Selling part of a business- audited vs unaudited figures

[belfry]

I have a investor willing to buy 20% of an existing business that I set up 15 years ago. Our sales are £1m + and our profits are approx £200k.
Due to the size of the business we don't need to have our annual accounts to be audited. The investor is asking for audited accounts.
We don't have a FD, and our books, payments, monthly management accounts and year end accounts are all dealt with by our accountants.
To me, it feels overkill to then have these figures audited by the same firm of accountants.
Am I being unreasonable please? The quote to audit the figures was £5-10k.

[anonymous-user]

Is this person familiar with investing in privately owned businesses or taking advice from a paid advisor?

A good DD process would achieve the same outcome for the investor as an audit on that size of business? Although at that level of investment/return sounds like the investor is overly cautious which could mean headache ahead.

[anonymous-user]

Tell the investor that the business is happy to be audited, but that the bill for it is on him as part of his due diligence

Oh, and that no matter what the result of the audit, the bill is always on him and there is no change to any part of the deal already agreed

[Eric Mc]

What extra level of comfort would an audit mean to to him and how much extra would he be preferred to pay to have an audit carried out?

And most auditors will not want to try and go back a number of years to conduct an audit on accounts that were completed and signed off in unaudited form originally.

[wattsm666]

The investor is trying to use and audit instead of due diligence, which is wrong. They are separate exercises and have different work scopes.

The investor should be paying for the d/d