Build a roadmap

H1 decision: remove delivery-to-invoice admin

Prioritise the independent-restaurant workflow: receive once, capture shortages, match invoices, track credits, export without rework. The company outcome is monthly churn falling from 2.4% to 1.6% in the segment representing 82% of accounts and 61% of revenue.

The evidence supports this over enterprise reporting: - Receiving has 640 active accounts; 71% of uses involve desktop entry followed by retyping from paper. - Invoice upload reaches 870 accounts, but matching remains manual. - These workflow requests account for 33 log entries from 32 distinct non-Calder customers. That shows breadth, although we must verify which are independent restaurants. - Calder’s 14 entries represent one $186k account, not 14 independent demand signals. Duplicate requests and inconsistent ARR entries must not inflate priority.

Roadmap and capacity

Assign stable ownership: Squad A—Receiving & Integrations; Squad B—Invoice Automation. Dates are planning targets, subject to initial technical validation.

Capacity: each squad uses 10 weeks per quarter; total 40. This comprises 30 weeks of core feature work, four conditionally held for ERP export, and six for instrumentation, adoption and contingency. No hidden third squad or assumed spare engineering capacity.

Matching should start with high-confidence suggestions and explicit review of exceptions—not unattended financial decisions. Credit tracking follows completed matching; accounting export follows credits. Mobile receiving precedes shortage capture. The squads should agree shared delivery/invoice identifiers early, without inventing an additional prerequisite for matching.

Outcomes and decision gates

In January, baseline independent-restaurant admin time, receiving completion, matching effort and cohort churn. Recruit restaurants doing significant delivery/invoice work, including recently disengaged accounts—not just enthusiastic requesters.

Proposed release-success thresholds, to validate against those baselines: - Receiving: at least 30% less median time per delivery, including subsequent re-entry. - Invoices: at least 30% less manual reconciliation time, with no increase in material errors. - Adoption: at least half of pilot accounts repeatedly use the relevant workflow within four weeks.

Use a staggered rollout with comparable restaurant cohorts to assess improvement, rather than attributing every churn change to launches. Review workflow outcomes monthly and segment churn throughout H1; June churn alone may not capture the full effect of later releases.

If matching or mobile receiving slips, protect the core sequence: release the conditional ERP allocation first, then move later scope rather than bypassing quality checks.

ERP gate: by end-January, PM, CS and the account manager meet Calder’s actual users and renewal decision-maker. Confirm the job, current workaround, required fields, renewal significance and whether the four-week estimate covers acceptance criteria. Commit only if this is a valuable, bounded export—not a disguised report builder. Otherwise redirect those four weeks to core-workflow quality and adoption.

What we are not doing

• Custom report builder, pivots, site dashboards, scheduling and custom PDFs: insufficient breadth and weaker connection to the churn goal. The builder alone costs 12 weeks; it cannot fit alongside the core programme even if all ten non-core weeks were reclaimed.
• Approval chains, permissions, SSO and custom order fields: defer pending demonstrated retention, security or contractual necessity; none is established here.
• Catalogue expansion, bulk SKU tools, dark mode and multi-currency: defer. Catalogue’s universal usage does not establish that these additions reduce admin-related churn. Unestimated requests are not free extras.

What we tell Calder Group

“You’re important to Fernhill, and we want to understand what reporting prevents you from doing today. We are not committing to a custom report builder before your May renewal. Our H1 investment is delivery and invoice automation. We will assess whether a bounded ERP export or existing standard reports can meet your immediate need, and return with a written scope and credible timing.”

CS owns the renewal plan, with a January discovery meeting and an April executive checkpoint. Daily report usage and 20% overall usage growth do not prove safety—but an unverified “might leave” does not justify displacing the company’s retention strategy.

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: remove delivery and invoice admin

Prioritise the receiving-to-invoice workflow, not a general reporting platform. Our goal is to reduce independent-restaurant monthly churn from 2.4% to 1.6%. These customers represent 82% of accounts and 61% of revenue; their leading exit reason directly names delivery and invoice admin.

The evidence supports this choice: - Invoice upload reaches 76% of accounts, but matching remains manual. - Receiving reaches 56%, with substantial paper-to-desktop re-entry. - Mobile receiving, invoice matching and shortage flagging attracted requests from 9, 8 and 7 customers, respectively. - Calder’s multiple requests represent one $186,000 account, not repeated incremental ARR. Its renewal risk warrants investigation, but the report-builder threat is currently second-hand and usage is growing.

Sequenced delivery plan

Squad names below describe their H1 ownership. Estimates are squad-weeks; each squad has ten per quarter.

Capacity: committed feature builds total 30 of 40 squad-weeks. The other ten are explicitly allocated to rollout, quality, adoption and contingency—not assumed available for an extra large feature. Each squad stays within its quarterly limit.

The two squads must agree early on delivery-line identifiers, received quantities and discrepancy states. Invoice matching must still handle ordinary deliveries without waiting for shortage flagging.

Success measures and checkpoints

The primary measure is independent-restaurant monthly churn, tracked monthly against the 1.6% goal. Report results by adoption cohort, while recognising that adoption alone does not prove causation.

In the first two weeks, baseline: - Admin minutes per delivery and invoice. - Paper/re-entry frequency. - Manual matching effort, match accuracy and exception rate. - Credit resolution time.

Set numerical improvement targets after that baseline, rather than inventing savings from request counts. Confirm pilot customers include independent restaurants; the request log does not establish every requester’s segment.

At the Q1 review, assess mobile adoption, time saved and parser readiness. During Q2, expand releases only when accuracy and support burden are acceptable. If adoption is weak, spend the reserved capacity removing friction before widening scope.

What we are not doing

• Custom report builder this half: 12 weeks would take the selected feature programme to 42 weeks before rollout or contingency. Standard reporting has 19% penetration; Calder’s daily use makes its needs worth understanding, but does not establish broad demand for a builder.
• ERP export: four weeks is feasible in isolation, but is not presently justified ahead of workflow adoption and reliability. Revisit only with verified renewal requirements and an explicit capacity trade-off.
• Approval chains, site permissions and SSO: defer; they do not directly address the leading churn reason.
• Custom dashboards, scheduled reports, custom PDFs/fields, SKU tooling, more suppliers, dark mode and multi-currency: no H1 commitment. Several lack estimates, and universal catalogue usage is not evidence that catalogue enhancements will reduce churn.

What we tell Calder Group

Hold a joint PM, CS and account-manager conversation early in Q1—not just before May. Validate who requires the builder, which decisions it supports, and whether renewal actually depends on it.

Tell them:

> “Our H1 investment is reducing delivery and invoice administration. A custom report builder is not committed for this half. We want to understand your specific reporting gaps and test whether existing reports or a bounded export can meet them before renewal.”

Agree a written reporting-gap assessment and a pre-renewal checkpoint. Any newly verified retention requirement triggers a leadership trade-off decision—not an uncosted promise or a quiet roadmap diversion.