve been working on the annual report?

Since I’ve started working on these reports, I’ve found more and more funds have been interested in sending us their data over time as the company grows! We now get more replies than we ever did a few years ago. The amount of deals disclosed to us has tripled since 2018.
In terms of changes in trends in the report itself—this isn’t really where our expertise lies, not mine, at least!

Advise clients who aren’t already thinking about ESG—accessing this data could be the first step to laying out an ESG strategy and understanding the space. So you could also keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Or you could monitor your existing clients’ ESG impact as well.”

Our summary

Over 80 hours of work, with 20 people analysing over 2,000 deals—and it’s here: The Deal 2023. We analyse every deal made in the previous year by sector, stage of evolution, gender distribution, and more—to bring you a comprehensive overview of the UK’s economic state.

If you’re interested in getting access to the top-quality data on all UK private companies we use to write The Deal, speak to one of our team members or book a demo below.