In case you are wondering – no, this is not about making the closing more festive, or planning for a champagne celebration after the closing.

As companies think about the timing of the closing, several key drivers are leading both the buyer and the seller to strongly prefer a month-end closing (which could happen to fall on a weekend), especially:

• Accounting and systems issues with having a cut-off date that is not at month-end for purposes of preparing the closing balance sheet or financial statements to be included in future public filings
• The switch over of operational items and IT systems (with a weekend closing providing the parties’ operational and IT teams with additional time to complete the switch over and perform testing before the business re-opens)