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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."

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".