You are Ana Cremades, Controller of VeloAnalytics, a Madrid SaaS scale-up six weeks away from a Series B partner roundtable. On January 2 the sales team closed a three-year, €1.2M enterprise contract — the largest in the company's history. The CEO wants €1.0M of it on the FY2026 P&L. The auditor at PwC says €427K. The gap is real revenue, real pitch optics, and real audit exposure. By Friday you owe a memo with one number, your initials, and a defence that will survive a restated quarter post-funding.
The situation
VeloAnalytics is a B2B SaaS scale-up headquartered in Madrid: a real-time analytics platform combining in-store footfall and e-commerce telemetry for mid-size European retailers. Founded in 2021 by two ex-Inditex data engineers, the company has grown to 47 employees, €4.2M ARR, and a customer roster of 38 logos — mostly Spanish and Portuguese fashion, beauty, and home retail. The product works. The retention curve is good. The market is real.
You are Ana Cremades, 33, CPA accredited by ICAC, ex-EY auditor (assurance, retail & technology, five years), Controller at VeloAnalytics since March 2024. You report jointly to the CFO, Juan Pablo Lasagabaster, and the CEO, Iván Romero. You came from the audit side specifically because you wanted to build accounting rather than test it. You have been doing that for two years.
The company is in the closing innings of a €12M Series B raise to fund LATAM expansion (Mexico City and São Paulo as the first beachheads). The lead-investor term sheet is signed in principle with a tier-1 European growth fund; the partner roundtable is scheduled for the second week of March 2027, and the FY2026 audited numbers will be on the screen behind Iván while he presents. Revenue growth — not just ARR, not just bookings — is the single metric the partnership will index on.
On January 2, 2026, the sales team closed Tendencias Aragón S.A.: a 60-store mid-market fashion chain with a €120M top line, growing e-commerce, and a board that wants instrumented retail. Three-year contract, €1.2M total commitment, broken into four obligations: a one-time €200K setup & integration fee, €600K of prepaid SaaS licenses (8% discount for paying upfront), €300K of premium support billed annually, and €100K of prepaid credits for ad-hoc analytics consumed "as-and-when" with refund of unused credits at month 36. Cash hitting the account in Y1 is roughly €952K — about €1.0M.
On Wednesday morning Iván forwarded you a Slack thread from the night before. "Ana — for the Series B model we need to show €1.0M of Tendencias revenue in FY2026. Everything we'll have cashed by then. Push back on PwC if you have to. Growth is the story." Two hours later Pilar Goñi, partner at PwC and your lead audit signer, called the office line: "Ana, I read the Tendencias contract last night. Under IFRS 15 the Y1 revenue is €427K. Anything above that, I'm going to qualify the opinion or we're going to have a longer conversation than either of us wants. You know this. Let's not turn it into a fight."