The language of tech middle-market turnaround.

A rolling short-term cash forecast used to manage liquidity, runway, lender discussions, and turnaround decisions.

A schedule that groups unpaid customer invoices by how long they have been outstanding.

The annualized revenue value of a customer contract, excluding one-time fees unless explicitly included.

Annual recurring revenue and monthly recurring revenue. The recurring-revenue base that buyers normalize before valuing a software or tech-enabled services company.

Contracted but not yet delivered work or revenue, often used to assess delivery capacity and revenue visibility.

The recurring board reporting package that turns operating metrics, financials, risks, and decisions into one governance view.

Bookings measure contracted sales commitments; revenue measures what can be recognized under accounting rules. Confusing them inflates forecasts and board confidence.

A capital-efficiency metric that compares net cash burn to net new ARR. It shows how much cash a company spends to create each dollar of recurring revenue.

A plan for keeping critical operations running through system failures, incidents, disruptions, or transition events.

The number of months a SaaS firm needs to recover the fully-loaded sales-and-marketing cost of acquiring a customer. The leading indicator of capital efficiency.

The ownership record showing equity, options, warrants, SAFEs, notes, and other claims on a company.

The number of months a company can operate before cash runs out at the current burn rate.

The percentage of deployments or production changes that cause incidents, rollbacks, hotfixes, or customer-impacting failures.

The rate at which customers or recurring revenue leave over a defined period.

Retention measured by customer groups that started in the same period. Cohorts reveal whether growth is durable or masked by new-logo acquisition.

Diligence that evaluates market demand, revenue quality, customer retention, pricing, pipeline, competition, and go-to-market repeatability.

The dollar value of a customer agreement, usually measured as ACV, TCV, or ARR depending on contract term and revenue model.

A failure to meet a financial or operational requirement in a credit agreement.

Revenue dependency on a small number of customers. Concentration can compress valuation when losing one account would materially impair EBITDA or growth.

A composite signal used to estimate renewal, expansion, adoption, and churn risk by customer.

The operating function responsible for customer outcomes, adoption, retention, expansion, and renewal health.

The structured repository of financial, legal, commercial, technical, customer, HR, and operational diligence materials used in a transaction.

The operational state required for an acquired or carved-out business to serve customers, pay employees, run systems, and make decisions on the first day after close.

Cash collected or invoiced before revenue is earned under accounting rules.

The operating discipline that connects software delivery, infrastructure, reliability, security, and release cadence.

Four software-delivery metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.

A contingent purchase-price mechanism that pays sellers after close if agreed revenue, EBITDA, retention, or operational milestones are achieved.

Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. The proxy for operating cash flow that PE buyers use to set valuation multiples.

An adjustment that adds back non-recurring, owner-related, or transaction-specific expenses to estimate normalized EBITDA.

The total value of a business independent of capital structure, typically equity value plus debt minus cash.

Diligence that validates reported revenue, EBITDA, working capital, debt-like items, cash flow, forecasts, and accounting policy.

The degree to which sales, revenue, cash, or delivery forecasts match actual results. It is a trust metric for boards and buyers.

The condition where a founder-CEO sits on enough decision critical paths that the firm cannot operate or scale without them. The single largest exit-multiple compressor for tech middle-market firms.

Financial planning and analysis: budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, KPI reporting, and decision support.

A part-time senior finance leader who provides CFO-level judgment without a full-time executive seat.

The system a company uses to define, reach, sell, onboard, retain, and expand its target customers.

Revenue minus direct delivery costs, expressed as dollars or percentage. Gross margin shows how much revenue remains before operating expenses.

Revenue retained from existing customers before expansion. GRR shows how much revenue survives without upsell.

The risk that a project, integration, system rollout, or operating change fails to achieve the intended result.

A threshold in an acquisition agreement that determines when indemnity claims become payable.

The accountable post-close operating office that governs integration milestones, dependencies, risks, and synergy capture.

A temporary technology executive placed in the operating seat to stabilize engineering, product, security, or technical execution.

The legal transfer of intellectual property rights from employees, contractors, founders, or third parties to the operating company.

Operational dependency on one founder, executive, salesperson, engineer, or delivery leader whose loss would materially impair performance.

A lender's temporary agreement not to exercise remedies after a default or covenant issue.

A non-binding transaction proposal that sets price, structure, exclusivity, diligence scope, and major conditions before definitive agreements.

The percentage of customer accounts lost over a period, regardless of the revenue size of each account.

A SaaS sales-efficiency metric comparing new recurring revenue to prior-period sales and marketing spend.

An outside advisor who helps management analyze strategy, operations, organization, or performance issues.

Improvement in EBITDA, gross margin, or contribution margin through pricing, mix, cost structure, delivery efficiency, or operating leverage.

An enterprise B2B sales qualification framework: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Paper process, Identify pain, Champion, Competition. The discipline that moves win rates from 29% to 68%.

A recurring-revenue retention metric that includes churn, contraction, expansion, and upsell from an existing customer cohort.

The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers a year later, including expansion, after subtracting churn and contraction. The single most-watched B2B SaaS valuation metric.

Current operating assets minus current operating liabilities. In M&A, the working-capital peg can materially change cash delivered at close.

EBITDA adjusted for non-recurring, owner-related, accounting, or transaction-specific items to estimate sustainable operating earnings.

The finance operating system around reporting, forecasting, board cadence, unit economics, cash, systems, and decision support.

The recurring rhythm of meetings, metrics, owners, and decisions that keeps an organization executing.

A private-equity operator responsible for helping portfolio companies improve performance, integrate acquisitions, professionalize functions, and capture value-creation plans.

The ratio of qualified pipeline to sales target. Coverage indicates whether the team has enough real opportunities to hit the number.

The post-close work of consolidating systems, people, customers, and operations between an acquirer and an acquired firm. The phase where 70% of M&A value-creation lives or dies.

Evidence that a specific market segment repeatedly buys, adopts, retains, and expands a product.

Software used to manage services delivery, staffing, utilization, project economics, time, billing, and resource planning.

A governance function that coordinates projects, timelines, dependencies, reporting, and delivery standards across an organization.

An independent forensic analysis of a target's reported earnings, normalizing for one-time items, accounting choices, and revenue-recognition decisions. The diligence step that determines real EBITDA.

Revenue that should have been earned, billed, collected, renewed, or expanded but is lost through process gaps.

The accounting policy that determines when contracted customer value becomes recognized revenue.

Revenue operations: the systems, data, process, and governance layer connecting marketing, sales, customer success, finance, and delivery.

The heuristic that growth rate plus EBITDA margin should sum to at least 40% for a SaaS firm to merit premium valuation. The floor for institutional capital interest.

A forward-looking revenue estimate that annualizes recent performance, often used when a business is growing or changing quickly.

Actions that increase the time a company can operate before cash, liquidity, or financing becomes binding.

A measure of how effectively sales and marketing spend converts into new recurring revenue.

A controls attestation for security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy. Often required for enterprise software sales and diligence.

A contract document that defines project scope, deliverables, responsibilities, timeline, pricing, and acceptance criteria.

The realization of expected revenue, cost, margin, customer, or operating benefits after a transaction.

The cumulative cost of architectural, platform, testing, and operational shortcuts in software systems — convertible to dollar EBITDA drag and exit-multiple turns.

Diligence that evaluates software architecture, technical debt, security, scalability, team, product delivery, and platform risk.

A post-close agreement where the seller temporarily provides services the buyer or carved-out business cannot yet operate independently.

An operator or advisory leader brought in to stabilize a distressed or underperforming company and restore execution.

A ratio used to value a company against EBITDA, revenue, ARR, gross profit, or another operating metric.

The post-acquisition operating roadmap that translates investment thesis into measurable revenue, margin, integration, and leadership outcomes.