Build a roadmap

Strategic Overview

Our H1 goal is to reduce independent restaurant churn from 2.4% to 1.6% per month. Independents represent 82% of our accounts and 61% of our revenue. Exit surveys point to one glaring issue: "too much admin; didn't save us time on deliveries and invoices."

Usage and request data confirm this friction: * Deliveries: 56% of accounts use the desktop receiving checklist, and 71% of those print it on paper and manually re-type it later. * Invoices: 76% of accounts upload invoices, but 100% of matching to orders/deliveries is manual. * Demand: Out of 40 feature requests from independent restaurants in the last six months, 33 are for Receiving and Invoicing workflow improvements.

We have 40 squad-weeks across two squads in H1. We will dedicate one squad to Invoicing Automation and the other to Mobile Receiving, with a small allocation in Q2 to protect the Calder Group renewal without derailing our core strategy.

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H1 Roadmap Table

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Execution Plan & Sequencing

#### Squad A: End-to-End Invoicing (19 of 20 weeks) Squad A will spend the entire half building a seamless, automated invoicing pipeline. 1. New Invoice Parser (Q1, Weeks 1–5): Required foundation. 2. Automated Invoice Matching (Q1 Week 6 – Q2 Week 4): Our second most-requested feature by independents (8 requests). Automatically reconciles uploaded invoices against delivery records. 3. Credit Note Tracking (Q2, Weeks 5–7): Requested 5 times. Ensures restaurants actually recover money when suppliers shortchange them. 4. Accounting Export with Credits (Q2, Weeks 8–9): Requested 4 times. Pushes clean, reconciled data into their accounting tools. Week 10 is reserved as buffer for edge-case supplier invoice formats.

#### Squad B: Receiving & Strategic Retention (20 of 20 weeks) Squad B will solve physical delivery admin first, then pivot to a targeted retention play. 1. Mobile Receiving (Q1, Weeks 1–8): Our #1 most-requested feature (9 requests). Lets kitchen staff check off deliveries on their phones at the back door, killing the clipboards-and-retyping workflow. 2. Flag Short Deliveries at the Door (Q1 Week 9 – Q2 Week 1): Requested 7 times. Allows staff to log missing items on their phone during check-in. (Bonus: This creates the exact data needed for Squad A’s Automated Invoice Matching and Credit Note Tracking). 3. ERP Export CSV Variant (Q2, Weeks 2–5): Delivered by early May ahead of Calder Group’s renewal. 4. Workflow Polish & Onboarding (Q2, Weeks 6–10): Shipping features doesn't lower churn unless customers use them. Squad B will spend the final 5 weeks removing friction from mobile/invoicing onboarding to ensure we hit the 1.6% churn target.

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What We Are Not Doing (and Why)

• Custom Report Builder (12 wks) & Reporting Add-ons: Only 19% of accounts use standard reports today. Spending 30% of our H1 capacity here starves our core receiving/invoicing workflows and guarantees we miss our churn goal.
• Enterprise Admin (Approval chains - 6 wks, Site permissions - 4 wks, SSO - 3 wks): Zero independent restaurants asked for these. Building them turns us into bespoke enterprise software at the expense of 82% of our user base.
• Catalogue Additions / Bulk SKU Tools: Catalogue already has 100% usage and isn't driving churn. Our Ops team can handle urgent supplier catalogue additions manually.
• Dark Mode & Multi-Currency: Low request volume (3 total) and zero impact on admin time savings.

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What We Tell Calder Group ($186k ARR)

The Reality: Calder’s usage is up 20% YoY, they use standard reports daily, and they haven't complained to CS. The renewal risk is likely an Account Manager hedging their bets. However, $186k is significant, so we shouldn't ignore them entirely.

The Pitch (Delivered jointly by Product, CS, and the AM): 1. Lead with Operational Value: Show them Mobile Receiving and Automated Invoice Matching shipping in Q1/early Q2. Across their multiple sites, eliminating paper receiving and manual invoice reconciliation will save their site managers hundreds of hours a month. 2. Solve the Underlying Reporting Need: Explain that we are not building a custom pivot-table builder inside Fernhill this half because we are focused on core operational automation. Instead, we are building their requested Custom ERP CSV Export in April (before their May renewal). This allows them to pull granular, site-level data directly into their existing ERP/BI tools (or Excel) to build whatever custom pivots and dashboards they need. 3. Bridge the Gap with CS: Have Customer Success set up a weekly manual email of their daily standard reports so they don't have to pull them manually.

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.

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.