The revenue you have already earned — and the discipline to keep it.
Most software businesses do not have a sales problem so much as a leakage problem. Revenue is signed, delivered and consumed, but never fully billed. Entitlements go uncaptured, uplifts go unapplied, and usage runs ahead of invoicing. Veridian finds that money and builds the governance that stops it draining away — and, when the audit table is set, we advise whichever side of it you sit on.
The problem
Contracts are where value is won and quietly lost. World Commerce & Contracting and Deloitte, in The ROI of Contracting Excellence (2023, based on 1,236 organisations surveyed between April 2021 and December 2022), state: “We estimate that average value erosion now stands at 8.6%, with the best performers operating at a little over 3% and the worst more than 20%.” The original IACCM study in 2014 put the figure at 9.2%, so a decade of contract-management software has moved the number very little. Treat that as an industry benchmark rather than an audited fact, but the direction is unmistakable: the leak is real and it compounds.
Separately, EY’s revenue-assurance work estimates that organisations lose between 1% and 5% of revenue or EBITDA to leakage each year, a range MGI Research narrows to roughly 3–5% of revenue for most companies. For a £30m ARR software business, that is somewhere between £900,000 and £1.5m a year — money already earned, walking out of the door unbilled.
The causes are rarely dramatic. They are small, cumulative and invisible in the finance system: missed billing on live contracts, indexation clauses that were never applied, entitlements delivered but never invoiced, contractual uplifts left unenforced, read-only and archive licences that were never priced, and expansion rights that no one triggered.
Where it goes, and how it stops
Value leaves a contract in small, unremarkable ways: a price increase nobody applied, a module delivered but never invoiced, an archive licence given away for free. Each one is trivial. Together they are the distance between what you have earned and what you have billed. The work is closing them, and then keeping them closed.
Contract monetisation
We reconcile what your contracts entitle you to charge against what you have actually billed, then recover the difference and install the rules that catch it going forward. That work covers:
Missed billing
On active agreements, where delivery outran invoicing.
Uncaptured indexation
CPI and RPI-linked clauses that were written into contracts but never applied at the anniversary.
Unbilled entitlements
Seats, modules, API calls, storage and usage delivered against a contractual right to charge, but never invoiced.
Unenforced uplifts
Annual price increases the contract permits and the customer accepted, but the business never actioned.
Read-only and archive licences
Access that carries a price and a right, routinely given away for free.
Expansion rights
Pre-agreed growth triggers, ramps and true-ups that sat dormant.
This is the discipline our founder built at scale: a commercial contracts function whose excess-use order book grew from £1.2m to £25m — a twentyfold increase, anchored to the contracts function itself.
Software asset compliance
We work the licensing and compliance side of software from every angle:
Designing and running vendor compliance programmes
For software vendors who want a disciplined, defensible, revenue-generating approach to entitlement and usage, built the way a serious compliance function is actually run.
Advising organisations in dispute with their vendor
Where a licensee has received an audit notice or a true-up demand and needs its actual entitlement position established quickly and defended on the facts.
Vendor training
Equipping commercial, licensing and account teams to understand entitlement, usage and the mechanics of monetisation.
Insolvency and restructuring work
Where a licence position, an entitlement set and a vendor’s exposure have to be established quickly and accurately under time pressure.
Both sides of the table
Here is what sets this apart. Veridian designs and runs compliance programmes for vendors, and Veridian advises organisations in dispute with their vendor. We do both deliberately.
Because we have built these programmes from the inside, we know exactly how the other side thinks — what a vendor will push on, where a licensee’s position is weak, and where the real settlement sits. Whichever side you are on, you are working with someone who has sat in the other chair.
Vendor audits are rising, and the stakes with them
Software vendor audits are not a tail risk; they are routine. A Flexera/IDC survey (published January 2016, corroborated by law firm Mintz in 2018) found that 64% of enterprises had been audited or subject to a licence review in the prior 18–24 months. Of those audited, 44% made true-up payments of $100,000 or more, and 29% paid $300,000 or more.
The pressure has only intensified. The 2025 Survey on Enterprise Software Licensing and Audit Trends (Unisphere Research, sponsored by LicenseFortress, published 22 January 2025, from more than 300 respondents) found that 62% of respondents reported being audited by a major software vendor within the past year — a significant increase from 40% in 2023 — and that nearly 32% of organisations incurred financial liabilities exceeding $1 million from audits, more than tripling the 10% reported two years earlier.
Preparation, not panic, is what determines the outcome — and preparation is a discipline, not a scramble in the week the letter arrives.
Insolvency and restructuring
When a customer or a counterparty enters an insolvency process, licence and contract positions have to be understood fast. There were 23,872 company insolvencies in England and Wales in 2024 and 23,938 in 2025 (Insolvency Service, official statistics), so this is not a rare event — in 2024 that equated to roughly 1 in 191 companies on the register.
Recoveries for unsecured creditors are typically very low: the Insolvency Service’s own CVL research report (published December 2024) found the median recovery for unsecured creditors was effectively 0% in liquidation, while separate government analysis of administration filings put the average creditor recovery in administration at around 6%.
That reality argues for acting early. Under section 233B of the Insolvency Act 1986 (introduced by the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020), a supplier cannot terminate a contract simply because its customer enters a relevant insolvency procedure — the so-called ipso facto restriction. The practical lesson is that value is protected before insolvency, through early-warning and disciplined arrears management, not recovered afterwards. We help establish the licence position, quantify entitlements and exposure, and frame the commercial response while there is still room to act.
Retention is part of the same story
Protecting revenue does not stop at billing. The programme our founder built turned compliance into a full commercial lifecycle — delivering 120% net revenue retention and 90% gross revenue retention with a three-year average contract length. Adoption and retention are how leakage is prevented at source: customers who use what they bought renew what they use. That capability runs through everything on this page.
How engagement works
We scope every engagement to the problem. That might be a fixed-term recovery and remediation project to find and reclaim leaked revenue; a programme design-and-build for a vendor compliance function; a defence engagement for a licensee in dispute; or rapid licence-position work inside a restructuring. We agree the deliverables and the terms before we start.
Why Veridian
Our founder founded and led the commercial contracts function at The Access Group from 2017, growing it from a single person to a team of 45 and lifting the excess-use order book from £1.2m to £25m. He went on to serve as Director of Compliance and then Commercial Director, where the compliance programme became “TrueSight” — a full commercial lifecycle delivering 120% NRR and 90% GRR.
This is not a framework borrowed from a textbook. It is a machine that was built, run and proven at scale.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us what the commercial picture looks like and we will tell you, honestly, whether and how we can help.