The renewal shrank in a March budget meeting. The cash gap hit in July. We build Anaplan and Pigment models that surface both while you can still act.
30 minutes with our founders. No sales pitch, just answers.
Most EdTech planning breaks in the same place: the company runs one fiscal calendar while its customers run another. Districts start their fiscal year July 1. Board approvals drag past that. Contracts get co-termed to weird dates so a district can consolidate renewals. A three-year deal with an enrollment true-up clause books at one number and cashes at another. If your planning model treats a district like a normal B2B customer, every forecast it produces is quietly wrong.
That part is old news. Here is what's new.
Two years ago, this page would have talked about planning through the ESSER cliff. That's done. The money expired, the liquidation deadlines passed, and what's left is the contraction: we've watched district budgets come down 5 to 8 percent, with the cuts landing disproportionately on the supplemental tools EdTech vendors sell.
The Department of Education is being dismantled while you read this. Title I administration moved to the Department of Labor. IDEA went to HHS. Funding statutorily continues, but guidance and payment timing are chaotic.
In July 2025, $6.8 billion in Title II, III, and IV funding was frozen after districts had already built budgets around it. 24 states sued to get it released. The FY2026 budget proposed eliminating those programs outright.
In June 2026 the FCC opened a proceeding to scale back E-rate. Districts now know federal money can disappear mid-year, so they commit slowly and buy less. Your pipeline feels it before your P&L does.
You cannot model your way to certainty about any of that. What you can do is stress-test. We build funding-scenario models that answer specific questions:
Most companies we talk to can't answer that last one. Usually it's the first thing we build.
This is the section that matters most, so we're going to spend real time on it.
Logo retention can print healthy while net dollars bleed out one shrunk renewal at a time. Cohort NRR is the honest number.
When renewal decisions actually get made, in district budget committee meetings. The August PO is just the paperwork.
Districts access thousands of digital tools and meaningfully use around fifty. Their business offices finally have the analytics to see it.
Districts almost never cancel. Cancelling requires a decision, a justification, someone willing to tell teachers their tool is going away. What districts actually do is renew the logo and shrink the deal. Drop from 5,000 seats to 3,500. Cut two modules. Refuse the price step-up you built into the contract. Your logo retention prints 95% and your board deck looks healthy while net dollars bleed out one renewal at a time. In our experience the honest number is cohort-level net revenue retention, and if yours is sitting around 95%, you are contracting in a healthy costume. Most planning setups we inherit can't compute NRR by cohort at all. The data lives in a renewals spreadsheet the CS lead maintains, and it dies when she leaves.
Timing makes it worse. The renewal decision does not happen when the PO arrives in August or September. It happens in February and March, in district budget committee meetings, when next year's spending gets set. By the time the purchase order shows up, the outcome was decided five months earlier. A renewal forecast that lights up in August is a report. One that lights up in January, before the budget committees meet, is a plan. We build the second kind, which in practice means scoring every account on usage, funding-source exposure, and step-up risk, and timing the whole thing to when the decision actually gets made rather than when the paperwork shows up.
And usage is now the whole game. A contract with 5,000 paid seats and 500 monthly actives is a budget line waiting to be noticed. Renewal committees are asking for usage exports and ESSA evidence tiers before they'll re-up. If your planning model can't see the paid-versus-active gap, your account managers are walking into February meetings blind.
Bookings and cash are different problems in this industry, and summer is where the difference gets dangerous.
From mid-June to mid-August, district AP offices effectively shut down. Old fiscal year closing, new one not yet approved, half the staff gone. Collections go near-still for eight weeks while your payroll runs every two. We've heard PE diligence teams ask it almost verbatim: can this company make July payroll without touching the line of credit?
A monthly cash view smooths right over the answer. We build 13-week cash forecasts timed to district AP cycles, because a company can be profitable on an annual basis and still have a genuinely bad three weeks in July. It's the cheapest thing on our menu and probably the one clients thank us for most.
Commissions are where we usually start, and we'll be straight about why: it's where the pain is loudest. Get the engine right and you've also built the clean bookings-and-renewals data layer that everything else sits on. That's the expansion path, and it's the honest version of "we do full planning."
Every deal tagged by funding source: Title I, IDEA, state grant, general fund, or "the champion hopes to find money." An unfunded deal doesn't slip a quarter like enterprise SaaS. It slips a full year, to the next budget cycle. A pipeline model that knows this stops flattering you.
EdTech comp is nasty in specific ways. Multi-year deals with enrollment true-ups mean a rep gets an accelerator on a booking that shrinks eighteen months later. Co-terming splits credit across periods. Consortium bonuses, K-12 vs. higher ed tiers, partner rebates, and a structure that changes annually. We recalculate in hours when districts bulk-renew in August.
Logo retention and net dollar retention split apart, cohort by cohort. Usage, funding-source exposure, and step-up risk scored per account, timed to the February budget committee calendar instead of the August PO.
A typical $50K district deal is really three performance obligations in a trench coat: software, implementation, and PD, each recognized on its own schedule. Deferred revenue balloons in Q2 and Q3, then unwinds unevenly. If you're ever in a sale process, restating bookings into compliant recognized revenue is the most common way a buyer's QofE team walks your number down. Better to have the model before they do.
Dual-calendar FP&A that separates school-year operations from fiscal-year reporting, plus scenario models for the federal layer: Title program exposure, state adoption timing, E-rate risk. Not certainty. Exposure, quantified.
We drive vendor headcount off paid seats, active usage, contract count, implementation backlog, and ARR per CSM. Not district enrollment, which is a district's planning problem rather than yours. And K-12, higher ed, and corporate learning get modeled as the different markets they are.
While we're in there we also fix territory logic for cooperative purchasing, since a Sourcewell, TIPS, or OMNIA contract means deals arrive through a channel your CRM's geographic territories weren't designed for. And we'll usually pick a fight about quarterly quotas, which are artificial when your customers' budgets close June 30, whatever your own fiscal year looks like; districts commit in spring, POs land in late summer, and reps sandbag accordingly because the comp plan pretends otherwise.
Look at the last few years. Bain took PowerSchool private at $5.6 billion. KKR bought Instructure at $4.8 billion. Coursera and Udemy closed their merger in May 2026.
Sponsors change what planning has to produce:
Truth is, most companies call us at one of four moments: a new CFO arrives, a sponsor closes, a board forecast gets missed, or an exit process starts. We've learned to just say that.
If you're under $25 million in revenue with a five-person finance team, you probably don't need Anaplan or Pigment, and we'd rather tell you that in the first call than invoice you for eight months. Well-built sheets or a lighter planning tool will carry you further than you think.
The conversation gets real around $50M, or at PE ownership, or when multi-entity consolidation makes spreadsheets unsafe.
A unified commission engine across K-12 and higher ed sales organizations, handling multi-year co-terming logic that would make a generalist consultant quit. Over four years of managed services: quarterly refreshes, plus a structural rebuild every year because sales leadership reorganizes territories annually and the model has to move with them. That yearly rebuild was not in anyone's original scope. It's just what the account actually needs, so it's what we do.
An assessment company running commissions on spreadsheets, with sellers seeing where they stood once a year. We built their full engine in Pigment, six weeks from data to first payment calculated. One quarter in, dispute data surfaced a pattern, and Riverside shifted crediting mid-year toward the product they wanted sold. Sales picked up, revenue followed, and a correction that used to be a next-year conversation happened in the first quarter on the system. Their ops team runs it themselves now.
We'd rather you knew in January than found out from the August PO. Thirty minutes with our founders. No sales pitch, just answers. Bring your renewal cohort data if you have it.