What is a business case?

A business case is the deliverable Serre exists to produce: a quantified, defensible answer to the question every buyer eventually asks — "what is this actually worth to us?"

It pairs one prospect (the company you're selling to) with the solutions and value drivers from your library, fills in that prospect's real numbers, and produces ROI, payback, and net present value — plus a range, not just a single point estimate.

The shape of a case

Every business case moves through six phases, shown as a stepper across the top of the case editor:

1. Brief — who the buyer is, what they care about, what they'll object to.
2. Drivers — which value drivers from your library apply to this deal.
3. Inputs — the prospect's actual numbers: their current state and the improvement you're proposing.
4. Calculate — Serre runs the math and stamps the result.
5. Val Review — Serre's copilot pressure-tests the case before a CFO does.
6. Deliver — exports, share links, and meeting prep.

You can move back and forth between phases. Nothing is final until you calculate.

Statuses

• Draft — the case exists but hasn't been calculated yet.
• Generated — the case has stamped results and is ready to deliver.
• Archived — retired; hidden from your main lists.

The numbers are frozen on purpose

When you calculate, Serre takes a snapshot: the formulas, inputs, and results are stamped exactly as they were at that moment. If you later improve a value driver in your library, business cases you already generated do not silently change — the version you showed a buyer last month still says what it said last month.

New cases pick up the improved driver automatically. To bring an older case up to date, re-run its Calculate step — that stamps a fresh snapshot with the current formulas.

This is deliberate. A business case is a document you put in front of people; documents that quietly rewrite themselves don't survive procurement.

Related

• What is a value driver?
• How Serre calculates ROI
• Build a business case