ACV has been proven to be a furphy. It's supposedly the...

ACV has been proven to be a furphy. It's supposedly the contracted revenue per year, or the total amount that clients have committed to spend each year. As I have long maintained, in B2B SaaS this "commitment" is merely an intention, and sometimes clients will spend more, sometimes less. This is simply because the service provided is charged per the level of usage, not a flat fee. I don't think the "commitment" is complete BS but it's an estimate or best guess based on the pre-sales process. In this way ACV is a forward looking, expectation based metric.

The ARR should be an extrapolation of "what's the annual revenue if everything continued as current". For simpler business it might be as simple as last month's revenue x12, but I'm sure it's more involved for 3DP due to spiky usage and enterprise invoicing patterns. But we would expect that ARR is much closer to the reported revenue number than ACV ever was.

Given the ACV-revenue disconnect (as noted ACV ~$19m, Revenue ~$8m) it's likely that ARR will between those two values. The market will definitely be watching for evidence (i.e. accuracy) of the ARR number, and we want to see that the half yearly revenue number is at least close (i.e. no more than 20% lower) than half of the ARR number. If ARR is $12m then I'll be disappointed but believe it; if it's $20m then I'll be pleased but skeptical until I see confirmation in the half yearly revenue number. Either way the quarterly receipts number will be more useful than an unproven ARR metric.

edit: For anyone complaining about this distinction between "contracted" and "intended" spend, see the key line in GF's post: "Because SaaS businesses like Pointerra have a no lock-in/commitment commercial model (ie the customer can cancel at any time)..."