Operator
I would like to hand the conference over to your host today, CEO, Mr. Edward Chung.
Thank you, sir. Please go ahead.
Edward Chung
Good day, everyone, and thank you for the introduction. Today, I have Stuart MacDonald, our COO, and Cale Bennett, our CFO, with me today.
Welcome to our 2025 results presentation for the full year. These materials were also lodged with the ASX this morning.
Today, I'm going to take you through the highlights of our results. Cale will then take us through the detailed financials, followed by Stuart, who will take us through our significant achievements.
Then I'll provide an update on building the future and our long-term outlook, and our outlook for FY26. For the 16th consecutive year, we've delivered record ARR, record revenue, and record profit, and we beat our guidance that we set in May this year.
Our ability to deliver these results for the last 25 years as a listed company, and in fact since inception in 1987, is due to our clear vision, strategy, culture, and ongoing investment in R&D, which is highlighted in our leading average total shareholder return over this 26-year period of approximately 16% per year, four times greater than the ASX 200 total shareholder return over that same period. We started the year celebrating 25 years on the ASX and finished it off by being admitted to the ASX 50 Index.
SaaS Plus, our game-changing offering, which combines our vertical-specific and mission-critical SaaS ERP, and implementation with the fastest implementation times in our market, delivers. It's fueling our growth, together with our significant investments, and highlight for the year was the UK, and our team's grit and determination over many, many years to take on the established players and win has resulted in ARR growth meeting our expectations, up 18%.
This has, in turn, enabled us to deliver PBT growth of 19% to $181.5 million. Those that follow us know that we surpassed $500 million ARR in the first half of FY25, 18 months earlier than planned, an incredible achievement for our company.
More importantly, we set a new long-term target, an ambitious target of a $1 billion plus ARR by FY30. I want to remind everyone of our strategy because it's this strategy which enables our strong, consistent growth.
We exist to make life simple for our community, and it's very powerful and meaningful to us and our customers. You notice there's nothing in there about ERP software.
It's because it's about what ERP software makes possible. We take the complexity out of ERP and turn it into clarity, and this enables our customers to do their job even better.
Councils reinvesting in roads, housing, and services; universities delivering world-class student experiences and world-class research; and for government, health and community services, and asset-intensive industries, all of these essential industries operating better, scaling faster, and serving more. Every innovation we deliver puts more resources, more time, more money back to where they belong.
Our passion is to solve the complex. We don't do easy; otherwise, everyone would be doing it.
ERP is hard. Student management or Property & Rating, which is the mission-critical products for higher education and local government, is hard, and we're one of only a handful of vendors worldwide.
Payroll is hard. The Power of One is hard.
Moving an entire customer base of 1,300 customers from on-premise to SaaS without skipping a beat is hard. Rewriting an entire codebase four times over the last 38 years is hard.
Some people say that SaaS Plus is impossible. My point is, when you add it all together, there is no one doing what we do.
We create mission-critical products and solutions that power local government, universities and TAFEs, governments, hospitals, large infrastructure providers. They are our community, and our team choose to work here rather than any other company.
Our staff work here and they love it because they live and work and play in the communities they serve. They have a really deep connection.
Our core beliefs are our non-negotiables, and they underpinned our strategy. Our strategy hasn't changed dramatically over the last 38 years, but how we execute this strategy evolves quite a lot as we respond to shifts in technology, feedback from our customers, competitors, and the market generally.
It's this clear strategy that resonates with the market, and it's why we win against our competitors. Once we land a customer, they expand with us over many, many years by taking more products and more modules to streamline their business.
It's why they stay with us forever and what fuels our consistent, strong growth, and you see this in our ARR growth. Now, here are the major elements of our strategy.
The first is one experience for our customers. We believe in a fully integrated ERP solution.
We provide very deep and broad functionality. In 1987, we started with one product.
In 2008, we had 11 products. Today, we've got 20 products with over 500 modules, and we continue to invest in even more functionality for our customers.
All on one platform, with one user experience, one upgrade path, one security posture, one source of the truth. No one comes close to our focus and commitment to our vertical markets.
We have the deepest functionality for our vertical markets. We are hyper-focused on just a handful of industries, and we're not all things to all people, and we bring 38 years of sector-specific knowledge which is built into our products and our solutions.
We compete and win against the best-of-breed players. We're ERP, but much, much more.
In short, we never follow the standard path. We don't fight in the red ocean.
We create the blue ocean by having ERP for core, defined vertical markets. As I said, these are mission-critical products and best-practice solutions which power universities and TAFEs, local government and governments, hospitals, large infrastructure providers.
We're an innovation-driven company, and we believe in evolution. We leverage new and emerging technology at each generation for our customers, and we invest in the range of 20% to 25% of revenue every year into R&D.
This is equated to over $1 billion of investment into our ERP, into our products, and into our modules. We have a track record for investing in the future, and the success we're having now comes from the R&D investments that we made over five years ago.
Our fourth-generation ERP, we call it CiA, is available any device, anywhere, anytime. As I said, we've successfully re-engineered our whole ERP not once, but four times over the last 38 years.
Think millions of lines of code. Finally, this fourth generation has the highest level of security accreditation in the industry.
We provide the most trusted SaaS platform. We are the first global SaaS ERP provider to achieve IRAP PROTECTED, no carve-outs to any of our products or modules.
We know it's not feasible for any individual organization to keep up with the increasing costs and complexity of cybersecurity unless they've adopted a SaaS-first strategy. We spent hundreds of millions of dollars building the world's most trusted SaaS ERP that's secure, reliable, and efficient.
We're going to continue to invest millions of dollars to set the bar higher each year. Now, with the Power of One, we build, market, sell, implement, and support our SaaS ERP for 1,600 customers globally.
For us, the Power of One is special and it's unique. Firstly, it's a big IP engine.
At every stage, we get feedback from our staff and our customers, and we make the product better. We have a direct relationship with the customer as we own that customer relationship.
We all know ERP is hard and it's complex, and there'll always be issues from time to time. In the old model, or the traditional model of a separate vendor and a separate implementation partner, when things go wrong, the implementation partner blames the vendor and the vendor blames the implementation partner, and it's the customers that are impacted.
Now, with the Power of One, we are 100% accountable for our customers' outcomes, and it's one of the reasons we maintain 99% customer retention over the last 38 years. Now, SaaS Plus is a game changer in our industry.
For us, it's the next logical evolution of SaaS, where TechnologyOne delivers the entire outcome faster, with minimal risk, and a single annual fee to our customers. SaaS Plus delivers faster time to value as we continue to dramatically drive down implementation time frames, removing the need for traditional long, drawn-out, and risky implementations.
Our goal is to deliver ERP in 30 days, not the thousands of days like the traditional systems integrators. Through the Power of One, TechnologyOne is the only SaaS ERP provider able to deliver on this compelling proposition because we own all parts of the value chain, with our mission-critical products, our industry-specific IP built up over the last 38 years, and our own in-house, highly skilled and talented consulting team.
We've invested over $1 billion in our ERP to date, and the success we're having today comes from the investments we made five years ago, and the success we'll have in future comes from the investments we are making now. When you think of game-changing technology, a few things come to mind: iPhones changed the market for mobile phones, Tesla changed the market for vehicles, Uber changed the market for how to grab a cab, and now we got AI.
TechnologyOne is changing the market. We have two not-so-secret secret weapons.
The first is SaaS Plus. No one can do what we do because, as I said, we have industry-specific and mission-critical software that leverages our deep experience and IP in very specific markets like local government, higher education, and government, and our own talented in-house consulting team, all in one fee, with the fastest implementation times in the market versus the traditional plain-vanilla ERP without mission-critical software for anyone, and the systems integrators or the Big Four, who are motivated by billable hours and making implementations longer.
Number two, technology is moving faster than ever, especially in the age of AI. We're at the cutting edge and the leading edge of the next evolution of ERP.
We launched Plus in our October showcase, and the customer feedback, it's been phenomenal. An independent researcher who we know said to me at one of the showcases that we've totally leapfrogged the competition.
With Plus, we know we're onto a winner, and we're going to talk about that later. When you have SaaS Plus and Plus together, we create significant value for our customers, and that translates into significant value for TechnologyOne.
These investments enable us to continue to double in size every five years. Our addressable market is huge and growing.
Today, we have over $554 million ARR and that new long-term target of a $1 billion plus ARR by FY30. You're going to hear me say it over and over, SaaS Plus is a game changer and it's powering our growth, and Stuart's going to get into a lot more detail later.
As a result, our outlook for FY26 is also strong. Now, in FY25, we delivered strong profit and ARR growth, beating our guidance.
An increasingly common metric to assess SaaS companies is the Rule of 40. The Rule of 40 typically measures recurring revenue growth and cash profit margin.
However, there's really no strict definition, and in fact, many companies use slight variations of the Rule of 40. We got some feedback recently that the more correct method is to use our ARR growth percentage plus our pretax free cash flow margin.
Previously, we conservatively used post-tax, which means our Rule of 40 result is even better. Now, strong profit and growth is nothing new to TechnologyOne, and you can see, for the 12 months to 30 September 2025, we recorded a Rule of 40 result of 59, and that puts us in the top quartile globally against our software peers.
Because it's a common metric and we're going to be measured on it anyway, we've added it to all of our metrics. Importantly, we expect to remain in top of class, which is above 40.
Cale will now take us through the detailed financials.
Cale Bennett
Thanks, Ed. Once again, we are incredibly proud of the results we have delivered in FY25.
SaaS Plus continues to resonate with the market, driving a strong top line, with ARR up 18% to $554.6 million after surpassing the $500 million mark at the half. We've also delivered another strong sales result in the UK, with UK ARR up 49% and UK new sales ARR up 52%.
SaaS and recurring revenue is up 19% to $553.2 million. Recurring revenue represented 91% of total income in FY25.
At the PBT line, we beat our guidance of 13% to 17% to deliver 19% PBT growth to record $181.5 million in FY25. With such a strong result and great confidence in our future, our board has determined a final ordinary and special dividend of 30 cents in aggregate to take the total FY dividend to 36.6 cents, up 63% year-on-year.
More on that shortly. In all, we have met or exceeded our expectations across all metrics in FY25, an unequivocally strong result.
I'll now take you through the financials, beginning with the income statement. Profit before tax has increased 19% to $181.5 million, another record for the business, and ahead of our guidance given at the half of 13% to 17% growth.
SaaS and recurring business grew 19% to $553.2 million in FY25. Total income was up 18% to $610 million for the year.
Traditional new project consulting revenue was up $6 million in the year as our team continues to deliver on the backlog of T&M work previously sold. Total expenses grew 18% to $428.5 million, primarily driven by SaaS platform costs and investments in people.
We have undertaken modernization efforts during FY25, which has necessitated increasing infrastructure costs as we ran new and old side by side. We do not expect similar run rate increases in future periods.
Our net capitalized R&D costs are up 28% or $6.9 million as our R&D team pushed hard into showcase, getting Plus and in-product AI use cases live. When we began the SaaS Plus transition, we indicated we would be mindful of the impacts on profitability.
With SaaS Plus now being our default go-to-market motion globally, the investment in our long-term strategy has equated to 2.7% of margin in FY25, which is the equivalent of $17 million of revenue foregone. This has resulted in a PBT margin consistent with last year at 30%, but we remain convinced that our SaaS Plus strategy will deliver in the long term, and our focus on increasing the PBT margin to 35% remains unchanged.
In the meantime, as previously communicated, we will continue to deliver profit growth. While profit before tax was up 19%, net profit after tax was up slightly less at 17%.
The effective tax rate for the year was 24%, up from 23%, primarily driven by the growth in our R&D tax incentive claim being lower than our profit growth. Given the quantum of profit increases, we believe the tax rate will trend towards an effective tax rate of 25% in future periods.
Turning to the balance sheet, cash and investments have increased 15% to $319.6 million over the last year. This strong cash uplift year-on-year was despite an outflow of $44 million for the CourseLoop acquisition and $30 million spent acquiring 750,000 shares on-market for the employee share trust.
As I mentioned at the full-year results last year and again at the half-year results, cash flow was assisted in FY25 by creditor payments brought forward into FY24 in the order of $20 million. That is evident in the increase in trade payables change year-on-year.
In all, a strong uplift in cash during the year. Deferred revenue has increased by $48.1 million, consistent with our business growth and annual in-advance billing schedule.
Net assets have increased $71.4 million over FY25 to $450.7 million. Throughout our history, TechnologyOne has consistently invested in R&D to enable us to deliver the most impactful products to our customers.
As anyone who has attended our showcase knows, FY25 was a special year. We invested 25% of total revenue, or $153.7 million, in R&D in FY25, with 55% or $84.4 million capitalized.
This is at the top end of our optimal range as our R&D pushed hard to deliver our artificial intelligence product enhancements and Plus for showcase. This was in addition to continued product development and investments in SaaS Plus and ERP in 30 days.
Our acquisition of CourseLoop also added to our R&D spend as we integrate their operations. Going forward, we expect to target R&D investment in the 20% to 25% of revenue range, which we continue to believe is the optimal investment level.
On to the cash flow now. In FY25, free cash flow generated was $184 million, up $65 million or 55% on the PCP.
In addition to the increase in our profit before tax, our working capital position improved by $46.8 million due to our annual in-advance billing growth and the benefits of the pulled-forward creditor payments into the previous corresponding period. This hasn't been repeated in FY25.
This provided a tailwind to our Rule of 40 in the order of five points. Our income taxes paid have increased in the year in line with our tax rate and profit growth from previous periods.
The investment and financing activities includes both the cash outflow for the CourseLoop business of $43.7 million and $30.4 million paid to acquire shares in the employee share trust, a capital management initiative announced last year. TechnologyOne's balance sheet is very strong, with no debt and a significant cash position.
High levels of recurring revenue, strong cash flow generation, and a strong new business pipeline provides us with confidence in the future. In FY24, we outlined three paths we were taking to improve certainty and evolve our approach to managing our capital base.
Firstly, our dividend payout ratio was set to 55% to 65% of NPAT. Secondly, we reiterated that we were looking at IP-related acquisitions and acquired CourseLoop, a class-leading curriculum management solution to build out our OneEducation offering.
Finally, we announced that we would begin purchasing shares on-market through our employee share trust to satisfy staff equity issuance requirements. In FY25, we spent some $30.4 million purchasing 750,000 shares, and we expect to spend more in FY26.
As our business continues its positive path, we will evolve our approach to capital management, maintaining a disciplined approach to balancing the needs and opportunities of the business with rewarding shareholders. Given our outstanding year, confidence in the future, and significant capacity on our balance sheet, the board has decided to reward shareholders by determining a special dividend of 10 cents per share in addition to the final ordinary dividend.
With confidence in our trajectory and healthy cash generation, the board has decided to lift the ordinary dividend payout ratio from 55% to 65% to 65% to 75% of NPAT in future periods. We are incredibly proud of our results in FY25.
Our board has determined a final ordinary dividend of 20 cents per share in addition to the special dividend of 10 cents per share, both of which are franked at 65%. This puts our total dividend up 63% for the year to 36.6 cents per share.
We are extremely pleased that our ongoing success enables us to continue rewarding our shareholders incrementally. I'll now hand over to Stuart to take us through some of the notable achievements in FY25.
Stuart MacDonald
Thanks, Cale. Our strategy is delivering exactly as we expected.
By offering 20 best-of-breed products within the world's only true SaaS Plus platform, purpose-built for the verticals we serve, we've created a competitive advantage that continues to resonate deeply with our customers. As you can see from this slide, our growth is broad-based and accelerating.
Every vertical is performing well, with three delivering double-digit growth, and our two largest verticals of local government and higher education are leading the charge, growing at 22% and 24% respectively. What makes this particularly powerful is that our market penetration in any single vertical remains below 15%.
That means there's still significant headroom for sustained expansion. We are only just getting started.
At the half year, I promised to put the UK front and center at the full-year results, and I'm proud to say that the team has delivered beyond our expectations. The UK achieved 52% new ARR growth, an extraordinary performance that reflects not only strong execution, but also the strength of our brand, our platform, and the people that are in this market.
That momentum is being driven by a fully localized team of 185 exceptional people, achieving some of the highest employee and customer NPS scores across the entire company. The UK also holds the largest number of referenceable customers of any region, a clear signal of deep customer trust and satisfaction.
The UK's relentless focus on customer outcomes is exactly why we pioneered SaaS Plus in this region three years ago. That decision has reshaped the entire business.
SaaS Plus is now our global standard. It is clearly the competitive edge.
No other vendor in our market can match the certainty, speed, or success we are delivering with this model. The combination of the team's discipline, world-class delivery, and the technology that is years ahead of the competitors is elevating our brand to be the benchmark others are trying to chase.
I'll share with you two key wins shortly in the UK, but the message is very clear: this isn't just another strong year; it's another step in building a foundation of sustained, compounding growth well into our future. Out of the more than 250 wins at the half, I'd like to highlight three briefly.
Our strategy has always been consistent: start small, prove success, and build momentum into larger, more complex customers. In the UK local government sector, we began with the counties and the districts, becoming the partner of choice by consistently delivering successful projects.
About four years ago, we took this momentum and began working with the unitary councils, bigger, more complex organizations. Today, I'm pleased to say we now have more than 10 unitaries that are SaaS Plus partners.
The final stage of this strategy has been reaching the London boroughs, and not because of their size, but because of their purchase power and their sophistication to choose the best. I shared with you at the half that we won the London Borough of Islington, the largest borough in London.
Now, less than six months later, I'm proud to announce that we've continued this momentum, winning the Royal Borough of Greenwich, with more than £300 million in annual revenue and one of the largest growing boroughs in all of the UK. This steady, delivered approach—starting small, scaling up, staying focused on vertical-specific SaaS Plus—continues to validate our model as proof that a disciplined growth and exceptional delivery is much better than any hype and complexity over time.
If you look at the University of Hertfordshire, they've been a long-standing partner for more than 15 years, utilizing our finance and timetabling and scheduling solutions. They were also one of the early partners in helping shape our new Plus platform.
Early this year, they went to market to replace Ellucian, whose product couldn't deliver the functionality and reliability they needed for a university of their size, with more than 32,000 students and among the fastest-growing universities in all of the UK. We are proud to confirm that we have now been selected for the student management solution, not just for its depth of capability, its defense-in-depth security, and its technology, but because they saw the strength of our roadmap and the power that comes from a full ERP integration.
That decision makes Hertfordshire our sixth university in just two years, and it's another clear signal that the scale and success of our SaaS Plus model in the higher education sector is accelerating fast. Now, if we look at local government in Australia, Central Coast Council in New South Wales is a great example.
It was a council that was under financial distress for more than four years, running multiple, disconnected solutions, including Infor. They went to market looking for a single, consolidated partner to modernize their operation and stabilize their organization, and we were the clear choice, winning a $4.8 million annual recurring revenue contract that brings together the majority of the products under their stack to support both their recovery and their long-term growth.
Our history is defined by bold, aspirational targets that drive our focus and underpin our success. The two metrics that show this clearly reflect our strategic focus and how we measure performance.
Best practice in our industry for net revenue retention ranges between 115% and 120%, and once again, we are firmly within this benchmark, achieving an impressive 115% this year. It's important to note that sustaining an NRR of 115% annually over five years alone doubles the size of the company.
Highlighting this metric is a critical component of an ERP strategy. Secondly, and I think most impressively, our churn rate is 1.2%, remaining within our target range and continues to be one of the lowest globally in our industry.
Once again, it validates our strategy, focus, and investments, and the executing are all working. For more than six years, we've been leveraging AI within our product suite.
We've said for many years, we've been actually using AI inside our products for a long time. As previously highlighted, we've been using AI to benefit our community.
We've been leveraging cameras on buses and garbage trucks to look at variations of field to generate work orders. We've also been providing, for more than six years, products inside our software suite that are leveraging AI, for an example, our expense claims suite.
We've never really highlighted the fact of using AI because we didn't see the need to do so. As a result of the work we've been doing for the past two years, we've looked at new ways of both leveraging our in-products as well as building new products that can leverage this AI.
We looked at how to leverage AI in two phases: one, leveraging the 19 products we have, finding better, more efficient ways for which our customers can achieve outcomes. Then we looked at ways of leveraging AI tools across the full operations.
We've evolved and grown our products from one product in 1987 to 11 products in 2008 to 20 products today. Each product has over 20 modules; that's well over 500 modules in total.
As we announced in showcase in October, we will be embedding AI functionality within the 19 products we serve with the release of our 2026A. That will be the start of the release that will continue for years ahead.
There will be a point where every single product will have AI included inside them, therefore enabling faster outcomes, more efficiency, and greater cost effectiveness for our customer base. At showcase, we introduced something truly transformational, our 20th product, Plus.
Plus isn't just another feature or module; it represents the future of enterprise software, the beginning of our fifth generation of ERP. It's the first system designed not just to record and report, but to think, learn, and advise.
It understands every aspect of the customer's organization: their people, their process, their performance. It responds in real time.
It identifies trends, highlights risk, and recommends actions before they even surface. It's a digital twin for the enterprise, one that supports leaders every day through natural conversations, no screens, no clicks, just a conversation.
With Plus, we're not just redefining ERP; we're reimagining how an organization works. This is the next frontier in enterprise intelligence, built entirely within the TechnologyOne ecosystem, a world where the systems finally work for you.
Our goal with Plus was simple: to put in the hands of every TechnologyOne user. We wanted every customer to experience the power of this product to dramatically improve the efficiency of their operation, and in turn, deliver better outcomes for their community.
To achieve this, we've commercialized Plus different. We've removed the complexity that is holding many organizations back from embracing AI, particularly the confusing token-based model dominating the market today.
In most AI platforms, usage is priced per token, effectively a syllable, which means costs are unpredictable for large, complex requests. That doesn't work well for our customers.
Governments, universities, hospitals, and essential infrastructure providers, they need clarity, predictability, trust in their commercial agreements. We created a whole new model.
For Plus, we price on conversations, and for in-product, we price by interactions. Whether the interaction evokes 10 tokens, 10,000 tokens, our customers are charged a single fee, predictable amount, seamlessly bundled into their ARR contract.
This model is unique to the market. It removes all that commercial risk.
It encourages widespread adoption, and has been exceptionally well received by our customer base. It's simple, elegant way to make AI real, accessible, and valuable at scale.
Our diversified strategy is delivering exactly as intended. With our mission-critical software, SaaS Plus, ERP in 30 days, and our continued investment in R&D, we're not just delivering growth; we're shaping the future of enterprise software.
Products like Plus demonstrate how deep our sustained innovation translates directly into performance and the confidence of our long-term growth. These R&D investments are long-term strategic commitments.
They power both new customer acquisitions and net revenue retention, enforcing the durability of our model. None of this would be possible without a world-class R&D team, a group defined by creativity, technical excellence, and the unrelenting drive to solve the hardest problems for our customers and community.
Their work is the engine behind our growth, and we are enormously proud of what they continue to achieve. I'd like to hand back to Ed.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Stuart. To wrap up the result, quite simply, SaaS Plus delivers.
We achieved a year of record ARR, record revenue, and record profit: total ARR up 18% to $554.6 million; UK ARR up 49% and new sales ARR up 52%, the flywheel continues to turn; profit before tax to $181.5 million, up 19%, beating the guidance we set in May of 13% to 17% growth. This has enabled us to continue our strong R&D investment for future growth of $153.7 million, up 20%.
With a strong balance sheet, strong results, and confidence in the outlook, a record total dividend of 36.6 cents per share, up 63%. Now, let's bring our focus to the outlook.
Our focus is to maintain our strong momentum well beyond the $500 million ARR and to continue to double in size every five years. It's why we invest in R&D for the long term, to continue to build platforms for growth: new products, new modules, and new offerings.
We achieved our last goal of $500 million ARR 18 months earlier than planned, and we set a new long-term goal of $1 billion plus ARR by FY30. We're well positioned for future with multiple platforms that drive consistent growth and to meet our targets.
We have a total addressable market of over $13.5 billion and it's growing. We will deliver strong net revenue retention with our 115% to 120% target.
As Stuart said, at 115% alone, we can continue to double in size every five years. We have significant white space in our existing customer base.
Once we land a customer, there are many, many new products and modules that we can provide to those customers. We license in a number of ways, and we see continuous growth in our rateable properties and student charges under our agreements, together with built-in annual CPI increases for all of our customer contracts.
We continue to win new logos in both APAC and UK. SaaS Plus is a game changer, and from a growth point of view, replaces traditional one-off consulting revenue with high-quality annual recurring revenue, and we'll continue to invest in R&D.
We also continue to target acquisitions in a very disciplined way that adds new IP to the business, such as CourseLoop. The leverage we're delivering in our business provides us with significant headroom for inorganic growth.
We've got a great vision and a great platform for the future of ERP with Plus and our in-product AI, and when we add IP acquisitions to this foundation, the value to our customers and to TechnologyOne is exponential. At every stage of our evolution, we provided more and more value for our customers.
We started as an on-premise company, as a licensed business that provided value by automating and streamlining our customers' operations. Then we moved to the cloud, and we said cloud was war, and as we moved people to the cloud, our customers would seek to consolidate vendors, and we've seen the benefit of that.
Customers seeing the benefit by consolidating vendors, they have removed the complexity in their own operations. Then we moved to SaaS, with multi-tenanted SaaS, the world's highest level of cybersecurity certification, and on SaaS, all products and modules are available and visible for our customers, which has enabled our customers to take up products seamlessly.
The next evolution of SaaS was SaaS Plus and ERP in 30 days. Even more value has been created for our customers as the need for long, complex, risky traditional implementations has been removed.
Finally, we released Plus at showcase recently. Unanimous feedback from our customers is the amount of efficiencies and savings in their organizations that we presented at showcase was, in fact, conservative, and would be at least two times, three times, perhaps even 10 times more.
At every stage of our growth, at every stage of our generations of software, we deliver more and more values for our customers, which means more and more value for TechnologyOne. Our strategy, our investments, and a resulting moat before AI and Plus was already strong: verticalized software, mission-critical applications that only a handful of vendors in the world provide, software built for complex industries with strict compliance requirements.
Some have said that the Power of One was a handbrake on growth, but with SaaS Plus, we've flipped the switch and we've removed the buying and implementation friction for our customers. With ERP in 30 days, we can scale even faster.
We have industry-leading customer retention, and we have a track record of delivery. Now, with AI-enabled products and Plus, our moat is even wider, even deeper.
It's evident to our customers and prospects that more data from taking more of TechnologyOne products and modules equals more learning, equals more augmentation and more insights, equals more value. Plus, with no clicks, no screens, just a conversation, it's the Trojan horse for taking more of our products.
It has a low price, has no implementation or training, which drives more product and module take-up in our customer base. An additional piece, as our customers take on interactions and conversation bundles, this AI transaction-driven pricing will drive additional ARR from each of our customers.
Now, let's zoom in and focus on the outlook for FY26. The markets we serve are resilient, and TechnologyOne is not impacted by any of the current geopolitical issues.
TechnologyOne provides mission-critical software with deep functionality for the markets we serve. Our customers have independently verified cost savings of 40% plus by moving to our SaaS.
Our global SaaS ERP, now turbocharged with AI and Plus, allows our customers to innovate and meet the challenges ahead with greater agility and speed, without having to worry about the underlying technologies that makes life simple for them. Plus will drive net revenue retention.
SaaS Plus is driving significant opportunities for us, and the pipeline for FY26 is strong. We'll continue to benefit from improving margins because of our significant economies of scale of our single-instance global SaaS ERP.
We talk about heartbeats and rhythms all the time in our business, and for as long as I can remember, our heartbeat, our rhythm, it's been 10% to 15% profit growth. We were able to do this because we've been disciplined, focused, and have a history of delivering.
As we transition to a SaaS company, and now a SaaS Plus company, we've been able to carefully and surgically increase that heartbeat and that rhythm. We started firstly with 10% to 15%, then that accelerated to 12% to 16%, and then 13% to 17%.
You can see we've got a track record of delivering or beating the top end of guidance. Our outlook for FY26 remains strong.
Talking about rhythms, just like we've always done, we'll provide another update on our guidance at the AGM in February. Our discipline, our diversification, execution, and visibility of the business gives us the confidence to continue to drive strong growth.
In FY26, we introduced our groundbreaking AI platform, and it's set to deliver a generational leap forward. As a result, TechnologyOne's sales pipeline of opportunities for FY26 remains strong, which positions us for strong continuing growth.
We've got this energy, this momentum in the business right now: 20 products, over 500 modules. Our addressable market is huge and it's growing.
We've made and will continue to make significant investments in R&D in new products, in new modules. Because we follow the road less traveled, we have invented SaaS Plus and set a very ambitious goal of ERP in 30 days.
With our game-changing AI-enabled products and Plus, with no clicks, no screens, just a conversation, we maintain our strong conviction of a $1 billion plus ARR by FY30. As I said at the outset, our people have a deep connection with our mission because they, their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their family live, work, and play in the communities we serve.
They live and breathe the TechnologyOne way. They create and deliver the mission-critical products and solutions that power our customers.
None of these results would be possible without the talented and committed people who make up TechnologyOne. Our people, they're on a roll.
They have this energy and momentum. Since 2017, we measure employee Net Promoter Score.
It has grown from -17 to +43. We would all like to thank each and every member of the TechnologyOne team across the globe.
We'd also like to thank you, our shareholders and our community, for your continuing support. Can we now hand back to the moderator for any questions?
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session.
If you would like to queue for a question, please press star, followed by one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you would like to cancel your request, please press star, followed by two.
If you would like to submit a question online via the webcast, please type it into the ask a question box and click submit. Edward, we will now start with questions from the phone call.
Your first question today comes from Kane Hannan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Kane Hannan
Morning, guys, and thanks for the questions. Maybe just starting on that ANZ ARR growth, I think it slowed from around 19% in the first half to sort of 15% in the second half.
Just elaborate a bit more on what drove that slowdown and some of the changes in NRR that came through. Whether AI launch that's coming next year delayed some things on your side we should be thinking about?
Edward Chung
I think, thanks, Kane, for your question. Firstly, we're very proud of all the results we delivered, including our ARR growth.
If I look at it at multiple levels, we've got multiple platforms for growth. Our goal is to obviously hit the profit for the year, but also hit our ambitious goal of a $1 billion plus ARR by FY30, and we're very confident and on track for that.
We also balance all of our metrics and all of our delivery. I think, when we look at with the Power of One, we have to deliver consistently for our customers.
You might have heard me talk about heartbeats, and our heartbeat is set in a way that we don't stuff it up and we don't stuff it up for our customers. That's first and foremost.
Every piece of ARR we sell, we have to deliver. We're very focused on that.
Kane, was there a second part to your question?
Kane Hannan
I had a couple of different ones, but it's just more the slowdown. Just you talked about setting the platforms for sustained, compounding growth in the UK.
I think the UK was about 20% of incremental ARR growth for the year. Is that the sort of level we should think about going forward?
Do I think about that sort of trending higher given the successes you're seeing, or just how do you frame the UK momentum from here?
Edward Chung
I think what we do is we set our obviously profit goal and we set our total ARR goal, and UK is part of that. I can't actually picture the 20% thing you talk about.
ARR in the UK grew at 49%. We expect it to compound quite strongly.
I don't know if we'd commit to 49% year on year on year, Kane, but within the context of all of those ambitious goals, the UK will continue to be strong over the next three, four, five years.
Kane Hannan
Sorry, I meant sort of share of revenue growth, but yep, that's helpful. Then just lastly, the changes in the divi payout and obviously the special dividend.
Is there anything we should read into that in terms of appetite for large M&A that we've seen a bit of across the tech space down here, and just how do you think about the M&A landscape at the moment?
Edward Chung
I think we obviously are at a point where we're hit leverage and we're, for lack of a better way, churning out a lot of cash. One of our long-term shareholders said, "If you keep going on the trajectory you're on, Ed, you'll probably have a billion dollars cash by FY30."
If we do, we probably will. One, it's a good problem to have.
Two, you saw this year, we made an acquisition in CourseLoop. We did a share buyback to neutralize the staff equity, and we also gave a special dividend.
With our confidence in the future and a whole lot of cash generation, we could do that. We think that with the platform we have, Plus and AI, with the strong cash flow generation which we'll continue to see, that there will be opportunities for us to make M&A.
We'll always do it in a disciplined way that we've always talked about having great IP in the verticals we serve, in the regions we want to follow. We think there's lots of opportunity, Kane, and we think that we can take advantage of that opportunity, but I just want to flag that it's always in that disciplined way.
Perfect.
Kane Hannan
Thanks very much, guys.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Wei-Sim from Jefferies.
Please go ahead.
Edward Chung
Good day, Wei.
Wei Sim
Hey, Ed. Hey, great presentation.
Great set of results. My first question is just in regards to SaaS Plus.
Cale mentioned before that we've seen kind of like a $17 million revenue headwind from this. I've done some modeling on unit economics, and I think SaaS Plus started around 2022, if I remember correctly.
Should we expect, I guess, this heartbeat that you talked about? Thanks.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Wei. Do you want to...
Cale Bennett
I guess, Wei, that will definitely become a tailwind at some point. That is kind of the whole point of the strategy.
In terms of being really granular about when that sort of nadir is, I guess we're not too clear on that. It does feel like we're getting closer to it.
There is plenty of momentum in the SaaS Plus strategy. The teams are all executing well on implementation.
Look, we're getting there, but I don't want to sort of put a sort of firm date on it. You're right, there is a point here where what we've sold is generating more revenue than the cost of us implementing what is currently in front of the team.
Edward Chung
I think, going to Cale's point, it is a long-term strategy. When we come out of that, I don't know, low point, as you put it, expect margins to accelerate.
We just got to get there first.
Wei Sim
That makes sense. Some of the, I guess, concerns from the results this morning I've heard is just that NRR number being at the 115, which is definitely still world-class, but at the bottom end of the range.
I was just wondering in terms of, I guess, the number of products per customer, is that a way that we should think about it? Are you able to give us any kind of color as to the average product per customer right now and, in terms of your highest penetrated customer, what they look like, just to understand what could be the potential outcome as you continue to penetrate into your existing customer base?
Edward Chung
I think there's multiple levels here. I might start and then hand over to Stuart.
I think, firstly, Wei, you're right. NRR at 115 is awesome.
It's at top of the range. If we continue to do that alone, we'd double in size every five years, which is sort of that high-level commitment and strategy we put out there to the market.
One thing that we should probably all just look through is, when you look back a couple of years in the COVID years and when they had those supply chain issues, CPI for some of our customers was running at 6.5%. My signal is to look through the last couple of years.
CPI has returned to normal now, which is probably 1.5%, 2%. That's a lot of probably the delta.
Stuart, going to the next point, we don't measure products or modules per customer anymore because it's a little bit nonsensical, but do you want to...
Stuart MacDonald
No, it's completely a fair question. The issue that we have is it's not apples for apples.
We break it down to 20 products. In the 19 traditional products we have, they all have a different amount of modules.
If I look underneath the covers of just Financials, it has somewhere in the region of 25 to 30 modules, and I can't think of a single customer that's actually got all 30 modules. It's very hard to actually give you a metric that's meaningful that says the average customer has 6.25 products because there's no apples-for-apples comparison against other customers because it's other verticals, it's other regions with other product sets.
What we really look at is the graph that I spoke to in the presentation, which is the ARR growth per customer. That's trying to be a mix of everything to show you.
We don't look at any customer related to the total TAM potential and then the average of. We have what we call an Eldorado map, we see the white space of every product that we have that they don't, and we target them, but we don't look at it as a whole cohort because it doesn't really work.
It's not a measure that adds value.
Edward Chung
Wei, can I add that I was talking to someone earlier, and they said something to me, something to the effect of, "If you hit a billion dollars ARR by FY30, is that slowing growth?" I smiled at him and said, "No, no, it's a billion dollars plus ARR by FY30," because we're not indicating slowing growth, number one.
Number two, we invest in more products, more modules for our customers, we expect NRR to stay in that 115% to 120% range going forward. I might also say that we launched Plus, which we've been investing in for a couple of years, and Plus is like the Trojan horse for more NRR.
Do you want to talk about that, Stuart?
Stuart MacDonald
The goal of Plus and what we've built with Plus is to give true visibility of your organization, but it only can give you visibility of the information that we provide, the data lake that we're supporting. When we started looking at early adopters and getting feedback, every single one of them said, "We need to expand our footprint of TechOne so we can get a more wholesome understanding and review of our business."
To Ed's point, we think of it as a Trojan horse because we've made it in such a cost-competitive position where we want them to consume it and use it because really what we want them to do is buy more products underneath to leverage it. We're already seeing that play out.
We released Plus about 3.5 weeks ago, I think. Our average sales cycle for an enterprise product is about 8 to 9 months; if it's a new customer, it's probably 9 to 12 months.
We have sold eight Plus deals in 3.5 weeks. The exciting part of that is they are paying for something now.
They're so excited about it and they won't actually get the access to it until March. They can see the value.
They can see where they want to go, and now they're coming back to us and saying, "Can we start consolidating some other products so when Plus is available, we're ready to actually leverage that data lake?" At the same time, the beauty of what Plus does, it doesn't start from day forward; it actually looks at all your data going back to the first time you were starting to use TechOne software.
It really does value your whole enterprise from day one all the way forward, and the market is unbelievably excited by it.
Edward Chung
Can we elaborate on that phone call we had on the Thursday night before we even launched Plus with a customer? Sure.
Stuart MacDonald
We did quite a bit of research before we released Plus, and we wanted to make sure that the excitement that we saw, others were seeing. We had a very large university, and we had the full SLT on our side with their full SLT, and we gave them a full demo.
The first reaction was from the registrar of that university said, "This is a game changer. This changes everything."
We asked them the question very early up and said, "How would you price this? How would you value this?"
They said, "From this very simplistic demo that we've seen, we can reposition at least two analysts inside our university just from the very simplistic view, it pays for itself very quickly." Then the CIO said, "Yeah, but we need to get your HRP system so we could really get that full understanding of our operation."
That same conversation has happened with three universities in the span of four days. That's the conversation we want to have.
We're still an ERP company. We want to sell ERP.
We want to sell the value of our products, and Plus is a way of delivering it at speed and at scale.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Wei. Sounds like,
Wei Sim
yeah, the pipeline's definitely accelerating right now. One last cheeky one, and I'm guessing you did it by design, but slide 32, ERP in 30 days, any possibility we could get what that number's looking like at this point in time?
Stuart MacDonald
I'll take that one. When we've shown the graph related to ERP in 30 days, it's quite a linear graph, and although I would love it to look like that, it won't because, as we've talked about in the past, we really look at getting to ERP in 30 days in two ways: one, it's our processes and our methods and just being faster and more intelligent related to the way we deliver software, deliver solutions; but then we also get the technical benefits.
We've been working in the background for about two years getting ready for what will be the drop of 2026B and 2027A, and we'll see massive improvements through that. You'll see a relatively smooth, linear line with massive drops as we go through, and so we are on track.
To give you a number, it's a bit of a misnomer related to if I drew a straight line, how would we get there, because we're going to see huge improvements in the release of 2026B and 2027A. The summary is we are on track.
We will deliver ERP in 30 days in FY28.
Wei Sim
Excellent. Thanks, guys.
I'll let someone else have a go.
Stuart MacDonald
Thanks, Wei.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Paul Mason from Evans & Partners.
Please go ahead.
Edward Chung
Good day, Paul.
Paul Mason
Hey, how you doing? Could I just ask on some of the AI features and the pricing that you guys discussed at the product day?
Could you maybe talk a little bit about how that's expected to initially flow through into ARR? Should we actually think about that having a couple of points of accelerative benefit or is it a bit early to sort of call that?
Edward Chung
Definitely early days, but I'll hand to Cale to color that in a bit for us, Paul.
Cale Bennett
Thanks for the question, Paul. It is early days, and we don't really know how quickly the take-up is going to be.
Obviously, as Stuart spoke to, as the strategy evolves, as the product evolves, the utility of the product will further evolve, and as our customers broaden their ERP usage, as does the utility increase. In terms of how it'll flow through, there are two elements.
They'll both show up as ARR. One is a sort of a more licensed access, and the other is really transaction-driven ARR.
As that utility, as that usage increases, as will that ARR. At the moment, even our forecasts, they're really sort of pie in the sky at the moment.
Hopefully, as FY26 evolves, we'll have a much better view of how that's going to unfold.
Stuart MacDonald
Can I add a little bit? There's two ways to look at it.
Our whole price book has been lifted by 10% to capture the benefit of the products that have been enabled with AI. You're looking at two things: the traditional ARR uplift just from the product side, and then that transactional pricing that we're learning from.
The market really loves the way that we've built it, it's that simplistic view of not worrying about tokens and complexity of a question; it's really the usage of, and so it's been resonating very well with the customer base.
Cale Bennett
We should be clear, though, that we've uplifted the price book for new sales going forward. We don't uplift the back book, yeah.
Edward Chung
Maybe I'll summarize all of that. If you're an existing customer using Financials and we've enabled AI, you get that for free.
If you're a new customer that wants to buy that same Financials, the price book will be uplifted by 10%. Then there's also this thing which is conversations or interactions, and we call that transaction-driven ARR.
Now, we haven't factored that into our forecast. That's upside for us.
What it means is, as the customers use their allocation of conversations or interactions, they can buy in bundles, and that bundle will uplift their ARR. When you piece it all together, it's quite an elegant way to price, it's quite an elegant way to demonstrate value for our customers and capture value for us.
Thanks, Paul.
Paul Mason
Just the second one for me was just a quick modeling question, probably for Cale. Your receivables management looked like it was unusually exceptional.
Should we use the current sort of ratios of receivables to sales as an indication going forward or expecting a normalization there?
Edward Chung
No, we have an amazing receivables team. Shout-out to Cale.
She's done a great job for her team. If you look back over the last couple of years, that team has gone pretty well.
There's nothing sort of super unusual. They did have a good year, but there's no kind of big one-offs in our performance.
Stuart MacDonald
Can I play off that for one second, too? I think it also highlights that we're selling well and delivering well.
We know our wheelhouse, we know what our customers want, and we're delivering. All parts of the business are performing to be able to achieve that.
Edward Chung
Exactly.
Paul Mason
Awesome. Thank you.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Paul.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Gary Sheriff from Royal Bank of Canada.
Please go ahead.
Edward Chung
Good day, Gary.
Gary Sheriff
Hi, Ed, Cale, Stuart. Quick question on that government vertical.
Are there any changes in the customer buying or feedback from federal or state government? Because the growth does appear to have slowed materially in that second half.
If I look back the last few periods, it looks like you did about 41% PCP growth in the second half of '24. You then did 28%, still super strong in the first half of '25, but it looks like it's dropped to about 9% in the second half of this year.
I just want to check, is there anything changing there that we should be aware of, or just any feedback from that federal or state government vertical?
Stuart MacDonald
It's a great question. The strategy that we've positioned for federal and state is the same as I would have mentioned for local government in the UK.
It's slow and steady and we go further and further up the food chain. We've got a strong foundation of referenceable customers in the federal government, and that's allowed us to win things like Department of Ag and the Department of Veterans' Affairs.
We're being pulled into larger, more complex departments, and the problem is we don't have the ability to really change their buying cycle or speed or the velocity at which they go to market. We're doing exceedingly well.
We've just got to wait for that machinery of government, that process, to come to fruition, and then we can capitalize on it. I wouldn't read into anything other than we're at the whims of the government and the process they go through in those very big, complex accounts to make sure that we're there first.
We've got a very strong track record. Our win rate is exceedingly high, and now because we're on the panel for government related to SaaS Plus, that win rate is improving.
Again, we have to wait for those projects to come out. Probably the final piece, Stuart, is the pipeline is very strong.
No, and not only strong, but expanding at the top end. We're being brought into the largest departments now, and so that's very exciting.
Again, it's that validation of our strategy to start small, build out. It really is resonating well.
We just got to wait our turn as we wait for those contracts to come to fruition.
Gary Sheriff
Excellent. Got it.
I guess the FY26 guide, market seems to be looking for a bit more concrete understanding on how that's shaping up, given you've got almost 95% of your revenue being recurring now. Is there any steer you can give to us rather than wait until Feb?
I guess the market's in a shoot first, ask questions later at the moment. Maybe just anything you give us a sense on that '26, or do we have to wait another few months to hear more?
Edward Chung
I think you have to wait a few more months. We talk about rhythms all the time and we have this rhythm, a heartbeat in our business.
It's very strong. You can almost see the trajectory we're on in that guidance slide, Paul, if you could just hold for a little bit, we will keep to our rhythms, keep to our techniques, and we will deliver for our customers and therefore our shareholders.
Stuart MacDonald
Can I try a different tack for you for a second? I'll give you another metric that we haven't highlighted.
We did showcase event 2.5 years ago, and we had a sellout for what we expected. We've just finished our showcase events for Australia and New Zealand, and we had double the attendees, double.
In 2.5 years, our brand, the want to be understand where we're going and be part of the journey of TechOne, there's double the amount of people in the room in each location, that's in Wellington, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. That's a testament to where this brand is going, how it's resonating with the market, and the excitement behind it.
Gary Sheriff
Thank you.
Stuart MacDonald
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Josh Kannourakis from Barrenjoey.
Please go ahead.
Josh Kannourakis
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions.
Just one quick one. I know you've still got some customers converting from Ci to Ci Anywhere.
When you're talking about Plus and obviously all the features and functionality of that, do they also need to shift to Ci Anywhere to get access to that? If not, maybe just talking about if that is a potential accelerant in terms of that ring-forward of adoption of the Ci Anywhere platform?
Stuart MacDonald
It's a really good question, Josh. It's a really good question.
The answer is we can actually service customers that are on Ci with the technology we've built, we can do it. We want our customers to move across to CiA, and so we have the opportunity, but we want that customer adoption to move across.
The customers are moving across to CiA at rapid speed, we're very happy with the speed of which people are coming across, but the technology, the underlying technology, can service the point you're making, but we want it for our customers that have moved across.
Josh Kannourakis
Yeah. I guess also to that point, for those customers, and if you've got anything, Stuart, just around what maybe proportion of the customers are on Ci Anywhere today, but obviously those customers in doing that, I think historically we've found have also taken more product, is that correct as well?
Stuart MacDonald
Absolutely. It's kind of all part of the mix of the strategy.
It's really hard to answer the question of customers that are wall-to-wall CiA, but it's in the hundreds, right? It is very high.
I believe there'll be a point where we call a date related to Ci as a product and we move everybody across, and we're getting closer and closer to that. Absolutely, as customers move more and more into the CiA space, the adoption is higher because they can see where all of our investment is.
The only investment we do in the Ci product is really our obligations related to bugs and obligations related to regulatory and governance. All of our effort is in CiA.
The customers are moving across at rapid speed. We've made it really easy to get across now, the speed of which we can move them across is much faster than it was even a year ago.
The momentum's there.
Josh Kannourakis
Okay. That's helpful.
Just second one quickly, just on M&A, obviously a lot of cash sitting there, as everyone's referred to. When we look at some of the product sets and gaps, obviously we've talked about revenue and benefits in the UK is one area, but I guess the structure of the boroughs and the different government structures over there mean that there's sort of a broader remit.
Is there other alternative areas outside of maybe what we traditionally see as your hunting ground in Australia that you may be able to move into or in the adjacencies?
Stuart MacDonald
The simple answer is yes. We tried to explain a little bit of this at the investor day.
We tried to explain the complexity that sits underneath a council of our 18 or 19 products, depending on the vertical we're in. There's probably 80 products that are running a council; there's probably more than 100 products that are running a university.
We have the ability to look at what's there, but at the same time, as Ed said, for us, we need the right IP and we'd need that also those people to come across with that scar tissue and understanding to what we look at is 1 + 1 = 3. We need to make sure that when we bought CourseLoop, it was added not only from an ARR standpoint, but our messaging as an ERP, and that's where we get the excitement.
The simple answer to your question is absolutely, there's things that we're looking at all the time, and there's a lot of great companies out there. We just want to make sure that it supports the whole portfolio.
Josh Kannourakis
Okay. I'll leave it there.
Thanks, guys. Appreciate your time.
Stuart MacDonald
Thanks, Josh.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Cameron Halkett from Canaccord Genuity.
Please go ahead.
Edward Chung
Good day, Cameron.
Cameron Halkett
Morning, team. Quick one, if I can go back to Plus.
Ed, you've made comments in the media before around the potential adoption of Plus within the first year of being around 10% to 15% of your customer base. Anything you can sort of comment to around that stat now that you've done showcase, sort of post-showcase feedback, how that sort of evaluates and compares to that stat you've provided before?
Edward Chung
The slide you're referring to is the one that says maybe fastest uptake of ARR. I think if we take a big step back, when we attended showcase and gave that presentation, the unanimous feedback was that the customers expected AI, but no one expected Plus.
It has literally changed the game for ERP. I was standing beside a researcher, economic researcher, independent from TechOne—he's done work for TechOne, but he's done work for all ERP providers—and he said something to the effect of, "You have just leapfrogged the entire competition with Plus."
That's the feedback we're getting from our customers. Now, if you then fast forward to that moat slide and join the dots with some of the things that Stuart explained is that Plus with its conversational nature gets rid of a thousand screens, literally a thousand screens in our software, and with no clicks, no screens, just conversations, and no training, it literally changes the game.
No one has done or thought about what we have delivered for the showcase. Now, join that together with, when I'm using that as a user, if I only have Financials, like this higher education customer, now I need to have your HR because I can see the value.
Now I need to have your student management because I can see the value. It is a game changer.
It will accelerate. It in itself will be the fastest uptake of our products.
Do you want to add anything to that?
Stuart MacDonald
Just to give you a little bit of insight, too, just to give you some understanding of our confidence in it, right after the showcases, we built a schedule for demos, and so we built a whole scheduling system for the allotment of getting demos to our customer base. We were oversubscribed within the first week.
The want to understand it, the wanting to see that, the wanting of the teams to see it throughout its whole organization—I think Ed's actually demoing it as well.
Edward Chung
To next week, yeah. Yeah.
Stuart MacDonald
It is what everybody's asking about. It is bringing up the level of the conversation, and it's very exciting.
Cameron Halkett
Thank you. Second one is just it's obviously been questions around the net revenue retention, but just by nature of its definition, upgrades are the biggest component of it.
Given you've got the price increases coming through before, I believe it's March 31, should we expect that net revenue retention, at least coming into the following half, we are available to say at least anyway, should be at least 115%, particularly given, potentially to avoid some of that price increase if people procure earlier?
Edward Chung
Maybe the answer is yes, Cameron. We don't look at it that precisely.
We go, 115% is our goal and we'll deliver that with all the platforms and all the levers we have. It's just not that precise, Cameron, but we'll add to the conviction and the delivery of that number.
Cameron Halkett
Sure. Last one very quickly for Cale, just around R&D guidance.
You mentioned that there's been a bit of a pull-forward, I guess, arguably, to get everything ready pre-showcase. With the range still at 20% to 25%, is that something we should probably consider more drifts towards the middle of that range in the next few years rather than continue to be at the top end, just given that pull-forward you mentioned before?
Cale Bennett
Look, I think as time goes on, just the way that the business growth, we'll see that number drift towards the middle. I think, importantly for us, that it doesn't go below that range because we need to make sure that we're investing for the future.
I think that's a reasonable conclusion. We continue to find plenty of interesting things to set our R&D people's minds to, and they find it themselves.
Look, we'll continue to invest in the range, but you're right, revenue's growing pretty quickly, and that R&D investment is primarily people.
Cameron Halkett
Yeah. All right.
Thanks, gents. Done again.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Cameron.
Operator
Thank you. Your next question comes from Bob Chen from JPMorgan.
Please go ahead.
Bob Chen
Hey, morning, guys. Couple of questions for me.
Just in the UK, obviously really strong momentum there. Just how important are the Greenwich and Islington sort of contracts as a reference case for future customers?
Do you have potential sort of pipeline looking at those implementations before they've sort of pulled the trigger?
Stuart MacDonald
The simple answer is it's huge. If you look at the boroughs, they have the purchasing power to buy whatever they want.
They're always looking for the first person to really be that early adopter of that new concept, which was SaaS Plus. Islington being the largest borough doing it first was a natural progression to Greenwich, and there's a lot more behind that.
We're really excited, and getting the biggest ones, the best brands upfront is very, very exciting.
Edward Chung
Stuart, where Bob might have been going, and correct me if I'm wrong, Bob, is do we have to wait for go-live for those?
Stuart MacDonald
No, no, no, no. We got Greenwich within six months of the award of Islington, and we will continue that momentum.
The momentum's there, the pipeline's strong. They'll be paying attention, and the beauty of the boroughs, they all talk to each other.
It's actually the success of its implementation that was a validation for Greenwich to move forward, and that continues.
Bob Chen
Perfect. Then in terms of when you're thinking about resources or manpower to tackle that sort of pipeline, how does that sort of compare in the UK?
Stuart MacDonald
No, it's a really good question. We've built a concept of a slot.
We have looked at our goals for FY26 in the UK, and we've stratified it based on its profile of Financials, Supply Chain, EAM, and then we've looked at it from local government and education. We can see forward more than a year now related to the resourcing we need to achieve the goals we want.
We're really playing that far ahead, and we can see that all the way through. I was on a call last night with the team looking at FY27 in the slots we need, we can see that far ahead now.
Edward Chung
Stuart, can I add also that one, that's amazing and that was learned from our SaaS transitions, the concept of slots. When you match that with ERP in 30 days, we can do four slots today, just making that up.
Tomorrow we can do six slots, the day after that we can do eight, we get more and more efficient and we can scale without adding people, Bob. It's quite exciting times in the delivery part of our business as well.
Bob Chen
Perfect. Then maybe just a quick one for Cale.
I think you mentioned earlier just some duplicate infrastructure costs. Could you sort of quantify what that impact was to your earnings this year?
Cale Bennett
We won't sort of fully disaggregate that. It's a bit of a complex beast.
The team are working hard to modernize our infrastructure to make it more scalable, more performant for our customers as we continue to grow. I think what I said a little bit earlier and what we'll stick to is the rate of growth won't be as high as it was this year.
This is a bit of a step-up year as we duplicated some stuff temporarily.
Bob Chen
Great. Thanks, guys.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Bob.
Operator
Thank you. As there are no further phone questions, Edward, we will now pause briefly and take questions from the webcast.
Edward Chung
Thank you. Do we have to read these questions?
Operator
Your first question from the webcast comes from Cheryl Lam. Cheryl asks, "All customers now transition to SaaS.
What gives you confidence that churn will remain low? NRR in second half seems to have slowed down relative to the first half of 118%.
Can you provide some color on what drove this, any changes in operating environment in second half to first half?"
Stuart MacDonald
A little bit of clarification so we're on the same page. All of our TechOne traditional organic customers have moved to SaaS.
When we acquired C&T about 2.5, 3 years ago, there's still a few outliers there that are moving across, I just wanted to be fair. The churn is fantastically low.
Our customers are resonating, as we've said they would from the very beginning when we started the story almost 10 years ago now, that when they came across to our SaaS world, we coined the phrase which is "cloud is war." We would help them consolidate the rest of their outlying applications into our systems, and that's what's playing, and that's why the churn remains so low because they're actually taking more products, not looking to offset products.
Edward Chung
Thanks, Stuart. The second half of the question is about NRR and does it look like it's slowing in the second half.
I think we manage the business on a full-year cycle and we manage the business within all of our metrics and the heartbeat, I don't read into first half, second half. It depends where big deals happen.
Perhaps like we talk about government all the time, they are very lumpy. Higher education has very lumpy deals.
We manage the business over a full year, number one, and we're very happy with the result in NRR. Second part is our heartbeats are very important to us.
We have to deliver for our customers as well. All the metrics you saw met all of our expectations.
Thanks, Cheryl.
Operator
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time, which concludes our conference for today.
Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.
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