Getbusy (LSE:GETB) — Half Year Results

0:00 Good morning, and welcome to the GETBUSY PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via the q and 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 can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to Daniel Raby, CEO. Good morning, sir. Good morning,

0:31 and welcome, everyone. Thank you for your time. We greatly appreciate it. Welcome to GETBUSY PLC h one twenty four results. I'm gonna go through company strategy, and then I'm gonna hand it over to Paul to talk through specific opportunities within each one of our business units and then our results. Our mission remains to make people happy productive and happy. Our software is productivity software that makes users more efficient and makes customer relationships better. We are a very ambitious company, and we're very clear on what success looks like. We've had a proven track record of successful growth to this point since IPO, and we're confident that from this point, we can continue to grow to ultimately create material value to shareholders over the medium and long term.

1:23 Since IPO, which was in 2017, we've had a consistent CAGR of 14 about 14%, and that's taken us from approximately 3 or 4,000,000 in ARR to 21,000,000 in ARR. We have a lot of experience in making these businesses profitable. So within our portfolio, virtual cabinet specifically is a very profitable business. It's got EBITDA EBITDA margins of about 40%. So as a group as a whole, in time, we can make it very cash generative. At the moment, we're making the decision to invest in growth because we know that the future value of that growth is greater, And that investing in customer acquisition and in new customers ultimately is gonna make us more valuable cost company and more cash generative company if we decide to go down that path.

2:19 We've got a strong balance sheet. So whilst cash didn't come in in a way in which we expected in the first half, equal its timing. And so we are confident that our cash balance is healthy, and with our debt facility in place of £2,000,000, we're very well capitalized. We're not gonna need additional capital to achieve the outcomes we look to achieve. Accordingly, whilst the ARR growth wasn't what we hoped in the first half, we don't think that means that we're not on track to achieve our medium and long term goals. So we are confident that within one of our business units, we can create enough strategic value and enough ARR to ultimately achieve this 120 and 150 cash distribution to shareholders before 2030.

3:11 We truly believe we're still on track with that. As a board, we are very focused on achieving that outcome. Long term, we're confident that we're growing and creating opportunity within greater addressable markets. So we're selling into new types of customers than what we traditionally have, which have greater financial characteristics than our current customers, meaning the the average sale price is much higher. The churn rate's gonna be lower. Our ability to monetize them in the future is gonna be better. Our ability to upsell to them in the future is gonna be better. So the long term trajectory of the business is a very positive one if we continue to stay focused on this new addressable market and continue to create the value that we're confident we have and that we've proven to create being able to create in the accounting market.

4:01 We're a very recognizable brand in the accounting software ecosystem. So we are very well known whether that's Virtual Cabinet or SmartBulk. We have 3030% of top 100 accounting firms in The UK. We have 8,000 firms globally. We've got 66,000 professionals who use us. There's 3,500,000 collaborators. That's our clients sending information to their clients. They share 20,000,000 documents annually to their clients. We hold over a billion unique documents into in our document management systems. We are very material and very important to the workflow of our accountants. That has significant strategic value, not less in the AI world being able to use that data to make our applications more intelligent.

4:53 It also means that we are hugely sticky. So because we're such a core part of the our customers' workflow, they stick with us for a long period of time, and that makes us very valuable. At the bottom of the slide, you can see some of our clients who are well known brands and have been clients for of ours for many, many years and have seen the value of our products for many, many years.

5:19 The problem we solve are very practical. You know, they're productivity software. They're productivity problems, and they reduce risk. So our clients are very document heavy. There's a lot of document chaos within their workflows. They use email a lot, which is a mess and doesn't give a good client relationship. They have security concerns, and compliance burdens are increasing for them. So what we do is we help them solve we give them improved client satisfaction. We help them with staff burnout and retention rate. We reduce the risk of sanctions and fines. If an accounting firm gets a data breach or fine, it's the end of the accounting firm. So they know how important we are to protect them from that from that perspective, and we help them with a lower carbon footprint.

6:15 We have three products, one being a very cash generative product, one being we one we think is focused on medium term realization and therefore will pay out to shareholders, along which one which we think is a long term business that's gonna create a whole lot of additional value in the long term. SmartVault is a desktop sorry. It's a cloud document management workflow system with a client portal and digital signature. It is integrated into the tax systems in The US accounting market. It's sold in The US and The UK. It's a 100% cloud and a 100% subscription. Virtual Cabinet is a similar product to SmartVault.

7:01 It's a document management system with a cloud portal and e signature. It's integrated into tax systems predominantly in The UK. It's sold in The UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It's a cloud hosted and desktop application. It's also a 100% subscription. And Work Hero is our new enterprise content management software, which we're looking to increase addressable markets on the back of its focus on integrations into ERP, specifically NetSuite. It's a 100% subscription and a 100% cloud, and we're putting a lot of AI investment into it.

7:38 The The common question we get is how do we win? And we went through very deep integrations into special spenders. So we're deeply integrated into, for example, with SmartVault, The US tax systems like Lacerte and ProSeries and ProConnect and Thomson Reuters. And as a result of being really deeply integrated into those app well, ProConnect we're working on, to be deeply integrated into those tax systems, we can create a much better user experience for the users. And there is things like single source of truth, which is very important for accountants. There's no ability to create double data. There is better information flow between what's happening in the tax system and future records that a client might need to get hold of.

8:32 So integrations into the mission critical software is how we create competitive advantage, and not only does it help us win, but it helps us with retention rates. So those customers that are integrated has a four times better retention rate than those customers that are not. Here's some examples of clients who have seen the benefits of the integrations. Tax Assist is a well known franchise, and it's a perfect example where they've got a lot more efficiencies and been a lot more effective in their client relationships through a deeply integrated document management application into their tax system, specifically Smart Bold in this case. This slide has a lot of importance to it because it shows just how deeply integrated we are into the account of workflow and how we are becoming a single source of truth for document depository across all the key apps within the accounting ecosystem.

9:32 So whether you're using a tax app or a communication app or a firm app, we are deeply integrated into them. None of them are focusing on document management. They're all relying on us to store their data. And that creates huge value in terms of not just how we help customers, but in the future, how are they gonna use that data from an AI perspective, how important we are to keep their applications sticky because we know that our churn rates are generally lower than than any of the other apps. And we and and it's taken us fifteen years to build to this value. So people being able to replicate that is very, very difficult. People being able to get things like SOC two compliant is very, very difficult. So this competitive advantage truly is built on a lot of barriers to entry, and it makes it very hard for anyone else to replicate it. And to see steep integration and this unique proposition, it gives us confidence in The US attacks market we're gonna continue to grow.

10:33 Workhero has that same value in terms of deep integration. It's predominantly focused on ERP users. So it's deep integration into ERP users, creates the same sort of great customer experience and value that SmartVault virtual cabinet does for tax products. And we know that in practice accountants, which we have been serving for many years, are now getting a better outcome from using an integrated solution. Incorporate accountants through their ERPs don't have that luxury. At the moment, they have a disconnected document management and a disconnected ERP. So by integrating those two and creating a sync and creating a workflow that's consistent and reliable and that surfaces the right data at the right time, it's gonna make them a lot more efficient.

11:27 The benefits of this ERP space is just how big it is. The addressable market is is much bigger than what we play in in the accounting space. And the partner ecosystem around NetSuite is a perfect example of that, where these partners have able to create great businesses just off the back of installing or building an app on top of of NetSuite or selling NetSuite. So this ecosystem and our ability to be able to work with them and incentivize them to sell work Work Hero can create great opportunity for us, and we know it can be a very long term scalable model. We've had very successful reseller partnerships in our existing businesses that has helped us grow significantly. There is a lot more opportunity to do that within the ERP space. So we are confident that work here long term has a greater addressable market, a bigger opportunity with than what our current businesses have.

12:27 It will take time. SmartVault and and Virtual Cabin are fifteen and twenty year old businesses. We're only a couple of years into this journey. It's early days, but we're starting to validate and prove that we've got a unique proposition to these clients, that partners around the ecosystem are starting to wake up and understand our value, that want to be involved with us and want to sell us. We're starting to learn that we have a unique competitive advantage and that no one else is doing this in the way in which we are, And we're very much learning that there is a high level of need from customers to solve these problems. So these practical problems that we think they have, they actually do have. And therefore, we're confident over time, adoption is gonna come.

13:14 On top of all of that, we've got this really exciting opportunity to build AI into our applications to make our applications only more valuable to our customers. We have a really rich dataset. As I said, we've got over a billion unique documents that sit within our applications. All of that has highly valuable data. So we can do in extremely intelligent things with that data and with our applications. For example, we can help with smart prioritization. We can help with being able to summarize documents so people don't have to read through long documents. We can help with where people should search and file documents. I always use the example that in our application, we use Work Hero internally.

14:02 I turn to Paul, my CFO, regularly and say, what's the sales forecast for one of our products in three years' time? And he has to go into that relevant document, find that number, and tell me what that number is. In the future, I should just be asking the application what is the sales forecast for a product in three years' time, and the application should be able to give me that answer. So we're confident that our applications are, at the moment, add a lot of value, and our slow gross churn number shows that. In the future, we're only gonna add more value. We also know how important it is to be responsible for the data we've got. So we have a very valuable data sitting in our in applications. It is tax data. It is people's personal information.

14:47 So we know we will we can't and will never expose this data to large language models or anyone external with it outside of our organization. So our security protocols are very tight. It's part of our key value proposition. So we will all we will control this data and make sure that only us can build intelligence on top of it. A perfect example of how we're using AI in our applications is is a release for work here, which hopefully will come in the next weeks and months. What this does is we've got a philosophy internally that no one comes to work to file documents. And often, our customers say to us, the biggest problem they have is just people filing documents in the wrong place, and that makes their file payments very messy.

15:33 So in the future, this AI engine sitting within Workhero will be able to understand the document. It will understand the content and the context of the document, and it will recommend where to follow. So it'll go through a similar process to a human where you read through a document and you think about where is the best place for this to be followed. The engine will do that for you, and then it'll recommend the tags that should be applied to that document. And as a result of this, hopefully, there's a whole lot less misfiling, and it's a lot easier for large organizations to find documents and pieces of work that they need to.

16:11 So, overall, before I hand over to Paul, we are very confident our strategy is still gonna create significant value, especially if you consider what we currently value at. We are a cloud business. We have very sticky and predictable subscription revenue. We have highly strategically valuable customers that large organizations understand strategic organizations understand the value of what we provide to them. We have a rich dataset that in the future, AI can add a lot of value to, and we're highly predictable. And at maturity, we can be a very, very cash generative business, and we have a lot of experience in moving our businesses to cash generative.

16:59 Strategically, objectives medium term remains the same. We wanna pay out a 100 to 150,000,000 in cash distribution to our shareholders before 2030, and we're confident that we're still on track to do that. Long term, we wanna build a business within the ERP space, which is bigger than what we got today, that we can distribute even more money than a 100 or a 150 to shareholders over the long term. So right now, what we remain focused on is the organic growth journey within our core business units. We are very focused on allocation of capital to make sure we optimize that. We're very focused on additional add on inorganic opportunities which come that help us monetize the base better or upsell better.

17:46 Overall, our strategy remains the same. We remain focused and remain confident that we're on track to achieve the outcomes and the goals that we've put in place. And we're just gonna stay on this path, and as a result, create a whole lot of shareholder value over the next couple of years. Thanks, Dan. Good morning, everybody. I'm gonna take a bit of time to look at each of our core products in a bit more detail and the opportunity that we see in in each of those. I'll start with SmartVault. SmartVault is our cloud document management application, mostly focused on The US accounting market. It accounts for about 53, 54% of our ARR, mostly a US dollar denominated business.

18:35 The strategic value for us in SmartVault is in the value of its very sticky, very accounting focused customer base to other players within The US accounting market. It is the largest accounting account of focused cloud application outside of the large tax providers like Insure and Thomson Reuters and and those sorts of organizations. So it has a very strong brand recognition in The in in in The US. And we believe once it gets to a certain scale, that customer base of accountants who tend to be very, very sticky, they don't change their sort of technologies every every year or every couple of years or anything like that, so they tend to be around for a long time.

19:23 That customer base will become very attractive to other players in the market. So it's focused on specifically US tax professionals. So whilst we talk generally about accountants, it's really the the the tax professionals, so tax compliance practitioners that we target. And the way we look at the market is by the the integration with the with the tax software. So by far, our largest integration is with Intuit's LASERT and Pro series applications. There's about 200,000 users of those products, each of whom is a potential user of SmartVault. Last year in July, we opened up our integration with the UltraTax application, which is part of the Thomson Reuters family.

20:11 Again, there's about 200,000 users of of of that product as well. They generally reside within slightly larger accounting firms, so more of the sort of mid tier than the the the smaller players that Intuit tend to serve. So opening that up of that that integration last year has effectively doubled our some directly accessible market. And we've been building brand recognition in that space since we since since we launched last year. And so far, that integration has been going well. So SmartVault wins in the space because those integrations that we have and very specifically with Intuit are very, very deep. So we are the only cloud stock management product integrated deeply with Intuit, and we work with Intuit's development teams. We have a commercial partnership with Intuit to ensure that those integrations are very tight, very deep, and remain constantly updated. No other provider has that has that benefit.

21:12 We also are completely agnostic about the other technology that accountants use. So all of the many different practice management applications, the the billing applications, the the the the the cash collection applications, and indeed the tax applications, we can integrate with all of those. So SmartVault effectively becomes the plumbing into which each of those applications are integrated, and SmartVault becomes a a single source of truth in terms of the documents that those accountants use. The brand recognition SmartVault is is outstanding. It was the first cloud document management provider specifically for accountants in in The US. So it has been around for a while and has built a very good brand in the market.

22:02 And as security becomes even more important for US accountants, and that's driven by the fact that some of the regulators, the FTC, the IRS, and the PTOB, are really coming down on accountants who aren't taking privacy and security seriously. So we are the only what's called SOC two type two security audit audited platform out there, and that means our product is constantly being audited for security compliance. So we don't just have to sort of dress up and look nice for a particular day of the year. The product can be ordered to the any point by those auditor, and that ensures that our customers can get, you know, a high level of confidence in the integrity of the of the product. So growth in SMART World, ARR growth for the first half was 8% year on year.

22:50 That's been somewhat softer than we've seen in the past. So a question we often get is, well, how are we going to increase those growth rates back to the the sort of rates that we have seen seen in the past? And there's a number of ways of doing that. The first is our new integration with UltraTax, which has been, you know, very encouraging to date. We've we've seen larger accounting firms come in through the door. They tend to be stickier. They churn at lower rates. That has doubled our market. So, actually, the playing field that we're on is substantially bigger than it was eighteen months ago. We've also been developing out our partnerships with WriterWorks who are reseller of ours. They've been actively selling now for about eighteen months, and they are now a significant contributor to our new business each month and a very reliable one. So that has been a very additive partnership for us.

23:40 And we also have a very strong working relationship with with Intuit as well. We launched at the back end of last year our accounting unlimited plan. So, broadly, that's a plan which bundles all of the technologies that we have integrated into SmartVault and that we've acquired over the last couple of years into a single plan. It creates a lot of value, particularly if customers use our esignature solution. So it's a much more cost effective way of them using that. The it's priced at $65 per piece per month. That compares to our sort of traditional accounting plan. This is about $45. So we get a 40% uplift in per user pricing from customers moving to that plan.

24:27 In the last couple of months of last year, regular selling season up to the end of January, that was a a a fairly significant contributor to our expansion revenue. We had, I think, two of the largest expansion revenue months that we've ever had, and we'll be promoting that that upsell product into our customer base over the rest of this year. And, hopefully, by the end this year, we're beginning to see some some some real traction amongst that base and a reliable run rate of what that sort of expansion revenue starts to to look like. And finally, we are we we we acquired a a business earlier on this year, which is our first step into the advisory market. I'll come on to why that is important in accountancy in in just a second.

25:17 So back in April, we acquired a an application called SmartPath. SmartPath provides accountants with a tool to be able to price all of the worksheets they have for their customers in an effective way. It enables them to benchmark their pricing across the whole market, and it enables them to be able to package the different services they provide for their clients in a neat way and also helps them to capture all of the work that they are doing. So they're getting paid for all of the work they're doing. That's gonna become increasingly important for accountants in The US specifically because the core tax compliance components of an accountant's work is becoming increasingly commoditized.

26:02 The technologies that sit around that, the tax applications, and and this is being accelerated with AI, is is making tax compliance much, much simpler. And so the prices of both that compliance those compliance services are are coming down. What that's doing is forcing accountants to well, first of all, make sure that their compliance process is efficient as as possible, but also to look for supplementary work streams to to to supplement the revenue they're losing from their compliance operation. For accountants, this is particularly tax professionals, this is usually a completely new skill set, and they need to build out a couple of things. First of all, their technical skill sets to deliver some of these services. I'm talking here about tax planning, the implementation of tax schemes, even things like general business advice and CFO services, those sorts of things, which in The UK, we see delivered quite commonly by tax professionals. But in The US, it's a it's a little less common. So they need those technical skills. What they also need is is other skills to equip them to reengineer their their businesses, and that's where SmartPath comes in to help them with that transition.

27:14 So I think we we see two ways of helping accountants with this advisory transition over the next few years. The first is by providing them with applications like SmartPath that can help them help those businesses make that transition. And the second is in making their tax workflows, their tax compliance workflows as efficient as possible. So, agree, that's what SmartVault has done for for fifteen years, but we're looking at extending out those workflows, particularly at the front end of the process and at the back end of the process in order to automate as many components as possible. So that frees up their time to deliver those much more human intensive advisory services. So we paid a $250,000 for SmartPath upfront. There is an earn out linked to ARR from that product at the end of twenty twenty six, and it's been doing very well since since we acquired it. So we opposed The US tax season when accountants start to listen to us again, which really kicked off in in sort of May. It's been, you know, a very strong contributor to our new customer acquisition. So we're pretty excited about the direction that products will will go in.

28:30 So moving on to Work Hero. Work Hero's ARR is is about 9.7%, so just over 45% of our business. And when we're talking about Work Hero, we're talking about the combined Workhero and virtual cabinet business. That's now run as one business. The two products are integrated, and we're shifting customers over from the on premise virtual cabinet product to the pure cloud Workhero product. The strategic value to us from this business is

29:00 in the long term potential of Workhero and specifically in the ERP market that we have opened up over the last couple of years. That market is substantially larger than the accounting market that we've been in before. It enables us to go across different industries rather than just focus on one industry, And we do that by teaming up with value added resell partners who who are strongly aligned with Intuit, who usually have a very strong geographical focus or

29:32 a very strong industry focus. So we can combine our own very deep technical knowledge of managing document approval workflows and chat workflows with the resellers' knowledge of those markets and accessing their customer bases. So we see that market, you know, could potentially be significantly larger than the accounting market over time.

29:58 What we've seen so far in that ERP market are, again, some encouraging signs for the future. So first of all, the average sale price has been materially higher than the rest of our business, so the smart vault and virtual cabinet business. And we've had some very significant deals come through in the first half of the year, which is very exciting for us.

30:20 We also expect that market to have very low churn rate. So because we are integrated deeply into the ERP system, specifically here at NetSuite, businesses don't change their ERP systems lightly. They are big projects, very disruptive, or can be very disruptive projects. And, usually, when an ERP system is in, it will probably see that business out for upwards of of of ten years. We implemented our new ERP system back in 2018, and I don't think I will oversee another implementation of a different ERP system in my time with GETBUSY. So the churn rates are very low. The retention rates are very high. So we expect customer lifetime value to be very, very high for Work Hero customers.

31:13 NetSuite, which is the first ERP system into which we are integrated, has about 38,000 enterprise customers. You know, we are a NetSuite customer, and we are very much at the smaller end of the NetSuite scale. So the the general base of of of NetSuite is is generally larger customers than we've we've typically acquired in the past.

31:36 So why why does that work here? When well, first of all, document workflows are exceptionally complex. It's not an area that these ERP developers will build out any more than very basic capability.

31:52 We combine a number of different areas of functionality that it it you would otherwise have to acquire from a whole load of different vendors who who won't integrate with each other even though individually they will integrate with NetSuite. I'm talking about the likes of box.com, of DocuSign, and people like that. By the time you bundle that very clunky, unintegrated experience together, you're talking about quite an eye watering price tag per user. So we're able because we combine all that functionality. It sits deeply within the NetSuite interface, literally on the NetSuite home screen if you have Work Hero.

32:28 Then, you know, we we can create a lot more value per user than bundling and certainly better experience per user than bundling different applications. We also have a native integration into NetSuite. So our development teams work with NetSuite's development teams to work on the road map for that integration, to keep that integration sharp and make sure everything is is is always working as it should. Whereas most of the other people in this market have just pure API integrations, effectively point and shoot. So they kind of point in at the APIs at each other and and and and, you know, some data exchanges, but not to the depth and complexity that we're able to to achieve.

33:12 So where does the growth come from in work area? Work area in the ERP space specifically at the moment is is is relatively small. So it's just less than £500,000 worth of ARR, but we very much expect that to accelerate over the next few years. But we use partners, which I just described, which enables us to have a very low customer acquisition cost and to reach a lot more of the installed base of NetSuite, but also the new customers coming into NetSuite because a large proportion of NetSuite customers will use partners as their ongoing technology advisers.

33:46 We're also looking to migrate customers from virtual cabinet into Work Hero, and we're doing that in a very methodical way. So a year ago, Work Hero was suitable for a certain subset of our virtual cabinet customers. As Work Hero has been maturing, that subset has grown larger and larger. So we can be very targeted in which customers we're trying to incentivize across to Work Hero as Work Hero matures and is able to deal with some of the more complex environments that virtual cabinet deals with.

34:18 Typically, we've seen a 20% uplift in in per user pricing as people have moved from virtual cabinet to Work Hero. So, roughly, virtual cabinet has a base of about nine nine to nine and a half million. So adding another 20% of that gives us about another one and a half or 2,000,000 over the next few years from those those migrations. In the longer term, we can branch outside of NetSuite, we have the potential to integrate with other cloud ERP providers like Sage Intacct or or Acumatica, so that helps us to extend the market. But our basic model of a of a solid and tight integration and then rinsing and repeating that in different in different ERP products is very similar to what we do with with smart bulbs.

35:05 So overall, you know, we we believe we have a business that has first of very loyal customers. These guys stay around for a very long time. Over time, they tend to spend more with us. So if you look at the customers that we had at IPO, that customer base is now spending over 35% more than the combined customer base was at IPO. So they sort of have immunity characteristics over time. 96% of our revenue is recurring in nature, so we're a proper subscription business. All the sort of SaaS transition stuff that a lot of companies have had to grapple with is is long in our past. And about 70% of our customers pay us annually in advance. So a lot of the growth we have had has has been self funding because we tend to get the cash upfront from from those customers.

35:54 So just moving on to h one revenue performance. ARR was up 5% in constant currency at 21,000,000. That has come from a a 9% increase in ARPU. So that's the average revenue per user and a 5% or sorry, four percent reduction in in paying users. That's softer growth than we've seen before. There are two principal reasons for that one in each business. So first of all, in SmartVault, we started a process at the beginning of last year of of reengineering our entire sales and marketing process. We have we have brought in a lot more people, and they are implementing a new sales and marketing methodology.

36:42 Undoubtedly, that has caused some disruption over the last eighteen months. We are seeing the the right the right sort of green shoots of of growth there. Now we're seeing, you know, conversion rates starting to to improve. And within all that, we've also seen some very encouraging signs, particularly around the larger accounting market. So we we are becoming more successful at selling to larger accounting firms than we have been in the past. But, definitely, we still got a little bit of of of of of work to do to get that module optimized. Secondly, in virtual cabinet in in UK, a factor that's been part of the market for the last the last few years has been consolidation, particularly in the mid market accounting space, which is where we play. So we've got, you know, 30 of the top 100 accounting firms.

37:36 And over the last few years, private equity businesses, in particular, have come in and bought individual accounting firms and then do roll ups acquiring other accounting firms and kind of running them in what you might call a more professional way. So not necessarily a partnership model, but more of a sort of a a corporate business model. One of the areas that they would typically look at for efficiencies is in adopting common technology platforms across the group, and that platform is normally mandated by the acquirer. Now we've done pretty well out of this over the last few years. Many of our customers are some of those consolidators. Unfortunately, in h in the first half of the year, we had two of those consolidations going against us. They were actually deals that happened probably about three years ago or so. So we've held on to those customers for a while.

38:31 At the time, three years ago, Work Hero was not really mature enough to offer as a cloud alternative for these for these accounting firms also for virtual cabinet. So we didn't really have the capability to offer a cloud alternative at the time. Decisions were made at that point. I think we'll be in a very different position now. I think Work Hero is is is certainly of the maturity to cope with these sorts of scale accounting firms. We held on to held on to them for longer than we thought, unfortunately. Ultimately, two of them churned in the first half of this year, and that's sort of has knocked virtual cabinets growth in that first half. So overall, churn rate across the group is 0.9%. That's a nudge up on this time last year, principally because of virtual cabinet.

39:19 SmartVault's churn rate has stayed very healthy during that time, and we expect that to continue to trend downwards over time. And net revenue retention of 99.7% is below our target of a 100, but it's still pretty pretty healthy. The larger number in the first half of last year was due to the tail end of our of our pricing rationalization that we were carrying out within within virtual cabinet. So looking at ARR bridge, I'm sure many of you have seen this before. Basically shows how we get from the beginning or from January 1 to to the end of June in terms of ARR. We look at versions of this, cuts by all sorts of different dimensions and, you know, customer size and that sort of thing around the business. So we did a million new business in the first half. That was up about 20% on the first half of of of last year.

40:12 I think what's pretty encouraging is that with with Kiro, for the first time, I'd say, has contributed meaningfully to to that number, which is something we're we're very encouraged about. Net expansion, which is the net of customers upgrading, downgrading, adding, and and and removing users, and also the impact of price contributed 0.7. And our churn rate of 0.9% sorry. Not point 8% contributes to that 1,100,000 of of churned customers. As I said earlier, that's slightly higher than it has been historically as a result of of that virtual cabinet churn. The p and l level, that 5% ARR growth at constant currency sorry. I've got she passed it from the slide point. That not only 5% of sorry. 5% of of ARR growth translates to 5% of recurring revenue growth, and at the the total revenue line, that that growth rate is 4%.

41:11 Our gross margin remains pretty healthy, above 89%. As I think I've explained before, structurally over time, that will trend downwards, and that's because our cloud products, which have a higher cost of goods sold, will will contribute more of our revenue in the future. So over time, that will trend. Probably, we'll normalize out to about the 85% mark, something like that. Because of the slightly softer ARR growth, we've we've kept costs pretty much the same as they were in the first half last year. So we've taken some actions to deal with the the slower ramp up of of of new sales growth in in The US in particular. So looking at cash, which is probably something which is on your your mind this half.

42:02 Typically, the first half is is is net cash out for us, and that reflects principally the renewal cycles for our customers. So the majority of our customers by by ARR with all of our annual customers, renew in the final quarter of the year. So what typically happens is January is our peak cash month, and then cash tends to decline until around about the end of September and into October. And then as we see a ramp up of customer renewals, cash starts coming in the door very rapidly in those last three months of the year. The first half, however, is usually helped by receipt of UK r and d tax credits, and we've received probably about 900,000 or a million pounds worth of those per year over the last few years. So a big help in in h one.

42:50 Unfortunately, for two reasons, we have not yet received that r and d tax credit. First of all, we split the businesses last year to separate out SmartVault entities companies from the Work Hero companies. That's led us to having to do two separate r and d claims this year, and that's compounded by the fact that HMRC have significantly ramped up the level of documentation that is needed for software claims. They issued some guidance, I think, towards the end of last year. And that's just made the process more more complex and and more time consuming. So whilst we can never guarantee when we will receive those claims because HMRC do not provide target dates, We would expect to receive that during the course of of h '2, but, you know, I'm stressed there can be no guarantees around the timing of that.

43:43 But because we have a a £2,000,000 unsecured debt facility that's that's very flexible and potentially extendable, we are not concerned about cash headroom. So we believe we are, you know, adequately capitalized to to realize what we are trying to achieve. So just to summarize, we believe we are operating in in very resilient markets. The customers we sell to tend to be very sticky. Accountants tend to have businesses that do well in in tough times and do well in good times. The push towards the commoditization of tax compliance works in our favor because automation of those processes becomes more and more important.

44:38 And we've got a strong balance sheet to achieve what we are trying to achieve. So in terms of what the future looks like for us, we'd expect to sustain that double digit ARR CAGR. You know, we are naturally looking to accelerate from the 5% growth that we saw in in h one. We believe we can create significant value in The US accounting market through SmartVault, and we believe that value is is realized on a cash terms over the next few years. And we'll continue to invest in our products and customer acquisition from our existing cash resources. So we believe we are well set up to achieve both the medium term goals of cash realization and cash return and our long term goals in growth in WorkGeo. So in a second, we'll just move to to q and a. Daniel, Paul, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the q and a tab situated on the top right hand 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 and a can be accessed via your investor dashboard.

45:45 As you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end? Excellent. Thank you. I'm aware we've slightly pushed the time on on the questions, but we'll try and get through as many as we may as as we can. So first one here, I'm afraid there's not a name against it. The the half year results reconfirmed revenue expectations of of just under 23,000,000, which implies an acceleration of revenue growth in h two. Do you expect revenue growth to come primarily from SmartVault or from from Work Hero? So I think the answer to that is a combination. I think, you know, I think we've explained the the key things that we are looking to do to improve revenue growth, particularly in smart vault. So expansion through the unlimited plan, the enhancement that we get from partners selling better to the Thomson Reuters space and carrying on doing what we're doing within the Intuit space.

46:49 Plus, we also have the the additive factor of the SmartPath acquisition. So, you know, there's a lot we're we're looking to do. There's a lot we're looking to achieve there. You know, we have, you know, very strong plans for for each of those, and I have no doubt whatsoever that over the medium term, they will all start to become very additive. But, you know, they are important to h two's ARR growth. So important to add to that as well that h two is our busy season. So in h one, traditionally, accountants haven't wanted to talk to us because they're busy doing tax returns and their work, and h two, they start looking at tech solutions for the problems they have. So h two is always an opportunity for us to accelerate growth.

47:39 Excellent. So there's a question here around the the accounting firm consolidation that I talked about in virtual cabinet. Actually, reading this question, I think I think we have we have answered that. There's a sort of a follow on question from it, but, know, why didn't that trigger an ad hoc announcement? Well, I think, as we said before, no individual customer in the past is is is material in terms of ARR terms. So we have no individual customer over 1% of of of revenue. So it would, you know, it wouldn't be the sort of events that triggers any kind of announcements. Mark is asking, there's been consolidation in The UK accounting market. Has that slowed the growth outlook in The UK? And is this is this true in The US accounting market?

48:25 But I think the The UK market generally is much better penetrated by by document management software than than, say, the the The US. So I think, generally, The US, it is a market that is is slightly more saturated than The US's. I think consolidation looks very different in The US, and I think that's because or so so that's something that's different from our perspective, and that's because we tend to deal with the smaller end of town. So when we talk about a large firm, it's kind of, you know, 20 to a 100 users rather than UK. That would be many hundreds of of of users. Relatively speaking, they are not touched by those consolidations as much as sort of the the the upper mid tier in in The US.

49:13 I think something they're having to do to respond to those consolidations is make that you know, that they need to become more competitive. They've gotta make their workplace more competitive. They've either gotta be able to do more tax returns or charge more for them, but we've already discussed that's not possible, We'll automate more within their within their tech stack. So I think, generally, that's a a kind of a favorable tailwind in the in The US. Sunil is asking you have 30% of the top 100 UK accounting firms. Are you a stronger representative of the largest top 10 firms? Well, the first thing he says, we don't we don't sell our products directly into the the big four. So that that means I'm now looking at 30% just from from six six of of the of the players.

50:01 And we do have 30% overall of the of the top 10, but they're not within the not within the big four. And if you go onto our website, you can probably find out who who they are. Most of those logos are listed. When would you expect to start seeing the benefits of integration from Thomson Reuters' UltraTax? So that's the integration we launched in SmartVault halfway through last year, recognizing you have to build brand awareness first. Yeah. Brilliant question, this one. This this is a a real catalyst for growth. So if we're successful in the Thomas Reuters UltraTax opportunity, then we will be able to accelerate the smart vault business. And the Reuters' customer base is bigger than the insurance customer base, and the financial characteristics of those customers are generally better. So for example, I expect churn rates to be lower, and we've seen that in virtual cabinet when we sell into larger clients.

51:00 It will take time. It will take time to build up brand recognition. We've spent ten years in in the intro base explaining to them who we are and what we do. I expect it to take a couple of years before we start to get mass adoption in Reuters, but all the positive sides are there that it is a likely outcome to happen eventually. We're seeing good conversion rates on the Reuter customers coming through, not quite the conversion rates we see on Intuit, but really not far off. And each element of the funnel in terms of top of leads, demos, things like that, we're seeing greater volume of Reuters customers coming through. So there's no doubt that there's a pickup in activity. I think it will take time before it has a meaningful contribution to the overall growth and time being a couple of years. But once we do get it right, it's gonna it's gonna be years of success for us, and it will accelerate SmartBot's overall growth potential.

52:00 Excellent. I think we've time for two more questions. So are there any capacity considerations with the premium accounting unlimited plans? If the crux of your answer is, you know, are there bottlenecks in terms of us deploying those plans, then the answer is is no. I guess the capacity considerations for us come from the resource that we're putting into encouraging those customers to to to move to those plans. That comes from, you know, customer marketing. I think we're well resourced there. And it also comes from effectively effectively account managers, the people we call customer success managers. And we're diverting resource internally more towards that customer success function over the course of h two to help with that that that that process.

52:48 Now that, as you expect, is being done still in a cautious way. So we see it as a big opportunity, but we also just need to test out that opportunity and test our messaging to those customers. So we're diverting more resource into it, you know, but we're not sort of we're not sort of, you know, tripling our customer success function or something like that in in h two. If we see great uptake, then it's a very, very investable side of the of the business. So we would we would naturally look to do that if if we're seeing the results that we're we're seeking. And it's also important to note that it's very new, this plan. So we're still learning what customer value we have to put in there to optimize the uptake. It's about 40% increase in price. It only started in November last year, so we've only really had one buying season through it.

53:38 We've only had a handful of customers adopt it. So we're still learning. The upside is that there's no doubt that the additional value that we can potentially build within the ultimate plan long term means that I'm confident across the whole base, ultimately, our average sale price is gonna increase significantly. So we've now put our toe into this idea of, hey. Our our packaging can be 40% more expensive if we provide you additional value, and there's been a positive uptake and a positive reaction from clients. So I think as we continue to build that value in the unlimited plan, it's gonna give us lots of optionality in the future to be able to monetize the base much more successfully.

54:26 Great stuff. And then the final question we we got time to answer. Do you have any KPI targets for paying user subscribers? It's not really the way we we look at the business. Obviously, you know, user user growth and ARPU growth are are clearly a a key part of mechanically how we describe what's what's going on. But in terms of how we plan the business, we look at it from, you know, the actual monetary value of of of ACV. So, typically, users aren't used internally for for for the way that we we plan things out. We do we do measure that. You know, we and, obviously, the number of users impacts things like, you know, the opportunity, for example, within the accounting unlimited plan that we that we just just discussed. It's not routinely used as a as a as a method to plan the business. We just find it unnecessary because, generally, with the volumes we have, you know, you can do it based on just the pure monetary value.

55:25 Daniel, Paul, thank you for answering those questions you can from investors. And, of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the investor company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, Daniel, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Thank you, everyone, for your time. It's greatly appreciated. As we've said through the presentation, we're confident that we're headed in the right direction to optimize and maximize shareholder value. This first half ARR growth wasn't what we hoped for, but it doesn't mean that we're not on track to be able to achieve the outcomes and the goals that we hope to achieve. So we're still feeling very optimistic and confident.

56:10 We're gonna remain focused, and we expect in the next couple of years an acceleration of the growth rate and, therefore, a real, path to being able to optimize this outcome. Daniel, Paul, thank you for updating investors today. Now 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, and I'm sure will 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 morning to you all. Thank you. Thank you.