Before the buyer checks your ARR, I check it.
Before a sale, a succession, an investor coming on board or a funding round, I reconcile your recurring revenue with contracts, invoices, incoming payments and your books. Every number leads back to its source document. Whatever doesn't add up, you know about it before the other side does.
Dominik Siegers. I ran an IT services company myself and worked on the investor side as an investment manager.
Results on the test dataset of Velmont Software GmbH, a fictitious company with 590 active customers, cut-off date 30 Sep 2026:
Where ARRproof fits into a transaction
Before the other side starts asking questions, your numbers are backed by documents and the gaps are known. If you start early, you have time to close them.
- TodayThe date is set or on the horizon.
- ARRproofI analyse HubSpot, invoices, bank and books and present the list of findings within two to three weeks.
- Clean-upWhatever can be fixed beforehand gets fixed, directly in HubSpot by us if you like.
- Data roomNumbers and exports are ready, each one traceable to its source document.
- Due diligenceThe other side's reviewers work with the same data.
- SigningOpen data questions are settled by then.
What I look at in your ARR
Three places I check first in established software companies, because that is where a buyer looks most closely.
The ARR bridge
The bridge shows how the ARR of twelve months ago turns into today’s ARR, through new customers, expansion, contraction and churn. A buyer reads from it where the growth comes from.
It tends to get distorted in two places. When a maintenance customer moves to subscription, they quickly count as a new customer. And a price increase lands in the same bucket as additional licences. I separate both and calculate the bridge two ways until it reconciles without a remainder.
Cohorts and net revenue retention
Do customers stay, and do they buy more over time? To see this, they are grouped by the year they started, and the revenue of each cohort is tracked.
The start has to come from the contracts. In established portals, the CRM field “customer since” is rarely kept reliably. Grouping by it puts customers into the wrong cohort, and the curve tells a different story.
Contract, invoice, payment, books
The ARR is in the contract. Whether it was also invoiced, paid and booked only shows in the reconciliation, customer by customer and month by month.
Where things drift apart, I look for the reason: contracts without invoices, invoices without contracts, open payments, manual postings. Every gap goes into the list of findings with its record and amount, so you have the explanation before anyone asks.
What you have in hand afterwards
Everything as a view to walk through together and as files for the data room and working papers.
- ARR bridge
- ARR at the cut-off date and every movement of the last twelve months, per customer
- Cohorts
- NRR, GRR and customer retention by starting year
- Reconciliation
- Contract, invoice and books for every month
- List of findings
- Every affected record with its HubSpot ID and amount
- New business and plan
- Win rate, loss reasons and a check of your business plan against past figures
- Legacy contracts
- Maintenance and hosting in the ARR, switches to subscription and the uplift that came with them
- Clean-up
- What should be corrected in HubSpot before the review, done by us if you like
- Source trail
- For every customer, the path from the number to the source document
What the other side would otherwise find first
Four findings from the test dataset. In a due diligence, each of them becomes a discussion if the other side finds it first.
ARR from nine active contracts with no current invoice
ARR overstated because four contract line items appear twice in the CRM
from 23 invoices to debtors that don't exist in the CRM
with the total contract value in the Amount field, where the others hold the annual value
If the other side values your company at a multiple of ARR, every euro it does not accept comes off the purchase price at that multiple.
How much ARR still depends on maintenance contracts
In established software companies, some customers often still have a perpetual licence with a maintenance contract alongside the subscriptions. Whether a buyer accepts that maintenance as recurring revenue is a valuation question. I calculate everything with and without maintenance and show how the customer base has moved to subscription so far.
In the test dataset, cut-off date 30 Sep 2026:
How it works
You don't need any new software for this. I work with read access to HubSpot and exports from your systems. The analysis runs on my own tool, so every number is reproducible.
Intro call about the occasion, the date and your systems.
Non-disclosure agreement, read access to HubSpot, exports from ERP and accounting.
I run the analysis and present the list of findings to you within two to three weeks.
We go through the results together, and then you get all documents for the data room.
I'll give you the price after the intro call. It depends on how many contracts and systems are involved.
For due diligence advisors and investors: If an advisor is already engaged, I support their work. Every number can be traced back to its source document and taken over as a file. The judgement stays with the advisor. CogniCore is not an audit firm.
Confidential from the start
Before a sale, usually only a few people know about it. On your side, all it takes is read access to HubSpot and the exports from ERP and accounting. You decide who finds out.
Before I see a single record, we sign a non-disclosure agreement.
I read HubSpot and change nothing there. Corrections happen only on your explicit instruction.
The analysis runs on my own computer. What I receive from HubSpot and your exports goes to no cloud or AI service.
30 days after handover I delete all data I received from you.
Dominik Siegers
I'm the founder and managing director of CogniCore IT Solutions GmbH in Cologne. With my team I help mid-sized companies make their processes clearer and easier to plan, mostly with HubSpot as the central system. I'm also an authorised coach in INQA, a German federal programme, for new business models and the workplace of the future.
I come from IT and ran an IT services company for six years. As a consultant I developed portfolio companies from the owners' point of view, and as an investment manager I built the structures investors used to assess startups looking for capital.
ARRproof is part of this work. It brings together the view of owners and investors and my experience with HubSpot since 2016.
Tell me your cut-off date.
From data access to the list of findings, I plan two to three weeks. I'll tell you what can be done by your cut-off date.