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Fernhill H1 Roadmap: Receiving and Invoicing First

The call

Both squads spend most of the half on the two jobs independent restaurants say we don't save them time on: checking deliveries and reconciling invoices. That accounts for 30 of our 40 squad-weeks. Of the remaining 10, 8 go to Calder Group's two most concrete asks (ERP export and site-level permissions) and 2 stay in reserve. We are not building the custom report builder this half.

Why

• The goal is independent-restaurant churn, and the exit reason is admin on deliveries and invoices. Those two themes make up 33 of the 53 requests in the log, from about 30 accounts across support, sales and in-app feedback:
• Mobile receiving: 9 requests
• Flag short deliveries: 7
• Invoice matching: 8
• Credit notes: 5
• Accounting export with credits: 4
• Usage shows where the admin sits.
• 56% of accounts use the receiving checklist, but 71% of those checks are re-typed from paper.
• 76% upload invoices, and every one is matched by hand.
• Standard reports, the nearest thing to a report builder, are used by 19%.
• Calder's 14 requests come from one person: their account manager. Calder hasn't raised the report builder with Customer Success. Their usage is up 20% and they use standard reports daily. "Might leave" is a signal worth acting on, but it doesn't justify 12 squad-weeks (30% of the half) and pushing back a churn lever. ERP export is the one Calder ask that appears twice in the log (FR-303, FR-339), and it costs 4 weeks.

Order of work

I'm assuming calendar quarters (Q1 Jan–Mar, Q2 Apr–Jun) and May as the renewal month.

Squad A (Receiving) 1. Mobile receiving (weeks 1–8). This is the biggest single fix for paper re-typing, and flag short deliveries depends on it. 2. ERP export for Calder (weeks 9–12, finishing about mid-April). It goes before short-delivery flags so it lands before Calder's May renewal rather than during it. 3. Flag short deliveries (weeks 13–15). 4. Site-level permissions (weeks 16–19). This is the default. If the Calder working session (below) surfaces something cheaper that matters more to them, such as scheduled report emails, we swap it in. Report scheduling was asked for twice but hasn't been sized yet. 5. 1 week buffer.

Squad B (Invoicing) 1. New invoice parser (weeks 1–5). 2. Invoice matching (weeks 6–14). 3. Credit note tracking (weeks 15–17). 4. Accounting export with credits (weeks 18–19). 5. 1 week buffer.

Squad B's chain is strictly sequential, so any slip pushes everything after it. The 1-week buffer is thin. If the parser runs long, we drop the accounting export to H2 rather than squeeze matching.

How we'll know it's working

Churn moves slowly, and the big items ship mid-half, so we won't get all the way from 2.4% to 1.6% from features alone by June. We'll track leading indicators monthly:

• Receiving: share of checks started on a phone, and share re-typed from paper. Target: re-typing down from 71% to under 30% by June.
• Invoicing: share of uploaded invoices auto-matched, and time from invoice upload to approval.
• Churn: monthly churn among accounts using mobile receiving or matching, compared with those that don't.

What we're not doing, and why

• Custom report builder, custom dashboards per site (Calder). 12+ weeks for one account. It would push invoice matching into H2. The low usage of standard reports doesn't suggest wider demand. We'll first find out what Calder actually needs.
• Approval chains with 5 levels (6), SSO (3), custom fields on orders, custom PDF invoices (Calder). Single-account asks with no link to the churn goal. We'll revisit in H2 with Calder's input.
• Bulk SKU import v2 and bulk edit for SKUs (Calder). Not sized and single-account. We'll size them in H2 if Calder confirms they matter.
• More suppliers (3 requests). Not sized, and not tied to the churn reason.
• Dark mode (2) and multi-currency (1). Low demand and off-goal.

A data note: Customers 553 and 294 each appear with two different ARR figures. It doesn't change any decision here, but RevOps should fix it.

What we tell Calder Group

The account manager and Customer Success should go together, in the first two weeks of Q1, well ahead of May. Customer Success needs to be in the room because Calder hasn't raised any of this with them. The message:

> "You've asked for a lot through your account manager, and we want to get the important things right before your renewal. Two commitments this half: ERP export in your format by mid-April, and site-level permissions by end of June. We're not building a full custom report builder in this period, and we'd rather tell you that now than slip it later. You use our standard reports every day, so we'd like a working session with your team to see the reports you run and the questions you can't answer yet. Scheduled report emails or saved views may get you most of the way sooner, and what we learn shapes our H2 reporting plans."

We don't promise a report builder date. If Calder makes it a hard condition of renewal after that session, it comes back to me and leadership as an explicit trade: the 12 weeks would come out of credit notes, the accounting export and short-delivery flags, which would weaken the churn goal.

Roadmap table

H1 roadmap

Priority: reduce admin that contributes to independent-restaurant churn. We’ll automate the invoice-to-credit workflow and make receiving work where deliveries happen. That addresses the stated churn reason and repeated requests across customers. Calder’s renewal matters, but the report-builder risk is unconfirmed, so we’ll validate it before committing 12 squad-weeks to a bespoke capability.

This uses the 40 available squad-weeks: 20 per quarter. The invoice sequence is parser → matching → credit tracking → accounting export; receiving is mobile receiving → short-delivery flags.

Not doing this half

• Custom report builder, dashboards and scheduled reports: 12 weeks, with the reported renewal risk coming from the account manager rather than Calder’s CS team; Calder’s usage is up 20% and it uses standard reports daily. We’ll validate the specific reporting job and whether it is truly a renewal blocker before reallocating capacity. A bespoke builder is not currently the best fit for the independent-restaurant churn goal.
• ERP export, SSO, site permissions, approval chains, custom fields, catalogue work and other Calder requests: several are substantial or bespoke, and none has stronger evidence against the stated churn driver than the selected workflow improvements. We won’t imply these are committed.
• More suppliers and dark mode: lower priority than reducing delivery and invoice admin.

What we tell Calder Group

“We’ve heard that reporting may affect your May renewal. We’re not committing to a custom report builder yet: your teams use standard reports daily, usage is growing, and we haven’t confirmed with you which reporting tasks are blocked. We’d like to meet with your reporting users and Customer Success early in Q1 to understand the must-have use cases and renewal criteria. We’ll come back with a clear proposal; meanwhile, we’ll be investing in reducing delivery and invoice admin across Fernhill.”

If that conversation confirms custom reporting is a hard renewal condition, we’ll bring the trade-off back for an explicit roadmap decision rather than promise a feature we haven’t scoped or prioritized.

Fernhill H1 roadmap (Q1–Q2)

The plan: 30 of our 40 squad-weeks go to the delivery-to-invoice workflow that exit surveys blame for churn. 4 go to Calder's ERP export, and 6 are held as buffer. We are not building the report builder.

Assumption: I've treated the invoice parser (5) as additional to invoice matching (9), so matching is 14 weeks in total. If the 9 already includes the parser, we gain 5 weeks of buffer and nothing else changes.

Roadmap

Why this order

• Outcome. The goal is churn among independent restaurants, and the top exit reason is admin on deliveries and invoices. Receiving and invoicing are exactly that workflow.
• Demand. The request log is consistent with the usage data, though it shows who asks rather than who churns, so the exit survey and usage numbers carry more weight.
• Mobile receiving: 9 customers, about $60k ARR.
• Matching: 8 customers, about $45k.
• Short deliveries: 7 customers, about $48k.
• Credit notes: 4 customers.
• Export with credits: 4 customers, about $28k.
• Sequencing. The invoicing chain is strictly sequential, so it takes one squad for 19 of its 20 weeks. The receiving chain runs in parallel on the other squad.
• ERP export before flagging. Calder's renewal has a hard date, and flagging doesn't. The export is two requests from Calder and the cheapest of their asks. It lands mid-April.
• Timing risk. Mobile receiving ships around the end of March and matching around the end of April. Churn lags adoption, so I expect only partial movement toward 1.6% by June. I'd report leading indicators monthly (mobile share of receiving, auto-match rate) alongside churn, and set that expectation with the exec team now.

What we're not doing, and why

• Custom report builder (12 weeks), plus dashboards, scheduling and custom PDFs.
• Calder is the only requester of anything in the Reporting theme. Only 19% of accounts use standard reports at all.
• The cost is 30% of H1 capacity. One squad would need all of Q1 plus two weeks of Q2, which pushes about 10 weeks of churn work out of H1.
• The churn threat behind it is unverified (see below).
• Approval chains (6), site-level permissions (4), SSO (3), custom fields, bulk SKU import v2 and bulk edit. These are all Calder-only. The three that have estimates total 13 weeks, with no independent-restaurant demand and no link to the churn reason.
• More suppliers (3 customers), dark mode (2), multi-currency (1). They're unestimated and unconnected to the admin-time problem. I'll revisit them in the H2 planning.

The Calder rows are 14 of the 53 log entries (26%), but they come from one account via its account manager. Counted by customer, they are one voice. The log also has small inconsistencies, such as Customer 553 appearing twice with different ARR, so treat its figures as approximate.

Calder Group

What we know. Their account manager says they "might" leave without the report builder. They haven't said this to Customer Success, and their usage is up 20%, which looks like engagement rather than exit. It's a risk to test, not a requirement.

What we do internally 1. In the first two weeks of January, Customer Success and I meet Calder directly. We ask which decisions they need reports for, what standard reports lack, and whether the ERP export plus raw data in their own tools meets the need. 2. Ask the account manager to give us one ranked list from Calder instead of 14 separate asks. 3. Have engineering size a thin reporting slice (for example, scheduled standard reports). There's no estimate today. It can only be funded from the 6-week buffer, and only if the January conversation shows reporting is a real blocker. 4. Checkpoint at the end of February. If Calder confirms in writing that reporting decides the renewal, I bring the exec team a trade-off. The full builder means dropping the credit-note tail and the ERP export and running with zero buffer, and it still wouldn't ship by May.

What we tell Calder - "We've heard your reporting needs and want to understand them properly. We'd like an hour with your team in January." - "Your ERP export is on our roadmap and is due mid-April, ahead of your May renewal. We'll confirm the format with you first." - "The full report builder isn't in our plan for the first half. We'll tell you by the end of February whether a smaller reporting improvement is feasible."

We make no date commitment for the builder and no promise on SSO, permissions or approval chains. If the ERP export slips, Calder hears it from us before they find out themselves.

Risks to watch

• Parser or matching slips. The buffer absorbs up to six weeks. Beyond that, credit notes and the accounting export move to H2, not receiving.
• Calder's real blocker turns out to be reporting. That is the trade-off decision at the end-of-February checkpoint, made with real information instead of a "might".