Good afternoon, and welcome to the GetBusy plc interim results investor presentation, and apologies for the short delay today. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen.
Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Daniel Rabie, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you everyone for joining this afternoon, and welcome to GetBusy H1 2022 results, in which we accelerated our ARR growth and upgraded market expectations. I'm Daniel Rabie, I'm the CEO of GetBusy, and with me today is Paul Haworth, our CFO. Our mission as a company is to build software to make people productive and happy.
This first half of the year was, in my opinion, our best results to date. I think we are building substantial scale and proving growth in very large and very valuable addressable markets. To be more specific around that, we now have over 2 million collaborators using our applications. We handle 250 million documents annually.
We do over 3 million e-signatures annually, which if we were just a standalone e-signature company, would be pretty good considering it's a small part of our application. It gives you some indication of how much usage we get. We've done 114 product innovations, which shows our capabilities to continue to innovate in the future.
Our ARR hit 18.1, which is 21% growth from the previous period. We're 94% recurring revenue. We have over 73,000 paying users. Our net revenue retention is over 100, which means that if you just look at our customer base at any point, and remove new sales growth, just look at the revenue we get through that customer base relative to the amount that churns, we grow through our existing client base.
We have 145 people in our organization across three geographical locations: the U.K., U.S., and Australia. We have 20 years of track record in what we do. We're very experienced in B2B productivity software, and we spend 23% of our revenue on R&D. Our business model is a highly valuable business model. As a result of that, we are targeting significant shareholder returns through compounding the high value of recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is very predictable.
It enables us as an organization to be very data driven. We're very clear on what our return on investment is. Typically, for $1 of cost to acquire a customer, we get $4 back over the lifetime of that customer. We're pretty confident with. Well, we're very confident with the 94% recurring revenue, and our net revenue retention over 100% of what our next 12-month growth will be, and therefore we can manage costs in a very proactive way. The subscription revenue provides a solid foundation for future growth.
It enables you to invest in the future and continue to build up that sustainable and scalable nature that recurring revenue gives you. Long term, it's extremely valuable because it creates a path to significant cash generation. We're in very scalable markets. There is favorable working capital. There's very high margins, and all of those scalable characteristics enable ultimate value within a business like ours. Typical multiples of 7x ARR in our space, generally greater than that.
Effectively what they are a proxy for future cash flow through a DCF model. The valuations, because of how predictable and scalable our business model are well justified. We have successfully and will continue to broaden our capabilities to underpin medium and long-term growth. We have established products which are driving the growth you've seen today, and we think that there's long-term growth out of those existing products through and continued successful execution on our strategy. We then are complementing that by emerging products into new markets.
We feel that the problems we're solving for professional service firms through our SmartVault and our Virtual Cabinet products are consistent with the problems that ERP users have or financial services in the U.S. has, and we have the capabilities to solve these problems. We're gonna leverage off those capabilities to create new addressable markets, which ultimately will result in continued and higher long-term growth. In summary, what we do is that we create a productivity layer on top of core business applications. As an example, I'll use the one in which we are most familiar with, which is tax preparation.
If I'm an accountant, I traditionally create a tax return in my tax software, and the tax software then is very limited when I wanna go and store or file that tax return or send that to a client to get e-signed or make sure that there is a task around that tax return internally, or wanna book an appointment with a customer to talk through that tax return. Core applications are generally very good at creating value in the core functions of the business.
Where we come in is we deeply integrate into those core mission-critical applications, and we add this layer of productivity software around that. That started as document management, but that's evolved over the last couple of years into chat, e-signature, client portals, appointment booking, quotes and proposals. We can see multiple different productivity components that over time we can solve to inc-
Ladies and gentlemen, just bear with us while we just bring Daniel back into the room. Paul, are we just waiting for Daniel to dial back in?
I can.
Just lost connection briefly.
Yeah, absolutely. I can pick up from here. My apologies to everyone. We are having some internet challenges today. You can't see me, nor can you hear Daniel at the moment. Between us, hopefully, we'll get through this. As Daniel was explaining, our software creates a layer of productivity for core business applications.
Among the professional services firms that we serve, typically those core business applications comprise things like tax preparation software, practice management software if you're an accountant, CRMs, so customer relationship management, applications like Salesforce or ERP systems which often run entire businesses, ERP like NetSuite or SAP. Typically, those applications are very good at what they do.
They're very good, for example, ERP at managing procurement processes and the CRMs at managing customer relationships and marketing activities. Typically, they're not built with productivity in mind for the user. If those activities involve, for example, documents or approvals or signatures, typically they're not built with that in mind.
Our products overlay a layer of productivity onto those core pieces of functionality. Increasingly what we're seeing is professional firms building stacks of specialist software that talks to each other in order to optimize productivity within their businesses. Moving on to the next slide, this shows our product suite. We have two established products which comprise the majority of our revenue at the moment.
Those products are SmartVault and Virtual Cabinet. Roughly in revenue terms, they're about 50/50. SmartVault recently slightly eclipsed Virtual Cabinet and is growing at the fastest rate. These products initially were aimed at the SME and enterprise accounting professional services markets, and they help customers to manage their document workflows to manage interactions with clients in a very secure and very efficient way.
SmartVault typically is aimed at the SME end of town, so typically accounting firms with fewer than, say, 20 users, whereas Virtual Cabinet goes from single user customers all the way up to just under the Big Four in terms of accounting firms. Those products comprise both cloud hosted and on-premise solutions, and we have a suite of mobility applications around them to enable people to be able to access their documents and their data from anywhere and from any device.
Those products principally operate in the U.K., in the U.S. and in Australia and New Zealand. We then have two emerging products. Workiro, which some of you will know, used to be called GetBusy, is really our next generation document management product. It's aimed specifically at the ERP space, so we're starting with an integration with Oracle NetSuite. It creates, again, a layer of productivity, particularly around the handling of documents and tasks and signatures within the ERP interface.
NetSuite has a customer base that ranges from SME to enterprise clients, so that very much is our target audience. NetSuite itself has about 31,000 installed customers. Worth noting as well that Workiro, the Workiro technology, is also a core part of the Virtual Cabinet cloud offering. There is a deep integration between Workiro and Virtual Cabinet.
Certified Vault is a product that we launched towards the end of last year. It is essentially an iteration of the SmartVault platform, aimed at helping customers in the asset finance space in the U.S. to secure digital chattel paper. So effectively Certified Vault acts as a custodian of that digital chattel paper in asset finance transactions.
An example would be a business that leases, say, you know, plants and machinery to end customers. The clients there are both the secured lenders, so the banks essentially, and the borrowers in an asset finance transaction. We have three new technologies which were all acquired last year. Ultimately, two of them will be integrated into our established product. DocDown is a form fill and data capture piece of technology which will help our customers to onboard their clients. Quoters is a quoting and proposal tool to help accountants issue much slicker and much more efficient and more professional looking quotes and proposals.
Both of those applications are in the process of being integrated into our SmartVault application, and we expect to be taking those to market later on this year. HelloPlan is a technology that we acquired and are building on the back of within the U.K. at the moment, and that enables professionals to manage the scheduling and the hosting of meetings. Effectively a more professional version of the calendar application by Calendly.
Paul, if I may just interrupt. Daniel is now back on the line, sir. Thank you for stepping in. Daniel, if I may just hand back to you in the meantime.
You're welcome.
Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Paul. Apologies everyone, technical issues. Following on from what Paul just described around each one of our products, we're now very embedded within the working day of the professional, and we solve really practical problems like scheduling a meeting or sending a quote or onboarding new clients, creating and managing work, and collaborating and signing.
It's this core value, which is why we are so sticky and our churn rates are so low. It's why we're so in demand, because these functions are only increasing in necessity, especially considering the macro environment, and professional firms looking to be productive. It's also why we've got so much expansion opportunity in the existing base.
If a company has SmartVault or Virtual Cabinet, we in future will look to sell to them DocDown, Quoters and HelloPlan as well. As discussed earlier, we have really deep integrations into the core software that our professional service firms use. Just pulling out some examples, for accountants in the U.K., TaxCalc is a disruptor in the cloud tax space with over 9,000 accounting practices.
They resell us as their document management module with SmartVault. Turnkey is the leading provider for the insolvency market. I think it has approximately 80% of the insolvency market and they've got a referral relationship with Virtual Cabinet, where they refer Virtual Cabinet clients who need document management. ERP users will be familiar with NetSuite.
We've done a lot of work with NetSuite over the last 18 months to fill productivity holes within their application, and we are now building value within that ecosystem and brand recognition within the ecosystem so that we've got a strong referral channel through NetSuite. Those who are familiar with the U.S. market will know that Intuit is probably the largest provider of small business accounting software in the world, and also has a large practice management division where they sell products including tax to accountants.
They refer SmartVault. You can go on the Intuit website and you will see SmartVault as a product which is essentially part of their portfolio. We've created-- There's many more of this and we've created this competitive advantage by these deep integrations into this mission critical software that are unique to us in many cases and in which is very, very difficult for anyone else to come into and disrupt or get access to the same sort of APIs that we've had to create these deep relationships.
That gives us great confidence that we've got this unique position to grow on, and we know the sizes of these customer bases, and we know that there's a lot more growth within them. Even if we just continue to execute effectively on the areas in which we've got competitive advantage then we should be able to see significant growth over the next couple of years.
I think we've now been very well proven, so our applications meet the requirements of high quality professionals. We've got over 3,000 paying users. We've got 30% of the U.K. top 100 accounting firms. I think recently we just made an announcement that we've won another really large insolvency firm. We think that there's many more of the top 100s that we can win over the next couple of years.
You know, with the brand recognition now we've got, the proven case studies, the unique integrations, that gives us great confidence that the existing applications we got, plus the new ones which we've acquired or built over the last couple of years, will drive more adoption of more customers well into the future.
Great. Thanks, Daniel. We're doing all of this in some very attractive large resilient markets. Just worth noting at this stage that we're not seeing any material impact from the current economic uncertainty on our customer base. Our view is that with inflation specifically, that is a net enhancer to our growth drivers.
The wage inflation that we're seeing within professional services firms ultimately improves the ROI of our products. That combined with the tight employment market for a lot of our customers is also driving them to look at options to improve the productivity of their existing staff rather than necessarily bringing on additional staff. Ultimately we see that as helpful to the markets we operate in.
Very specifically within the insolvency market, of course, some of the financial distress that companies are finding themselves under is directly beneficial to that market. The markets we're in have some very favorable tailwinds associated with them, and I'll come onto those in just a second. This slide defines the markets that we operate within. The accounting and professional services market in the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. We expect that to be roughly a GBP 750 million opportunity for the markets there.
If you divide that down into smaller chunks, the U.S. small and medium sized accounting and tax preparer market, so again, that's anything from 20-30 users and down, we estimate that that's about GBP 200 million ARR space. We are around about 5% penetrated in that space. We still see a lot of greenfield opportunity.
Many of the customers who come to us are coming from potentially a Windows file structure. Some of them even still come from physical files, say, paper files, and some of them come from generic solutions like Dropbox and Box. We still see a very strong opportunity for our products in these specialized markets. The financial services market in those four territories, we estimate to be in excess of GBP 1 billion ARR opportunity.
Specifically within that, we're looking at the mid-market banking space in the U.S., and again, with our Certified Vault products, we're looking very specifically at the asset finance space there. With Workiro in the ERP-enabled business space, we see that as around about a GBP 1 billion opportunity at least. The initial focus there is on NetSuite. NetSuite has about 31,000 customers, and that in itself is worth many hundreds of millions of pounds of ARR opportunity for us. What drives those markets? We believe there are four very strong and structural drivers to the markets that we serve.
First of all, professional services firms and most notably accountants have come under a lot of cost pressure over the last few years, not only from wage inflation more recently, but also from the increased regulatory burden. As those firms build out their compliance departments and as they recruit people who are generally more used to using technology, we're seeing some very significant digital transformation programs taking place within those firms.
We believe that will continue right up and down the market for many years to come. Privacy legislation has been increasing around the world. Obviously, four or five years ago, the headline piece of privacy legislation was GDPR within the European Union. That provided a very nice tailwind at the time for our U.K. business.
We don't solve all of the GDPR privacy puzzle, but we're a core part of knowing where your information is, who has accessed it, and if you're subject to a subject access request, then our software helps you to respond to that in a very efficient way. Now, we're seeing GDPR-like legislation being rolled out across the world, and specifically in the U.S., this is being rolled out in slightly different flavors from state to state. Currently, there's about five states who have actually enacted legislation. The most notable of those is California, with the California Consumer Privacy Act. We're seeing similar legislation work through the statute books in most of the other states in the U.S.
Now this just provides a favorable tailwind for us that raises the awareness of keeping your data secure, of knowing how to access data about a specific subject, and knowing who has had access to your data and documents in the past, all of which are favorable themes for our business. We've been seeing a shift towards hybrid working among businesses for many years.
COVID, for very obvious reasons, accelerated that significantly. We now believe there's a structural change in the professional services market, where to recruit and retain top people, hybrid working is here to stay. Our products help professionals to work from anywhere, whether it's in the office or anywhere else in the world, securely and productively.
We see that as another favorable trend for our business. More generally, the increased awareness and response to cybersecurity threats is helpful for our business. Our products act as one of the first lines of defense for keeping sensitive data and documents secure. We see as the wallet sizes for cybersecurity start to increase that we will share in some of that. All of this enables us to bring on board very sticky customers. This is an example of how we can sometimes apply a land and expand strategy with our customers. This particular example is for a top five accounting firm in Australia and New Zealand.
We initially won the Christchurch office of this particular firm back in the beginning of 2016, and very swiftly rolled out the Virtual Cabinet application to Queensland, Auckland and the East Coast Sydney office as well within the following few months. Over the following year, Adelaide and Perth were also added to that.
From the moment we installed that first office in Christchurch to where we are today, we've seen a 17-fold increase in the annual recurring revenue from that particular customer. As that firm itself grows, we also benefit from that as well. Taking those six sites, we initially installed just over 1,200 users. As at today, that number is about 63% higher, just under 2,000 users.
This is an example of how the sorts of clients we win, we can initially land and then expand within those firms and build out reasonably large enterprises. Looking to the future, we announced last year our plan to at least double ARR within the next five years. We believe we have the right team, the right products, and we're operating in the right markets to do that.
You can expect from us sustained double-digit growth in annual recurring revenue. ARR will remain our focus. Over time, whilst we'll be reinvesting for growth in the short to medium term, over time, there is nothing within our business that structurally shouldn't enable us to become a 30%+ EBITDA margin business as we reach maturity. We've already proven that with our Virtual Cabinet business, which on a standalone basis has an EBITDA margin in excess of 50%.
We've already tried and tested that model. From a cash point of view, we operate at a broadly neutral operating cash flow position, and that enables us to reinvest with a lot of confidence for growth. As we just summarize the results for the first half that were published this morning, annualized recurring revenue or ARR, which is our revenue run rate, our subscription revenue run rate, and is absolutely key to any subscription software business like ours, was up 21% at constant currency to GBP 18.1 million.
That now means just over 94% of our revenues are recurring in nature, and that's actually the highest on AIM. We expect that to increase a little bit further over the next few months as well. That ARR growth came from a combination of an 8% increase in our paying users and a 15% increase at constant currency in our annual revenue per user. A combination of volume and pricing drove that growth. At the bottom left there, our average revenue per customer, average revenue per account, was just over GBP 2,000. That's actually up about 29% at constant currency on the same time last year. Our churn rate improved from 1% per month to 0.9% per month.
To be clear, that is the proportion of our revenue base that disappears from customers who are leaving us every month. That compares very favorably to the typical SME churn rate, which is around about 3%. With more than half of our business selling into the SME market, we're very pleased with that level of churn. It's more of a testament to the fact that the customers we sell to are very sticky and also the fact that our products tend to be relatively infrastructural in nature once they've been implemented. Our net revenue retention improved from 99.3%- 100.6%.
Churn has obviously helped with that, has expansion revenue and has our fair price monetization efforts where we've been pricing and packaging customers in a fairer way. Our LTV to CAC ratio is a measure of customer acquisition efficiency. That's, as Daniel was saying earlier, if we invest GBP 1 in acquiring a new customer, so sales and marketing costs, over the lifetime of that customer, we get GBP 4 back. That's a very predictable number. We've got very predictable churn rates. We obviously know our pricing, and that for us is the reason why we continue to invest for growth. Taking a look at how our ARR has moved over the course of the half, we started the year with GBP 15.8 million of ARR.
We acquired GBP 0.9 million of new customers, and that's down ever so slightly on the first half of last year, but against the backdrop of very much a COVID rebound at the beginning of last year. Our monetization efforts led to an extra GBP one and a half million of ARR. Roughly 2/3 of that has come from our SmartVault business and about a third from Virtual Cabinet. We started the SmartVault monetization back in November last year. Virtual Cabinet was started in April of this year. We're still quite early on in that Virtual Cabinet journey. Churn led to a reduction in GBP 0.9 million. That compared to GBP 0.8 million in the previous year is better in terms of run rate.
A stronger U.S. dollar with just over 50% of our revenues being denominated in U.S. dollars led to a GBP 0.8 million increase, as well. Looking at our P&L, our recurring revenue is up 19%, total revenue is up 18%. We expect our non-recurring revenues, and this includes things like migration fees or consulting revenue, to be flat to slightly down in the future. Our focus is very much on subscriptions. We now package much more work into the pure subscriptions that we get from our customers. Our focus is very much on that recurring revenue line. Our gross margin at 90.4% was down slightly on the first half last year.
That's a product of the mix, so a greater volume of our business in our pure cloud products, where we bear the cost of operating those products. Typically, those products are operating at about 85% margin. As the mix moves more towards products like SmartVault, you'll see ultimately our gross margin normalizing to somewhere between 85% and 90%.
Our Adjusted EBITDA in the half was roughly at break-even. Adjusted EBITDA includes GBP 0.7 million of capitalized development costs. We present both an Adjusted EBITDA number and an adjusted loss number, which effectively is the sort of pure see-through P&L number. We've shown this cost-based breakdown on the right before.
Very roughly 75% of our costs, as with many software businesses, are related to the people that we have and incentivizing those people. There hasn't been any structural change to the makeup of our costs there. Looking at cash, there are two structural components that help us to operate in the long term at a small accounting loss position. That's the benefit we get from deferred revenue. Well over 65% of our customers pay us annually in advance. As we grow, that funds an awful lot of growth. Typically, we see deferred revenue benefits are slightly better in the second half than the first half.
The second structural benefit we have is, we are a recipient of U.K. R&D tax credit, that typically delivers us about three-quarters of a million pound benefit, annually, net of other taxes we have to pay, around the world. At the end of June, our cash of GBP 2.1 million was up 7% compared to the same period last year. We've got a GBP 2 million loan facility with Silicon Valley Bank, which is completely undrawn, giving us just over GBP 4 million of cash firepower. Just worth stressing at this point that we consider ourselves to be adequately funded. We don't see a need to raise additional capital.
The structural advantages you get from a SaaS business where you are selling to customers who pay annually in advance is extremely powerful to fund future growth. Just moving on to the outlook. Our focus unapologetically remains building our base of recurring subscription revenue, which we consider to be highly valuable. It's a very predictable revenue base.
It enables us to invest with confidence for growth. Our customer acquisition process is very scalable, so we know that investing in that, we know what the return is that we'll get off the back of that. We believe that our customer base is in a very valuable and attractive market with some very favorable tailwinds behind it. Our strategy is very clear. We aim to build long-term growth in those recurring subscription revenues. We have a portfolio of SaaS software solutions, each of which operates in some very large markets.
Our growth margins are high, and we have profitability proof points within the business, so Virtual Cabinet's EBITDA margin, you know, in excess of 50%. That gives us confidence that we have a roadmap to cash flow positivity and ultimately, strong EBITDA margins in the future. As Daniel said earlier, very typically, in businesses like ours, SaaS multiples that are ARR multiples that are applied are typically somewhere between 5x and 10x. Ultimately, our aim is to get the business where it is perceived with such quality that it starts to attract those kinds of multiples as well.
Just before I wrap up, just worth flagging that Panmure Gordon, our new broker, initiated coverage on us today. You can find on our website, getbusyplc.com, a summary of our analyst consensus if you need numbers for the next few years. Of course, as always, we are always available for questions. You contact us through our website if there's ever anything which you need to understand better. With that, thank you very much.
Daniel, Paul, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab situated in the top right corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard.
Daniel, Paul, as you can see, we've actually received a number of questions throughout today's presentation, and thank you to all the investors for submitting those. Could I just please ask you to read out those questions and give responses where it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you both at the end?
Of course.
Excellent. Thank you very much. Paul and I will share the questions, one each. Paul, do you wanna start?
Yeah, that sounds good. I apologize if there's any clunkiness to this, people. Daniel and I can't see each other at the moment, so we're gonna be trying to guess at who's doing which questions. First question, here are a few pre-submitted by Alessandro. I understand that a recent presentation said new round of monetization started in November 2021, and will continue for two years. What proportion of subscribers have had their monetization completed so far, and what proportion will have it completed at the end of October in 2022? I talked about this a little bit earlier, Alessandro. Our SmartVault monetization kicked off in November last year.
That is now got a couple of months left to run, essentially, so a good proportion of that, those customers are already on new pricing. Virtual Cabinet kicked off in April, and probably less than 20% of customers there have migrated onto new pricing. That's still got some way to run. Your next question I think is actually dealt with by my answer just then.
I'll move to your next question, which is, Certified Vault, I assume you mean Certified Vault and Workiro, are two promising add-ons for GetBusy. As you are aware, they could have a big potential, especially Certified Vault. I understand your rationale for not presenting all the future sales details of your different products that GetBusy has.
However, could you include an update in each half-yearly report on the ARR from these two businesses? That will allow people to gauge how these new activities are scaling as well as their future potential. In summary, we don't plan to disclose separate ARR for those products at this stage. That simply isn't fair on the teams that are taking those products to market.
They don't need to be doing that, frankly, in the full scrutiny of the public market. Also, at such an early stage in SaaS businesses, you know, you can get a lot of false positives and false negatives, so it's simply not helpful to anybody at the moment. You can rest assured at the moment that we have interesting strategic things to report on either of those businesses, that we will do so through RNS announcements.
Cool. Next question's from-- Sorry, Paul, were you? We finished with that one?
Yeah. Yep.
Okay. Next question is from Mazen. It says, "What makes you confident that you will not need to raise more capital?" Well, I think, Mazen, thank you for your question, first of all. A couple of things make us extremely confident that we won't need to raise additional capital. One is, if you looked at over the last probably 18- months and look on a 12-month basis, we've been cash generative. As Paul described earlier, there's some core structural components of our business that enables us to generate cash even if we have an accounting loss.
On top of that, because our revenue is so predictable and our return on investment is so consistent, we are well in advance able to understand what kind of cash we would generate from the costs in which we're putting into the business today. As a result of that, and because of the numerous proof points of SaaS companies moving to high operational leverage of 20%, 30%-40%, we are extremely confident that we will not need to raise any capital, and we think that in the near term we'll start to generate a lot of cash.
I'll take the next question, Dan. This again is from Mazen. How productive has the additional sales and marketing related investment in SG&A been? Should we expect SG&A to flatten out next year or is more investment planned? Specifically in sales and marketing investment, I know our LTV to CAC ratio I think shows the impact of that. That 4:1 LTV to CAC ratio has been very robust over the years. You know, incrementally increasing sales and marketing spend absolutely makes sense for us as a business at the moment. Other SG&A, we would ultimately expect to flatten out, but I'd say not yet.
As we build out the infrastructures for specifically Certified Vault, we see that as a very substantial opportunity, but not one that we can do without, you know, putting in place certain sort of regulatory and compliance capabilities within that business as well. You'd expect to see us ultimately still reinvesting most of incremental revenues back into the business over the next couple of years. There from Alan . Hi, Alan .
I think I'm sorry, Paul. Sorry to jump in. I think we've missed one from Ben B. Do you mind answering that one, and then I'll jump onto Alan's two questions?
Yeah. I'm trying to see that. Right, so down, bit further down. Here we go.
I'm sorry. Your list is probably slightly different than mine.
Yeah, sorry. Your analyst consensus suggests.
No, sorry, there's one before that. It says, "Can I ask why trade payables have increased by approximately GBP 1.3 million over the last 12- months? If you put aside tax leases and deferred revenue for the moment, it leaves net cash at effectively GBP 0.2 million. With your GBP 2 million facility available, of course, do you believe that is a little tight?
Yeah, great question, Ben. In summary, no, we don't believe that tight. Within that number is an element of the social security accrual that we have to make alongside share option costs. There is, you know, zero chance of all of those liabilities crystallizing at the same time, if you like, but we have to report them within our current liabilities number. In addition, there's incremental sales commissions and those sorts of things within there. The current liabilities number, the trade and other payables number, which is also impacted, by the way, with currency for our U.S. payables, is, you know. We simply will not unwind overnight.
You know, we're able to forecast out those cash flows with a high degree of confidence. To answer your question, you know, is that a bit tight? You know, we certainly don't believe so. Specifically, when you layer on the cash generation we get from new customers and also the debt facility we have in place with Silicon Valley , which is completely undrawn, we have no concerns around that.
Excellent. I'll jump onto the question from Alan F. Beyond the additional additions of resellers, are you able to share examples of tangible progress with Workiro, e.g., winning a large customer or current numbers of customers? Great question, Alan, and one of my favorite ones to answer. We've definitely seen some real tangible progress.
As you've alluded to, the most tangible progress is winning customers. A really good example is, as per our announcement last week, a top 200, sorry, top 100 accounting firm took on both Workiro and Virtual Cabinet. We're seeing more and more of that, where Virtual Cabinet clients are starting to see the value in Workiro and buying both of our applications. We're also starting to see some significant wins within the NetSuite client base.
There's another good example of that. I won't name the company 'cause it's not right to do so. That company started with one of their divisions, and I think we've grown out to three other divisions since then. Their customer sentiment has been very positive. We have loads of active customers now. We're continuing to monitor their usage and the value in which we're providing, and all of those leading indicators are pointing in the right direction.
Another question from Alan F. Appreciate focus is on future growth, but when should shareholders expect to see the scale efforts discussed produce significant free cash flow? Short, medium or five years, greater than five years? Alan, I think that's dependent on what kind of return on investment we get for our customer acquisition spend.
It makes a lot of sense for us to continue to invest when we're getting returns of GBP 4 for every GBP 1 in which we acquire customers. The value of that over a medium, long term means a substantially more cash generative business. We are confident that both SmartVault and Virtual Cabinet are at positions of scale now, and I think we've seen significant cash come out of Virtual Cabinet. I think in the short term, we're gonna start to see significant cash be generated from SmartVault. From our perspective, the operational platforms we've got in place are relatively mature.
It is very much a discussion of whether that additional cash is best used by investing in new customer acquisition or flowing down into profits to be distributed to shareholders or used for acquisitions. We are very much at that place of maturity where we as a board are discussing that regularly and constantly evaluating what the best use of the capital we are generating is.
There's one more here from Alan F., and then I'll let you jump onto Paul L's questions. Does the company provide its own digital signature technology or just retail DocuSign? If it makes sense, explain why. Great question, Alan, again. For Virtual Cabinet and Workiro, we use our own, and we build our own e-signature technology. For SmartVault and Certified Vault, we use DocuSign.
There's a couple of reasons behind that. First of all, DocuSign's brand recognition within the U.S. is highly valuable for us. Second of all, there's some unique functionality that DocuSign does for U.S. customers which our current eSign products don't do. Finally, there is quite a bit of work to integrate the e-signatures solutions that we got in Virtual Cabinet and Workiro into SmartVault and Certified Vault.
It's something which we're monitoring closely. We know that our margin on our signature solution is far greater than that of DocuSign. Over time, we expect to move away from DocuSign and to our own applications, but we'll only do that when that makes sense and when our applications are mature enough to deal with customer requirements.
Great stuff. Thanks, Daniel. Just a few questions here from Paul. Actually, Paul, I think some of your questions might have just been answered through some of the answers there around what level of investment to expect in product and customer acquisition over the coming years. If that hasn't answered your question, you know how to get in touch with me.
There is another question here, though, around talk about the significance of adding four value-added resellers to Workiro. To what extent are these intermediaries proven revenue generating products like Workiro, and to what extent are they a maybe growth option? The value-added resellers are a very core part of the NetSuite ecosystem.
Typically, these resellers have sometimes very large bases of existing customers who use NetSuite, and who they provide additional technology options to, and consulting projects and that sort of thing. All of the resellers we operate with sell other products into the NetSuite ecosystem as well. To that extent, a very well proven path. We also sell directly through NetSuite and directly ourselves as well. NetSuite is a reseller of the Workiro application. Workiro appears within the SuiteApp app store. We have a number of channels through to that market.
Cool.
Um-
All right. I'll, sorry, go for it, Paul.
No, go for it.
I was gonna jump onto Dave R's question. Have you finished with Paul, Al?
I'm not gonna take the blockchain one, so you can definitely, yeah, take this one.
This is a great topic. We're gonna probably need another hour or four. Is there a risk to Virtual Cabinet from the advancement in blockchain tech? Dave, great question, and as I said, I would love to take that offline and talk in more detail with you about it. No, there's no risk in that. In future, if blockchain matures to a point in which it's as efficient and more secure than how we're currently storing customers' information, then we can re-architect our product to talk to a blockchain back end. We're monitoring it very closely and understand the technology extremely well. We think it'll be advantageous for us in the future rather than disruptive. There's another one here from. Okay, go from Martin.
You're taking the other one from Dave. Am I correct in that you do not have any of the top four U.K. accounting firms as clients? Do they have their own proprietary solutions? What are the chances of you securing one or more as a customer? I think first thing to say is, yes, usually these guys do have their own proprietary solutions.
They're very different beasts to selling to and serving than anything from, you know, number five down. They're also not homogeneous organizations. Typically, you know, an organization like Deloitte or PwC is an amalgamation of lots of, you know, different service lines that usually operate on different technologies. The great example would be, you know, within a larger accounting firm, you might have different practice management provider for the tax team. It might be IRIS or something like that. Then you would have for the insolvency team, which might be Turnkey IPS.
Now, where we have had some success is where some of those large accounting firms have spun off their insolvency divisions in order to create independence between the or to remove the perceived conflict between audit and insolvency. We have been able to pick up some of those recent spinoffs as well. Whilst they don't have the Big Four brand anymore, they are, you know, very substantial insolvency operations in their own right. It's not a market that we are actively going after the Big Four.
I've got a question in from Martin S. How significant is Workiro's revenue? How quickly can this grow? What is the relative price of Workiro versus SmartVault? As Paul explained earlier, we don't disclose Workiro's ARR at the moment. It can grow extremely quickly. It's the largest addressable market in which we're currently playing in, with what seems to be the most significant problem to be solved.
I think over time, Workiro can be bigger than both our SmartVault and Virtual Cabinet businesses combined. What is the relative price? Workiro currently is a lower average sale price than SmartVault. That's because it's new to the market. Given the size of the customers, and our significance within their tech stack, I expect Workiro to be priced higher than SmartVault, but that will likely take a couple of years.
Good stuff. I think we're gonna have to be very selective on the question takes. We're definitely gonna get through all of them, so I'm gonna try and batch them into some themes. We've got a couple of questions here on Certified Vault. First of which is from Catherine T. Thanks for your question, Catherine. Could you give us a bit more detail on the response you've had to the Certified Vault solution to date, and what extra work you're doing to prepare the product for its wider launch?
A related question here from Sebastian. Can you expand on the reasons why you've pulled back from promoting the Certified Vault product? Catherine, to answer your question, the response we've had to Certified Vault today, up to date, has been very, very encouraging. We saw that towards the end of last year. This is a market which is crying out for digital solutions to help them do business in a more efficient way. There's currently only one other provider of any scale in that market.
You know, we provide very useful optionality for prospective customers. So far the response has been very good. However, it is a market where we need to make sure we absolutely know what we're doing before we really push our foot to the floor and the accelerator. We are building out some of the compliance elements to the product. The security requirements of some of these larger enterprises are very different to the security requirements of our SME base.
We wanna make sure we're getting those absolutely 100% right before we push very, very hard for growth in that product. We were very pleased with the reception that the prototype product got towards the end of last year. We will be moving the product on over the next few months, and anticipate being able to launch the product in a you know, a much more aggressive way during the course of next year.
Cool. Paul, should I quickly try and bash through some of the business questions, and then I'll leave you to finish on the questions around the analysts' consensus?
Yeah.
Um-
Go for it.
There's a question around paying users were static half on half. Please explain. Well, users were up 8%. [inaudible] said more growth came from average revenue per user increase than only 8% in paying users rising prices one-trick pony. Alan, I think it's important to acknowledge that the average revenue per user increase was not just the price rise, it was about providing additional capabilities and features to the existing client base. It was moving old client bases onto current pricing. A lot of it's not just related to price rise, it's about adoption, a greater adoption within our customer base of our applications.
That we can do over and over again for many, many years, especially as we build out more capabilities. There's a question here about what kind of uplift was there in ARR due to inflation? I think we've answered that around the average revenue per user. The last three halves have shown you ARR growth of GBP 0.8 million, GBP 1.6 million, GBP 0.9 million. Is this seasonality or was H2 exceptionally high? I think it is a function of having a really good half and us being very effective on our monetization, new customer growth, and protecting churn strategy.
I think there's another one around average price that we've got, and then Sebastian's asked around, appreciate you have signed five new NetSuite partners, and then I think that's a question again around customer wins. As I explained earlier, we've seen a good number of those come through recently. We expect that to continue. I'll jump on one final one from Mark. Is there interest in the business from private equity who historically have liked to buy SaaS players? Really great question. We're building up significant strategic value in core client bases for very large organizations and our access to competitive clients or a big percentage of their clients is material.
We know that the kind of multiples applied to SaaS businesses are healthy because those who work a lot with SaaS businesses know the future cash generation of them. We understand our strategic and potential value and we're way too early to materialize that. We wanna continue to build and scale. In the future, we will look at lots of different ways to maximize shareholder return. Paul, do you wanna hand over to you for the analyst questions?
Yeah, absolutely. Ben has asked, your analyst consensus suggests you'll be still loss-making for FY 2024. I'm surprised we're still looking at another two and a half years runway to profitability and cash generation, or have I misunderstood? I think we've addressed this earlier, Ben, with our approach of reinvesting incremental revenues back into growth. Key for us is that LTV to CAC ratio. While we're still seeing that at 4: 1, it 100% makes sense for us to reinvest all we can back into growing the business. We have, you know, additional products within the portfolio that we'll also be looking to scale to basically fuel long-term or add to long-term growth as well.
P&L profitability for us is not a focus in the near to medium term. Using the cash resources that we have and managing our cash flow with the advantage we get from customers paying in advance is absolutely a focus of ours. The final question, if the investment company team will allow me, from Sebastian. Appreciating that our analysts' forecast rather than yours, Panmure Gordon are forecasting revenue growth in 2023, GBP 0.5 million EBITDAR consuming GBP 0.7 million cash.
Can you explain why the profits and cash performance is forecast to diverge in 2023? You're looking there at an EBITDAR number, Sebastian. You'll need to look through the adjusted PBT number of that Panmure Gordon note, as well. I think you'll see that we are cash additive to that, as well. Ultimately all of the workings are there in the Panmure Gordon notes. You'll be able to see how they have modeled out cash flow over the next couple of years.
Um-
Daniel, Paul, I think you've actually managed to address every question from investors there. Of course, the company will review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Daniel, could I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah. Thank you everyone for your time. We greatly appreciate it. We're very ambitious and optimistic about our future and remains committed and confident that we will double our ARR in the next five years, as we've set out as a strategic initiative.
Perfect. Daniel, Paul, thanks once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of GetBusy plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.