Build a roadmap

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.

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 roadmap, Q1 and Q2

The call: Both squads go to the company goal: deliveries and invoices, the top reasons independents give for leaving. Calder gets a bounded share of capacity, not the roadmap. Calder's report builder can't ship before May, so we tell them that directly and commit to a scoped plan.

Why this split: - The receiving and invoice chains (30 of 40 squad-weeks) serve 32 different non-Calder accounts. Mobile receiving and flagging short deliveries touch 16 accounts. Invoice matching, credit notes and the accounting export touch 16. - Calder has 14 of the 53 requests, but they come from one account. Every Calder-only item totals 29 squad-weeks (report builder, ERP export, site permissions, SSO, approval chains). Taking all of it would consume 73% of the half. - Usage backs the sequence. 56% of accounts use the receiving checklist, but 71% of uses start on a desktop and get re-typed from paper, so mobile receiving removes that step. Invoice matching is manual for the 76% of accounts that upload invoices.

Capacity: 2 squads × 10 squad-weeks per quarter. The plan uses 40 of 40, with a 1-week spike per squad left at the end of Q2 for report builder scoping.

Dependencies are the risk. Item 2 gates the invoice chain. If the parser slips, items 3, 6 and 7 slip with it, and the invoice outcome misses the half. I'd rather flag that now than hide it inside the plan. If the parser runs over, the first move is to pull the Calder-only site permissions work (item 8) back into the buffer.

Measures: Time per delivery receipt and percentage of invoices auto-matched, tracked per cohort. Independent-restaurant churn (2.4% → 1.6% a month) is the outcome. We won't claim the roadmap alone moves it.

What we're not doing, and why

• Full custom report builder (12 weeks). It's 60% of one squad's half, for one account, and the earliest it ships is around the May renewal with no slack. We do a scoping spike and commit to a decision date, not a build date.
• SSO (3) and approval chains with 5 levels (6). Calder only, and the 5-level approvals request is a niche configuration. H2 candidates, to be revisited with Calder.
• Custom PDF invoices, custom order fields, per-site dashboards, bulk SKU import v2 and bulk SKU edit. All Calder-only, none estimated. Not in H1.
• Dark mode (2 accounts), multi-currency (1 account), more suppliers (3 accounts). Low demand, no estimates. Parked, not rejected.
• Scheduled reports by email (Calder, 2 requests). Not estimated. It goes into the spike as a candidate for a smaller Calder deliverable.

What we tell Calder Group

1. Customer Success calls them this week, not the account manager alone. They haven't raised the report builder with CS, and "might leave" is the kind of risk that surfaces too late.
2. Be direct about the report builder: it's a substantial build, it won't land before May, and we won't promise a date we can't keep.
3. What they get in H1: the ERP export in the format they asked for, shipping around early May, and site-level permissions by the end of June.
4. The report builder: we scope it with them in June, and we commit to an H2 decision date by the end of June. We don't commit to a build date until the spike returns.
5. Ask them two things: which reports they run daily (we know they use standard reports), and what minimum output would cover them until the full builder ships. Their answer decides whether scheduled email reports move up.

Asks for leadership: confirm Calder's renewal status and ARR before the CS call, and approve the spike's two squad-weeks. If Calder won't engage on the scoped plan, we should know before the roadmap is shared externally.