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 Product Roadmap (Q1–Q2)

Strategic Focus & Alignment

Our overriding company goal for H1 is to cut churn among independent restaurants (82% of accounts, 61% of revenue) from 2.4% to 1.6% a month. Exit surveys reveal the primary culprit: "too much admin; didn't save us time on deliveries and invoices."

Independent operators are drowning in manual paperwork at the back door and during invoice reconciliation. Therefore, both squads will be entirely laser-focused on automating receiving and invoice workflows in Q1 and Q2.

We have 40 total squad-weeks available (2 squads $\times$ 10 weeks per quarter). We are ruthlessly prioritizing features that directly target independent restaurant admin reduction, while deferring enterprise-heavy requests.

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Squad 1: Receiving & Back-Door Ops

Squad 1 owns the physical receiving workflow, eliminating the friction of transcribing paper notes and catching vendor discrepancies at the door.

• Q1 (Weeks 1–8): Mobile Receiving (8 squad-weeks)
• Outcome: Enables staff to check deliveries directly on a phone or mobile device at the loading dock, eliminating the current clunky desktop-to-paper re-typing workflow used by 56% of accounts. Directly targets independent churn by saving hours of back-door admin.
• Q1–Q2 (Overlap Weeks 9–10 & Q2 Weeks 1–3): Flag Short Deliveries at the Door (3 squad-weeks)
• Outcome: Built immediately upon Mobile Receiving. Allows staff to instantly log missing or damaged items during the mobile check-in process, generating immediate vendor credit trails and saving reconciliation disputes.

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Squad 2: Invoicing & Reconciliation

Squad 2 owns the financial workflow post-delivery, automating the tedious matching of paper/digital invoices against actual stock received.

• Q1 (Weeks 1–9): Automated Invoice Matching (9 squad-weeks, including parser)
• Outcome: Leverages the new invoice parser (5 weeks) alongside matching logic (4 weeks) to automatically reconcile uploaded invoices against verified deliveries. This attacks the second half of the independent churn bottleneck: manual invoice data entry.
• Q2 (Weeks 1–4): Credit Note Tracking & Accounting Export (5 squad-weeks total)
• Credit Note Tracking (3 wks): Tracks vendor credits resulting from short deliveries.
• Accounting Export with Credits (2 wks): Seamlessly pushes reconciled invoices and credit notes to accounting software, removing end-of-month manual entry.

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Roadmap Table

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What We Are Not Doing and Why

To hit our churn-reduction target, we are intentionally declining several high-visibility requests, notably from Calder Group (who accounts for $186k ARR, but whose account manager notes they "might" leave without the report builder).

1. Custom Report Builder (12 squad-weeks) & Calder’s Enterprise Requests (Approval chains, SSO, Site-level permissions, Custom PDF invoices): * Why: Building the Custom Report Builder would consume 30% of our entire company capacity for the half. While Calder Group represents significant ARR, their usage is actually up 20% this year, they have raised no complaints with Customer Success, and their renewal is in May. Diverting 12 weeks to appease an AM warning without CS validation while independent churn burns our revenue base is an unacceptable strategic risk. 2. More Suppliers / Catalogue Updates / Dark Mode / Multi-currency (FR-307, FR-315, FR-351, etc.): * Why: These are nice-to-haves that do not directly address the core operational admin burden cited in independent restaurant exit surveys.

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What We Tell Calder Group

> "We value our partnership immensely and are thrilled to see your platform usage grow by 20% this year. For H1, our entire product and engineering organization is locked onto a company-wide mandate to eliminate back-office administrative overhead for operators—specifically delivering mobile receiving, short-delivery flagging, and automated invoice matching. > > Because these workflows directly accelerate daily operational efficiency, we aren't scheduling the Custom Report Builder or enterprise admin controls for Q1/Q2. However, your Account Manager and our Customer Success team are logging your specific reporting and export requirements so we can scope them for a future release cycle post-May renewal. We are fully committed to ensuring Fernhill continues to scale with Calder Group's operational needs."

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".