Good morning, and welcome to the GetBusy PLC half-year results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during 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 would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Daniel Rabie. Good morning to you.
Good morning, and thank you for having us. And thank you everyone for joining us for the H1 2023 GetBusy results. In terms of introductions, my name is Dan. I'm the CEO of GetBusy, and with me today is Paul, the CFO. In terms of an agenda, we're gonna go through company strategy, which I'll be taking you through, then I'll hand over to Paul to talk through the market opportunity and then the financials, and I'll finish with an overview and some highlights. Let's get into it. Our mission is to make people productive and happy. This mission guides our culture as a company. So all our cultural values are around making our team productive and happy. It also guides the way in which we support our customers.
So we sell productivity software to professional service firms, and our main aim is to make them productive and happy through having good workflows and great user experience. We, as a company and as a board, are very clear on how we maximize shareholder value. And if I draw your attention to the bottom right-hand side of the screen, our aim is a cash distribution within the next seven years of GBP 150 million, and we are hyper-focused on achieving that and confident that we're headed in the right direction to be able to achieve that. So as a board, we are clear of what steps we need to take and how we create strategic value within our organization to ultimately provide significant shareholder returns over the next couple of years.
In terms of how we're tracking towards those... that goal, well, we've been consistently growing since IPO, with CAGR about 18%. This year, we grew 16% in recurring revenue, at a constant currency, I think 19% at actual currency. ARR was up 20.1% to GBP 14 million. We're class leading in recurring revenue, so 96% of our revenue is recurring, which I'm pretty confident is the highest, if not the second highest on AIM. We provide material value to our customers. We've got over 70,000 paying customers, predominantly accountants. So about 65% of those are accountants. And on behalf of those accountants, we store over 1 billion unique documents. So those are predominantly tax returns and financial statements.
They're core pieces of information and data that accountants are responsible for. We also enable our account-
Sorry, Daniel, you seem to be freezing.
to share their information with their client, and we too log in our cloud portal and interact with our clients.
Daniel, can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Yes. Sorry, apologies for that. You're just cutting off there, so we can't really pick up most of the things that you're saying. So I'm just gonna refresh your browser, if that's okay.
I can do...
No problem.
Ladies and gentlemen, please do bear with me as I try to reconnect Daniel to the room. Daniel, I can see you in the room. I'll just turn on your camera and microphone and hopefully... Perfect. Daniel, can you hear us? Daniel, can you hear us?
Okay. Well, while Daniel's reconnecting, I'm happy to pick things up and keep moving. So, Daniel was just explaining that our 70,000+ paying users interact with 3 million of their clients. And typically, they are signing about 3 million unique individual documents through our platforms every year. Typically, those documents are tax returns, so you know, we are a material part of the U.K. and U.S. tax take in terms of the number of tax returns that are being signed. Dan, are you back on?
Yes, I am. Can you hear me?
Absolutely. Yeah. Do you wanna, do you wanna keep going? I've just gone through, I've just gone through signatures and collaborators.
Yeah. Excellent. Well, thank you, Paul. Apologies about that. I'm not sure what happened there. So as Paul was saying, we facilitate over 3 million digital signatures, so that's a material amount of finishing an accountant's process and enabling them to give a good customer experience. So as you can see, we're essential to our core market. This value is why we're selling so much more of our product at a high average sale price. It's also why we have such low gross churn within our customer base. We are also expanding into new addressable markets, so we're very clear on how we create competitive advantage within the niche markets that we target, and we're expanding that addressable market to enable us a clearer path to the GBP 30 million target by December 2026, and ultimately the GBP 150 million cash distribution.
We're in very resilient end markets, so, irrespective of the macroeconomy, we seem to be resilient against it. And our business model is a very good one in terms of subscription revenue, is very predictable. It's very cash generative. So if you're not making a decision to invest into growth, you can become very profitable very quickly, and, operational leverage of 45%–50% is what we're achieving in our Virtual Cabinet business. So that gives you an indication of what we could achieve in our overall group if we wanted to. And on that note, we have GBP 3.7 million of available growth capital.
So considering we're reinvesting our growth back into our business, and then on top of it, have GBP 3.7 million in available growth capital, GBP 1.7 million in the bank, and GBP 2 million definitely, we're in a very good position to be able to focus on these subscription revenue, which makes our business a lot more valuable in the future. So in terms of, Sorry, hello?
Daniel, just taking your camera down just to keep the integrity of your audio, and I've done the same for Paul, so please carry on.
Thanks. Well, in terms of the practical problems that we solve, so we solve document chaos. As you know, accountants are very document-heavy workflow, and so the efficiency of how they deal with documents internally and externally is core to their ability to be successful. So we streamline that process. They're email heavy, like I'm sure we all are. They have large security and compliance risks, and those security, cybersecurity and compliance regulations are only increasing year on year. From a practical standpoint, this is what we solve for our prospects and clients. And in terms of how we present that externally, if you look at our marketing material, for example, you'll see us talk a lot about improve your client satisfaction.
You know, the old process of getting a client to print the tax return, physically sign it, scan it, email it back, all of that is a very cumbersome process. So our ability to streamline that customer experience through cloud portals and digital signatures makes everyone's life better. We talk a lot about reduced burnout and better retention rates, so I'm gonna talk to this in more detail in a later slide about the accounting market is growing, but staff who wanna be accountants are reducing. So it's accounting firms are really struggling to get new staff, especially in the U.S., and this is meaning that they need to retain their existing staff, and they need to attract the best staff when they can. And having the best tech in place enables them to do that.
It reduces stress, it makes their operations flexible, it enables hybrid working. So we're key to making sure that they keep their existing team, and that they can bring in new people and the best new people. We reduce the risk of sanction and fines. This is a core value proposition that we sell into our accounting firms. We also hold majority of their important data, so making sure that we keep that secure is a high priority for us and a high priority for them. And we help with the move to low carbon footprint. So obviously, digital experience is much better than a paper experience. Here's some newspaper articles which have all come out recently.
I think there was one yesterday, actually, on the crisis that's happening in the U.S. regarding accounting firms' ability to bring in staff. So a lot of them are looking at offshoring, a lot of them are looking at consolidation. Private equity are eyeing up a lot of accounting firms, and all this change is supporting this move towards automation and supporting this move into having the best tech stack to enable you to be efficient, as effective as possible. So, you know, the trend within the market is playing heavily into our hands. In terms of our products, so we have two established products, Virtual Cabinet and Smart Vault. Both are document management solutions with client portal and digital signatures.
They sell anywhere from small SMEs, all the way up to 30% of the top 100 U.K. accounting firms. We are the clear leader in document management for accountants. There is no one else that comes close to us in terms of market share. We are cloud-hosted, mobile, and on-premise, and in the U.K., U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. Virtual Cabinet is a very cash generative business. As I said, it creates operational leverage of about 40%. SmartVault is a high growth business, and that is the objective of those two companies: Virtual Cabinet to create the cash, and SmartVault to grow. SmartVault is growing in a very strategically valuable U.S. accounting market, and we continue to pick up more and more market share within that.
Those two products are our short-term growth products to ensure long-term sustainable growth, which has always been a strategic objective of ours. We've got three emerging products coming to market. So Workiro is our next gen generation enterprise content management solution. Essentially, what we've done with Workiro is we've been very successful through SmartVault and Virtual Cabinet at solving document problems for accountants in practice. And we quickly realized that in corporate accountants, so for example, Paul and his team, his finance team, they struggle with the same efficiency problems that in-practice accountants struggle with. So we felt that we could help them manage, sort, organize, file, share, sign documents in the same way we've been so successful doing to accountants for the last 20 years.
and so that triggered the investment in Workiro many years ago, and over the last probably 18 months, a hyper-focus on the ERP market. And we're seeing really good progress within Workiro. 20 partners signed in the last 12 months, just validating, on top of winning International Partner of the Year last year, just validating the opportunity here and that the ecosystem around NetSuite, specifically, are seeing that this problem exists and identifying us as a potential solution to that problem. So we're confident that we're growing in the right market and solving the right problem. We're also confident that the financial characteristics of Workiro are gonna be very favorable. And what I mean by that is we're gonna have good average sale price, we're gonna have big average deal sizes. Churn rates are likely gonna be low.
There's gonna be opportunity to monetize and upsell in the future. So, we're confident that Workiro is headed in the right direction and that we're making the right progress. Certified Vault is essentially just a spin-off from SmartVault. So it's the same core underlying product. It's just focused on the asset management sector. So what we identified is that within asset management, their ability to store and be custodians of important documents was limited, and that the provider that was focused in that market was no longer focused in that market, and that created a good market opportunity. So, in 2022, we brought a MVP to market and saw that there was demand for a product like ours with some really successful wins.
Since then, what we've learned is the need to make sure that the security protocols around the application are first class. And so that's what we're in the process of doing it right now. It's just not worth us risking the, you know, the rest of our successful business by making any mistakes here. So we're hyper-focused on making sure that we get our security protocols right. And then, from there, I think, Certified Vault is a really nice complementary product to SmartVault to increase the growth within that business unit. HelloPlan is a scheduling and meeting application. So, again, through feedback from our clients, what was clear is that scheduling meetings is a challenge often, especially in a hybrid working environment.
You know, making sure that those meetings are productive is particularly a struggle. So having a set agenda, making sure documents are there, taking notes, fielding that note, feeding those notes back into tasks, all of those things we're very familiar with, and our other applications do bits of it really well. So what HelloPlan is focused on is being that more professional meeting scheduling tool that helps professionals, predominantly accountants, schedule meetings more successfully. The purpose of HelloPlan is not to put huge amounts of investment into it. It's not something that we're gonna be piling cash into. It's very much just a complementary application that sits next to Virtual Cabinet and Workiro to upsell into those existing client base.
It's very much in the course of business of our other products and, you know, isn't a drain on cash flow. It's just got upside potential. In terms of our future, as you can see, we're investing for growth today in SmartVault through the cash today from Virtual Cabinet. And then we've got a clear focus on how we generate return well into the future, and that's through the emerging products, specifically Workiro. Across all those products, what is clear is that we're sitting on this rich foundation of content, of data. As I said, we have over 1 billion unique documents. We got over 3 million businesses logging in to exchange information around those documents.
So in the future, we have a big opportunity to leverage off AI to just make that data more intelligent. So just more search and answers, more context around the data, being able to provide feedback to data or review data a lot quicker. So you know, we have components of AI in our application already, but the evolution of it is an exciting prospect for us because it's clear that through AI, we can just add more and more value to our customers and just make them more and more efficient and intelligent on the information which they hold. We're hyper-focused and clear on our responsibility within that. So as I said, core to our value proposition is that accountants trust us.
They trust the fact that we're gonna secure their data in the right way. We hold over 1 billion important pieces of information on behalf of, you know, the largest tax accountants in the world. So we take that responsibility extremely seriously, and we would never expose that data in a way that puts them or us at risk or provides any confidential information. So, within the context of AI, we're very we, we understand our responsibility to do it in a safe way. And we're confident that within a safe way, we can create a whole lot of additional value to our existing clients and future clients, which is a really exciting journey for us to go on.
As I said, you know, again, to validate the strength of our business, 30% of the top 100 U.K. accounting firms, 70,000 users, 8,000 customers. We've got low customer concentration, so you can see how that's split. The customer size is split across our base. The low customer concentration helps with low gross churn. As you can also see that from the bottom of the screen, just some of the logos that we've got and the customers we've got. So we're truly trusted by the biggest and the best. And, you know, we add so much value to these customers that the cash flow that comes out of them is pretty protected for a long period of time. We've got 150 rock stars working for us, a very dedicated team.
I think most importantly to note is we're very experienced at this. We've been doing selling document management to accountants for 15, 20 years. I've been in the accounting industry for 20 years now. We're very, very experienced at selling software to accountants and very, very experienced in how we manage document workflows. It's all we've ever done, it's all we're ever gonna do in the future. And through doing that, we are the best at it. So we often get the question: How do you win? How specifically do you win? So, you know, there are lots of people that manage documents, and lots of people that manage workflow. There's lots of VC niche solutions. Why do people choose us over others?
And there, there is a simple answer, which has real complex barriers to entry as a result of it. So the simple answer is really deep integration into the specialist vendors. Intuit and TaxCalc are two, which, you know, I draw your attention to. You know, Intuit with, with SmartVault and TaxCalc with SmartVault, we are their document management provider. So if you go on Intuit's website or TaxCalc website, you will see that they recommend SmartVault as their document management. And that's Intuit and TaxCalc acknowledging that they're great at tax, they're great at practice management. The document component is a whole different workflow and a whole different skill set, and by integrating into us, they can have the best upgrade solution to their clients.
And by us creating a deep integration into them, we can get things like data sync, single source of truth, fewer clicks, less human error. It just automates the admin process, and it makes the accountant's life a lot more efficient. So these deep integrations is our unique proposition and why we win 9 out of 10 times, and a significant competitive advantage and barriers to entry. Others cannot do this quickly. It took us 8-10 years to get to this place. No one is trying, and if they did try, it would take them 5-10 years to get there. With Workiro, we're trying to create that same competitive advantage with NetSuite, so deeply embedding ourselves within NetSuite.
And again, on the VC business, we've got lots of experience with, say, Turnkey, which is a key partner of ours. VC is Turnkey's document management. So, you know, we're clear on how we win, and when you're clear on how you win, it's easier to repeat it and scale it. Here's another practical example of that. Tracy is a great customer of ours, and again, this quote just showcases the value of the integration between GetBusy and TaxCalc, which in this case is actually SmartVault and TaxCalc, and that being the core reason why she switched to SmartVault. So I think, hopefully, what's clear to you now is, you know, the objectives we're trying to achieve, how we've got competitive advantage, the value we provide to our customers.
We think that that sets us up for, you know, a really successful next couple of years. So the focus is now on scaling our customer acquisition models, and growing as quickly as possible, to build up as much subscription revenue as possible over the next couple of years, 'cause we know how valuable that subscription revenue is, either from a cash perspective or from an exit multiple. So at the moment, the team and the investment is very much going into sales and marketing. And we're probably doubling our headcount in sales and marketing over the next 12 months.
And we have been very successful in terms of our, our results of our sales and marketing, which is a traditional inbound model, where we engage customers at the top of the funnel, we nurture them down to demos, and then we convert those demos. Traditionally, we've done that at about 4-to-1 return on spend, with a 24-month payback period and a typical demo conversion rate of 50%. So as you can see, it's an efficient engine, and now we're just trying to do that at a lot more scale, and we're making progress towards that. I think just before I hand over to Paul, complementing the inbound model is a new partner strategy, and Paul's gonna talk to that in a bit more detail.
But what you would have seen is our announcement with Right Networks, our 20 partners that we brought in through the NetSuite ecosystem. So we've been very successful in directly selling to our customers. We're confident that if we complement this direct model with a partner model, that's just gonna accelerate our growth in the future. So I'm gonna hand it over to Paul now to talk through the financials and the market opportunity, and then I'll come back for an overview at the end.
Excellent. Thanks, Dan. So all of that has enabled us over time to create what we consider to be a very valuable, base of, of customers. And what makes those customers valuable to us is they tend to be very loyal. We've got very low churn rates, so, in the first half of this year, we're at 0.8%. That's been improving over the last, couple of years. And those customers tend to spend more with us over time. So our net revenue retention, and that is how much more each month our existing customer base is spending with us, that was about 100.5% per month in the first half of, of this year. Part of that's been buoyed by price.
Internally, we target that number anything north of 100%, but that's been a particularly buoyant figure of ours over the last couple of years. If you take a step back and look over the longer term, the customers who we have today, who were with us when we IPO'd back in 2017, are generating 35% more revenue than our entire customer base was back at IPO. So over the long run, these customers tend to be highly accretive in revenue terms. Our revenue is very predictable. We've got 96% of our revenue now comes in as recurring subscriptions. That's the highest we believe on the London market. It makes revenue visibility and revenue predictability very high indeed.
About 70% of our business comes in annually in advance. So we offer typically monthly or annual plans to customers. Monthly plans are more expensive. Annual plans come with a discount, and typically we see substantially lower churn rates on those annual plans. About 70% of our business comes in in that way, and that creates a lot of upfront cash for us to reinvest into the growth of the business. We consider the customer cash flows to be very valuable. If you take the discounted gross profit from our current customer base over the typical lifetime of our customers, that's worth well over GBP 200 million to us. So there's substantial value within that customer base.
Some of you, I think, would have seen this slide before. We offer, as with many subscription revenue or subscription software, businesses, monthly and annual plans. If you're an enterprise customer, you'll typically come in on a 3-year, initial term, and then we have annual renewals thereafter. Typically, our customers stay with us for 9 or 10 years. So we, yeah, we, we've been around long enough that we have customers who have been with us well over that, period of time. And we'll often charge, one-off implementation, training fees, and those sorts of things, migration fees. It's not a priority for us, that, but it's nice, nice cash to have, and it helps pay for some of the costs of, onboarding, those customers.
Once we've got the customers in through the door, we look to expand them through adding additional users. So that might be simply because we're selling to growing businesses. It might be because we start with one of our products in a single department in an accounting firm and then roll it out to other departments over time. We also have an expanding capability set, so functionality set, which we've modularized, and we can upsell to the existing customer base too. And an alternative way of doing that is creating different price and packaging plans.
If any of you have been on a SaaS software website, you'll typically see on their pricing page a variety of different plans, usually a starter and potentially even a free plan, moving up to richer plans over on the right-hand side. We are no different. We plan to do that with our customers too. The markets that we're in are very large. We actually break them down in much more detail in a second, reflecting the way that we go to market. The broader landscape we're playing in is very substantial. The territories we consider that we operate in are the U.S., U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. We've actually got customers in well over 50 countries, but these are the countries that we are focused on.
In the accounting and professional services markets, that's around about a GBP 750 million opportunity for the enterprise content management space that we are in. Financial services have a similar sized opportunity, and the ERP market, into which we've moved recently, is also a similarly sized market. At the macro level, these markets are a great basis to be at the moment. All professional services firms, and particularly accounting firms, are going through phases of digital transformation. They have to make their people more efficient. You saw the headlines Dan showed you earlier. You know, the accounting profession, particularly in the U.S., is in crisis. People are leaving the profession because of the pressures of the sort of three or four months of tax season.
Too few people are coming into the profession, and there's an increased influence of private equity in the profession, which is driving that sort of professionalized management approach. So you're seeing digital transformation projects, software implementations happening right across the size spectrum in the accounting market, and that's obviously beneficial to us. There's a greater awareness around the world around privacy concerns and protecting client data, and you'll all be aware of the GDPR legislation that came into Europe a few years ago. There is GDPR-like legislation currently being rolled out in the U.S. state by state. That creates complexity for professional services firms, who typically hold large volumes of client personal data.
Our products help clients to track that data, to identify who has accessed it, and to carry out the various requirements of the privacy acts, such as the CCPA or GDPR. We're living in a much more hostile cybersecurity environment. That will probably not be news to any of you. Our products help our customers to secure their very valuable and very sensitive client data, so we are part of that cybersecurity stack solution for our customers. The trends of flexible working over the last few years, which I think, you know, clearly were accelerated with COVID, but have been around for a while, also play into our hands.
So if you want to enable a flexible workforce, or indeed, if you want to offshore some of your work or outsource some of your work, which is happening as a response to those labor shortages in the U.S., then you need a secure and efficient cloud technology stack to enable that. So we are also part of that solution. I said I'd break down our markets in a little bit more detail. I do that with two of them here, so the U.S. accounting sector and the ERP sector. So the way we go to market, as Dan described, is very much aligned to the integrations that we have with other back office software. In the case of accountants and particularly tax accountants, that is their tax preparation and practice management software.
A lot of the SmartVault business historically has been built off the back of our integration with various Intuit products, including Lacerte and ProSeries, two of their professional tax preparation products. We estimate there's about 200,000 people across the U.S. who are users of those products. Each of those is a potential user of SmartVault. That translates to us as about a $100 million ARR potential market. We are still in the high single digits of penetration of that market, so there's still a long way to go. We are the only cloud document management provider into those products. We recently announced back in January. Back in July, rather, our new integration with Thomson Reuters UltraTax product. UltraTax is a similar product to Lacerte and ProSeries. It does similar things.
It's a tax preparation product. Broadly, it's got a similar market size, or similar user base rather, to Intuit's products. So that effectively doubles our accessible market in the U.S. So that's a brand-new integration launched in July, and we expect to see that starting to contribute over the balance of this year and into 2024. There is more than enough market amongst those two integrations for us to go after. You'll see the other items of software over on the right-hand side there. CCH has a suite of tax products, which in the future we'll look to integrate with, and other providers include Drake and a few smaller ones, which will be, you know, hopefully additive to our growth once we get those integrations in.
Historically, most of our business in the U.S. has been done through direct sales, so even though Intuit, on their website, recommend SmartVault as a product, all of the selling and most of the marketing is done by us. So essentially, thus far, all of our business has been generated through the direct channel. Back at the end of last year, we announced our partnership with Right Networks, which is a hosting provider specializing in the accounting industry in the U.S. So Right Networks effectively acts as an outsourced IT team for small accountants in the U.S. They have about 8,000 accounting firms on their books. SmartVault, in total, has about 6,000 customers, and there's very little overlap between the customer bases of Right Networks and SmartVault.
So Right Networks will be reselling SmartVault into its customer base. We'll be looking very carefully at how that progresses during the core Q4 selling season this year. Our sales and marketing teams have been working together very well, and we're very excited about what that partnership opportunity can bring us. We're looking for additional partnerships in the U.S. as well, so all of which will complement our direct sales strategy, into which we are also investing. So we're approaching the cloud ERP market in a similar way, based on the integrations that we have with cloud ERP providers, starting with Oracle's NetSuite product, which is arguably the biggest and the best. That's got a customer base of about 33,000 companies around the world.
We estimate that the opportunity in that base is north of $500 billion. We're obviously at a very early stage in that, but we expect over the long term to be able to rinse and repeat that with other cloud ERP providers like Sage Intacct and like Acumatica. Partners are and will continue to be a more important part of our growth strategy in the ERP space, and you can see some of the 20 partners that we've already signed up in that NetSuite ecosystem at the bottom of the page there. The reason they're so important is because they usually have well-established existing customer bases, who look to them for their technology suggestions, who look to them for their technology procurement.
So, incentivizing those partners to sell Workiro on our behalf gives us access to, you know, existing customers who we know use NetSuite and who the partners understand the problems of those customers very well. So I'll just quickly go through our 2020 H1 results, starting with revenue. So our annual recurring revenue, excuse me while I just sort my mouse out to properly hover over this, was up 14% year-on-year, at constant currency to GBP 20.1 million. ARR is our subscription revenue run rate. So if you take all of our monthly and annual subscriptions, that is the annualized value of those monthly or those revenue subscriptions. That's up about 7% at constant currency year to date.
Typically, we have a big Q1 in terms of new business. Q2 tends to be quieter because accountants, particularly in the U.S., are far too busy, doing tax returns and don't really want to speak to any technology providers, over that time. So where did that 14% uplift come from? It is predominantly driven by an increase in our average revenue per user, to GBP 275, and year-on-year, our user base has been essentially flat. So why is that? Historically, we have acquired a long tail of general business customers, usually to fill that sort of quiet time when accountants don't speak to us. Now, some of those are fantastic customers, very healthy customers for us.
But amongst that mix, there are customers who have no integrations, who have been expensive to acquire. They're typically four times more likely to churn than an accounting customer, and typically they have very low average sale price. So their ARPU can be sometimes just a quarter of the ARPU of our new accounting customers. But those customers tend to be just as resource intensive as our accounting customers to service, arguably more resource intensive. So the economics of them generally is not favorable to us. So as we went through our pricing moves over the last couple of years, we've restructured the plans that are available to those general business customers.
We've introduced minimum account sizes, and we've substantially increased the average price of those plans although they're still probably the entry-level plans are still about half the price of an accounting plan. So those pricing changes have, over time, shaken out effectively the low value, non-accounting customers that don't especially add value to our business. They don't necessarily make economic sense to us, and that leaves us with a healthy base of larger business customers, where the economics are much more attractive to us. Our view is that has simply accelerated churn that would probably otherwise have happened over the next couple of years, and it dilutes away that proportion of our customer base that isn't in our core accounting and professional services market.
So expect that to continue to contribute towards lower churn rates over time. You can already see the impact of that in the first half of this year. Churn came down from 0.9% to 0.8%, and we'd expect to continue to see that trail gradually downwards over the next few years, as well. Our average revenue per account was up broadly in line with ARPU, at GBP 2,490. Our net revenue retention, so this is a measure of how much more our existing customers spend with us month-over-month, before the addition of new customers, was at 100.5%. That has been buoyed over the last couple of years by our pricing moves.
Our target internally is always a hundred percent, and over time, through the selling of additional capabilities into the existing customer base and selling additional users into the existing customer base, we hope to continue to achieve those sorts of levels. We continue to acquire customers in an efficient way. Our LTV to CAC ratio, which is an indicator of how much cash we earn back over the lifetime of a customer at the gross margin level, for every $1 that we put into acquiring that customer, has remained healthy at 4-to-1. As we increase our investment during H2, that may take a dip. We see anything north of 3-to-1 as very investable, but our target is to maintain it at 4-to-1.
So just showing you how we got from our opening ARR to our closing ARR, we started with GBP 19.1 million at the beginning of the year. We've added GBP 0.8 million of new customers. That's roughly consistent with what we did in the first half of last year. How we're going to accelerate that in the future is through the launch of our UltraTax, Thomson Reuters integration in the U.S., which substantially increases our accessible market in the U.S. We expect the partnerships that we've created to start to contribute. That's both in terms of the SmartVault's partnership with Right Networks, but also the 20 or so channel partners that we have established with Workiro. But we're not relying on partners for that growth.
We're also investing in our own people and sales process substantially, and we expect that to contribute over the balance of this year and into next year. Our net expansion was GBP 1.5 million. So net expansion is the combined impact of pricing, of selling additional capabilities to the existing customer base, and adding additional users to the existing customer base, net of any users that are downgraded. Roughly 50% of that GBP 1.5 million has come from pricing in the first half, and the balance is from upsell and selling additional capabilities. Our form fill and quoting capabilities are now fully integrated into SmartVault, and we've started to sell those. We're seeing great traction with our e-signature capability in SmartVault and selling that as a subscription add-on.
We'll be looking over the next few months at repackaging SmartVault and incentivizing people to move up those pricing plans to keep net expansion buoyant. We lost about 0.9 million customers through churn. That, as a percentage, is lower than it was in the first half of last year. How we expect churn to improve in the future is through really, really focusing on those core accounting professionals who are deeply integrated to us. We know their churn rates are lower by expanding and deepening the integrations that we have, because we know those integrations create value, and also by targeting larger customers, particularly in SmartVault. Larger customers, historically, for us, have churned at much lower rates than smaller customers.
We had an FX headwind in the first half of the year, particularly in Q2, where the dollar strengthened, the U.S. dollar strengthened, or weakened rather, about 4 or 5% against sterling, had a similar impact from Aussie dollars. About 55% of our revenue comes from U.S. dollars, and about 10% of our revenue comes from Aussie and New Zealand dollars. So just moving to our P&L and a reminder of, I guess, our cost structure. About a quarter of our operating costs go into sales and marketing activity. About a quarter goes into product development. About a quarter goes into customer success, client delivery and support and operations, and those sorts of things.
Then, about a quarter goes into premises and the supporting functions, like people and culture and finance. So recurring revenue, in total, was up 19%. We've seen strong growth in both the U.S. and in the U.K. in particular. We'll continue to see non-recurring revenue decline as we have moved away fully from a perpetual license model, which was prevalent in the business four or five years ago. Gross margins remained healthy at 90%. The slight reduction on the first half of last year is simply a product of mix. Our cloud products typically have gross margins in the sort of 80%–85% range. And our on-premise products have effectively no material ongoing cost of sales, so their margin is in the high 90s%.
As we sell more cloud products, that becomes has an impact on gross margin. A reminder of our approach in the medium term is to reinvest pretty much all of our incremental revenue back down into growth. We plan to do that, continue to do that from our existing cash resources. We are not focused on achieving any particular EBITDA goals in the near term. In terms of what I said around that sort of broad cashflow neutrality, broadly, you can expect EBITDA to continue around or just north of that sort of breakeven level over the next couple of years as we reinvest back down. In terms of where we're investing in H2, we have a very heavy focus on customer acquisition, particularly in the U.S.
We're scaling up our sales and marketing teams to support our re-engineered sales methodology. We'll be looking to incentivize and bring on board new channel partners in the U.S., and we'll be upskilling various teams to support that new model as well. Just taking a quick look at cash. In addition to the adjusted loss we had in the half, there are two key components that I always draw to people's attention in terms of our cash flow dynamics. The first is deferred revenue. So I mentioned earlier, there's about 70% of our customer base pays us annually in advance. There's quite a heavy H2 weighting to that renewal season, so particularly Q4 is a very heavy renewal period for us, and we see substantial cash inflows during that period.
Typically, over the course of a year, January is a very cash accretive month for us, with very heavy renewals, and then we see a gradual decline down over the following sort of six months or so, and things start to pick up in the tail end of Q3 and into Q4. So we'd expect that deferred revenue bar to flip during the course of H2. We've been a grateful recipient of R&D tax credits in the U.K. over the last few years. So, broadly, we've received GBP 1 million annually over the last couple of years. As some of you may know, that R&D tax regime is changing. We... It will be less favorable to smaller businesses like ours.
There's still some ongoing campaigning and lobbying around that, but our conservative assumption, at the moment, is that you can expect our R&D tax credit receipts to broadly halve next year, possibly a little bit better than that, and then to gradually tail off as more parts of that legislation start to take effect. But we consider we've got more than enough growth capital for what we're trying to achieve. We've got GBP 1.7 million in cash and a very usable GBP 2 million pound loan facility with very favorable covenants, as there's no sort of balance sheet restrictions in there, or anything like that, and we plan to continue to use that over the next few years. I'll hand back to Dan.
Excellent. Thank you, Paul. Well, I'm gonna quickly finish with outlook and guidance before we head into some questions. I think, the key message we are trying to get across to our shareholders, and hopefully future shareholders, is, that we've got adequate amount of cash, and the ability to reinvest our predictable recurring revenue back into our business to significantly grow the top line over the next couple of years. So we will not need to go to the market and raise any money. We have more than adequate growth capital, and as Paul said, the next couple of years, we'll likely do this as a cash-neutral exercise. We expect then we will grow our top line, and then in a couple of years' time, we'll be able to produce a lot of cash out of this business, right?
At that stage, the business will be a lot more valuable, either from a cash flow perspective or from the multiples that you will apply to these kind of businesses, at an exit. We have a clear target of a GBP 70 million–GBP 150 million return to shareholders, cash return to shareholders in the next couple of years. The more resilient markets, the products we got, the sticky customers, the strong balance sheet, our experience and capabilities in the market, our competitive advantage, all of that gives us, as a board, great confidence that we are on target to achieve those outcomes. If we are to achieve those outcomes, that's significant return for shareholders over that period. Thank you, everyone, for your time today. We, we really appreciate it. We're gonna head into some questions now.
I think we've got about 10 minutes, and I'm gonna hand it over to Paul to read out the questions, and then between Paul and I, we'll answer those.
Excellent. Thanks, Dan. So, I'll take these questions broadly, or I'll prioritize those that were pre-submitted that we haven't already answered. And then I'll take some of the others in what I hope is broadly priority. I know we won't be able to answer all the questions, but we'll try to get to as many of them as possible. So, the first one, "Will Certified Vault be ready to be fully marketed at the start of 2024? And if not, when will it be ready?" Dan, do you want me to take that?
Yeah, No, I'm happy to take that one. But I think, yeah, it's important to note that we already have some Certified Vault customers, and they are being successful. In terms of, fully marketed, again, depends what you define that being. But it's very dependent on our security protocols being in place, and that we're confident that we're meeting, the bank's requirements and the regulation requirements. My expectation is probably by the end of 2024, we will be able to make a decision whether we make a more aggressive push into the Certified Vault market. It's also gonna depend on, the direction which SmartVault is going, 'cause then, at that point, it'll be an allocation of capital decision based on what we think will get the best return.
So, it's great to have options, and I'm confident by mid- to end-2024, we'll have that option, and then we'll make the best investment decision.
Thanks, Dan. So next question, which I'm happy to take, is, this is from Ben. ARPU, who appears to be doing much of the heavy lifting, regarding growth, when do you expect the emphasis to flip to, paid user growth? So, hopefully, Ben, I've explained the dynamics there with, with the user movements, year on year. You're absolutely right. Long-term growth has to be driven by, by volume, not, not just price. We've had some great price benefit over the last 18-24 months. We expect to see, user volume start to increase over the course of, of H2 of, of, this year. So broadly, those, lower value, customers, have now, churned or they've moved on to, our new pricing plans.
I think all of them will have had the opportunity or the second opportunity to churn or not to renew by December of this year. So, you know, we are hopefully coming to the tail end of that process. I'll give this one to you, Dan. This is from Sam: "What percentage of employee working hours are working from home, and do you find that efficient?
Well, Sam, I think, you know, this is core to our business because we are a productivity company that sell productivity software, and therefore, you know, we measure and monitor this very closely. We've always had a hybrid working environment, so, pre-COVID, we always had flexible working. You know, we have all the tech stack and the culture in place to enable us to do that. We have all the visibility and accountability metrics to be able to do that. So I think, our transition to COVID was fully remote working during COVID was relatively seamless, and then our transition out of it has been relatively seamless, with a good, healthy balance of in-person, in-office hours and, and remote. Each team's slightly different, but overall, we're getting that balance right.
Yeah. Excellent. Mark has asked: "How will we see success of Work — of the Workiro product? Will it be an acceleration of group ARR over the next, one or two years?
Yeah, I mean, that's the objective here, Mark. Definitely. So we're confident that, as we build up more of these partnerships and more brand recognition, more trust within the ecosystem, then, we're gonna get more penetration of the end customers, and ultimately, that's gonna grow ARR. The sales cycles of these customers are gonna be longer, and that, as I said, is favorable in the long term if you look at the average deal size and then ultimate churn rate. So I think that, ultimately, it's gonna be a big contributor to the group ARR. Whether it's over the next 1-2 years is hard to predict, but that's definitely our aim.
Excellent. Mark has also asked: "Can you talk a little about your reseller partners and what they can bring in terms of new market access, and how long that will take to be meaningful?
Yeah, well, I think, this is the big change in our business and a, very positive change. Right Networks' a perfect example of that, where they have this trusted relationship with, you know, over 8,000 end-user accountants, where they are the IT provider to those accountants. If they're recommending a solution like SmartVault to manage the documents in a more secure way, the likelihood is the customer's gonna listen and adopt that solution. So the ability for us to work with these partners and onboard them correctly, incentivize them correctly to ultimately, adopt a lot of their customer base, can be a significant, catalyst to future growth.
Mm-hmm.
Right now it's just started really well for us. So I mean, we're only a couple of months into it, but so far it's, you know, there's a very positive trend there. And I'm confident that them and, you know, maybe one or two others, 'cause you need to be very strategic with your partners. You can be busy doing lots of unnecessary work in the partner ecosystem. So one or two more strategic partners, and then we will have direct access to the core market that we're trying to achieve. And, influencers outside of ourself will be convincing our prospects to be buying our application, which is a very favorable position to be in.
Thanks, Dan. Tim has asked. I'll happily take this one, Dan. What does doubling headcount in sales and marketing mean in terms of cash and FTE? Broadly, Tim, once we're up to where we think we will need to be, ultimately, that's probably in the region of 15-20 individuals over time. I mean, we wouldn't expect all those to sort of, you know, start on the first of September or anything like that. That's broadly about GBP 1.5-ish million run rate. Obviously, part of that being sales teams is also variable rather than fixed.
But how we scale that in will very much depend on, you know, how we see that new process working. You know, we've historically layered investment of as we started to see results, and we'd expect to be doing the same here, potentially in a slightly more aggressive way than we've done in the past. Tim has also asked, just to flag, we've got about a couple of minutes left here, I think. In my experience, scaling sales in the U.S. is often a struggle for European companies. Who is leading the efforts? And do you have someone from the management team on the ground to be close to operations?
Yeah. Well, I'll, I'll answer these questions very quickly, given time.
Right.
Yes, we've got a team on the ground, and we've got strong visibility and accountability metrics in place and a tight culture. So, it's always a challenge expanding, but we're confident that we've got the right people and processes in place to enable us to be successful.
Excellent. Thank you. Sounds like investment is accelerating in product development and sales headcount. Not product development, Mark, but yes, in sales headcount. Can you confirm any future placings? This has all be done, this will all be done from existing cash resources, Mark. So we are not looking to do any placings. We're not looking to raise additional equity. I think we've answered Sam's question earlier. Catherine's asked: Could you give a bit more detail on customer interest in the form filling and quoting functions?
Yeah. So, good question, Catherine. Those are now fully embedded into the SmartVault product and being upsold into the SmartVault client base, so they're part of our strategy to continue the average revenue... the growth in average revenue per customer.
Excellent. Thank you. I'll quickly answer Richard's last question here: Do you use the customer get customer as a marketing tool? Richard, we use a customer referral tool, which I think is what you're referring to then. It's not specifically customer get customer, but it's a similar product for customer referrals. We find that referral network to be very healthy.
Excellent.
Thanks.
Thank you, Paul.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone, for your time.
Daniel, Paul, that's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of GetBusy PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.