Build a roadmap

Strategic Context & H1 Focus

Fernhill’s H1 north star is cutting independent restaurant monthly churn from 2.4% to 1.6%. Independent restaurants represent 82% of our accounts and 61% of revenue. Exit interviews clearly highlight the churn driver: administrative burden on deliveries and invoices.

Currently: * 56% of accounts use desktop receiving, but 71% write deliveries on paper at the door and re-type them later. * 76% of accounts upload invoices, but matching is entirely manual.

To reach our churn target, H1 execution is dedicated to eliminating manual reconciliation at the back door and in the back office. Calder Group ($186k ARR) is critical, but dedicating 12 squad-weeks to a custom report builder would derail the core churn goal and still risk missing their May renewal date. We address Calder with a targeted integration release and proactive commercial management.

---

H1 Roadmap

---

Squad Breakdown & Sequencing

#### Squad 1 (Receiving & Data) — 20 Squad-Weeks 1. Mobile Receiving (8 wks, Q1): Build a mobile-optimized receiving flow allowing kitchen staff to check off line items directly on their phone at the loading dock. Eliminates paper double-entry (71% of receiving workflows today). 2. Flag Short Deliveries at the Door (3 wks, Q1–Q2): Extends mobile receiving to instantly flag missing quantities, take a photo, and generate a shortage log directly linked to the order. 3. Automated ERP Export (4 wks, Q2): Scheduled and manual CSV/ERP data pipeline (FR-303, FR-339). Delivers automated raw financial/operational extracts before Calder’s May renewal. 4. Buffer & Mobile Rollout (5 wks, Q2): Ensures smooth adoption in noisy kitchen environments with flaky Wi-Fi.

#### Squad 2 (Invoicing & Finance) — 20 Squad-Weeks 1. New Invoice Parser (5 wks, Q1): Modernizes parsing infrastructure to extract line items, taxes, unit costs, and invoice numbers reliably. 2. Automated Invoice Matching (9 wks, Q1–Q2): Automatically matches invoice line items against purchase orders and received delivery logs. Discrepancies are flagged automatically. 3. Credit Note Tracking (3 wks, Q2): Pairs short-delivery logs generated in Squad 1 with incoming vendor credit notes, stopping suppliers from overcharging for missing goods. 4. Accounting Export with Credits (2 wks, Q2): Exports matched invoices and net credit adjustments directly into standard general ledgers. 5. Buffer & Edge Cases (1 wk, Q2): Absorbs parser edge cases and vendor invoice layout variations.

---

What We Are NOT Doing (and Why)

1. Custom Report Builder with Pivots (12 weeks): * Why: At 12 weeks, this would consume 30% of total H1 capacity for a single account. It cannot ship and stabilize before Calder's May renewal, and standard report daily usage is already healthy (212 accounts, Calder included). 2. 5-Level Approval Chains & Site-Level Permissions (10 weeks combined): * Why: Pure enterprise overhead. Does not solve the operational time sink driving 82% of accounts to churn. 3. Dark Mode & Multi-Currency (Non-core): * Why: Zero correlation to churn reduction or operational savings. 4. Catalogue Bulk Tools & Expansion: * Why: Catalogue usage is 100% saturated. The friction point is not creating items; it is receiving and paying for them.

---

What We Tell Calder Group

#### 1. Commercial Reality Check (Internal) Calder’s usage is up 20% year-over-year, and they use Standard Reports daily. Their threat to leave originated from an Account Manager conversation, not Customer Success or executive escalation. We will not over-index engineering capacity on an AM negotiation bluff.

#### 2. External Messaging (Fernhill VP of Product & Head of CS to Calder Exec Sponsor in March) * Lead with High-Value Clean Data: “A reporting tool is only as good as the input data. By shipping Mobile Receiving and Automated Matching in Q1, Fernhill ensures every invoice, delivery quantity, and supplier credit across all Calder sites is 100% accurate and audited in real time.” * Deliver the ERP Export (Ships April, ahead of May renewal): “Rather than forcing your finance team into a proprietary, rigid reporting UI inside Fernhill, we are releasing the Automated ERP/CSV Data Export in April. This allows Calder to stream clean, site-level operational and invoice data directly into your central ERP/BI stack (PowerBI/Tableau/Excel) with your custom formulas and pivot models.” * White-Glove Support: CS will construct scheduled, bespoke standard reporting extracts tailored to their multi-site leadership team during renewal discussions.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

Roadmap Table

---

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.

---

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 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.