Insights

Agentic AI turns your finance stack into a set of closed-loop workflows that plan, execute, and verify analysis—then hand decisions to humans with evidence. Instead of “copilots” that draft text, these agents query governed data, reconcile results, forecast with uncertainty bands, propose actions, and write back to your ARR Snowball, cash, and board packs—under tight...

Snowball is a general-purpose flow lens, not just a SaaS metric. The same Sankey-style visualization that clarifies ARR—inflows, outflows, and the net build with velocity/acceleration—translates cleanly to other operating flows. For cash, it traces invoices and receivables through collections alongside payables and disbursements to reveal net cash build, DSO/DPO, slippage, and CCC. For inventory, it...

Finance teams live and die by the quality of their numbers. Executives expect reports that are repeatable, auditable, and on time—while operations demand fresh data and engineering just wants systems that don’t break every close. The reality is that finance data isn’t static: source systems update late, postings get rebooked, and every entity has its...

Recurring models, such as SaaS companies, live and die on retention and expansion, not one-time bookings. ARR Snowball decomposes revenue into inflows (new, expansion) and outflows (contraction, churn), yielding clean GRR/NRR and velocity/acceleration trends that expose true revenue durability. Because it’s cohort-aware and definition-consistent, it avoids P&L masking, ties directly to operating levers (pricing, onboarding,...

When a company lacks job-level costing, margin analysis stalls. At one client, direct materials, outside services, and labor weren’t tied to jobs; freight revenue was visible, but final freight costs were negotiated monthly with brokers, so the actuals arrived late. We implemented a cost allocation model that provided a transparent, finance-grade allocation for estimating costs...

PE teams need numbers that are consistent across systems, comparable across companies, and traceable to transactions. Two situations come up repeatedly and benefit from the same architectural patterns. Use case 1: One portco, many systems, one cohesive report Situation. A mid-market company runs multiple ERPs and adjacent tools including billing, HR, CRM, and eCommerce. Month...

Understanding if you have a pricing problem When we engage with retail prospects for our services, the first thing I usually ask is, “Are you setting prices in a spreadsheet?”  If the answer is yes, likely you are experiencing challenges with your ERP or Host Merchandising system that were insurmountable and lead you to externalizing...

Navigating a Pricing Project If you’ve done your homework and are confident you have a pricing opportunity, it’s time to start thinking about a project.  Depending on what you’re doing, the project could be extensive or it could be a quick hit.  We’ll cover scoping the project in the next articles, but first some things...

Centralized pricing service In our consulting practice, we speak to many different retailers about their pricing needs.  Recently, the requests we have fielded are trending towards what I would term a centralized pricing service.  For many years across all industries the trend has been towards specialized services and we seem to have hit that point...

The Need for Better Pricing One of our customers eloquently said “If it ain’t broke, fix it anyway.”  She was talking about pricing.  She had inherited a pricing process from a former colleague that had to leave suddenly and had to get up to speed quickly.  The process worked, but it was terribly inefficient and...