Firstly, on the topic of a new substantial holder, that may not...

Firstly, on the topic of a new substantial holder, that may not occur, as most likely JBs shares were placed through a third party to a variety of instos. As long as each insto remains below the 5% threshold, there would be no need to report.

Now to the smoke and mirrors......

SaaS co's are interesting. In general they use an accrual approach for reporting, rather than a  cash  approach.

This is because of the deferred revenue aspect. Typically, forward (or deferred revenue) are money's received for a service that has not yet been provided. Under the accrual approach, these funds are treated as a liability rather than an asset. That is because the money has not yet been earned, and could, theoretically be reclaimed. Periodically, as the service is delivered, the funds are credited to the earnings side of the balance sheet.

Now let's look at the BID half yearly- and just to mention here that GM told me last Monday that he had been working on the half yearly over the weekend, obviously to get it out a bit early and try to try to counter last weekend's dramatic sell off.

On page 1, management has used a term ASR, and quoted that at $3.7m, with a growth rate of 106%. Impressive.

But what is ASR? For that you need to read the fine print- namely the footnote on page 5.

ASR, it turns out, refers to "the annualised value of client contracts under management, calculated by reference to the expected monthly fee for BID Energy's energy management platform.

That is- it is a sort of forward revenue pipeline, of money expected to be received from services not yet delivered! This should really be recorded on the liabilities side of the balance sheet, if at all! And doesn't really rate a mention, at least not on page 1.

So where did all this "potential" forward revenue come from? Mostly, it seems that it was from one large deal, done on the 17th Dec 2018. The Cushman and Wakefield deal.

"As a result of this transaction, and other account wins since 30 September 2018, BidEnergy’sASR2 has climbed to $3.4M". C&W announcement.

But has this important deal even been onboarded yet, let alone commenced? There was absolutely no mention of it in the half yearly. And the two key drivers , AdP and GM are currently in the UK.

There is also another mystery figure- AR, at $2.2 mil, also highlighted on page 1. In the second footnote on page 5, this is also described as "rebate capture revenues which are project based and are annualised on a rolling basis on the last 12 months of project activity."

So this is also forward revenue, but estimated on past activity, rather than actual contracts. Estimated by who? The same people who worked through the weekend, and who needed to show a strong balance sheet to a rattled market on Monday morning, after an sp rout the previous week,

Stuff like this makes me nervous. Smoke and mirrors; potential revenue from deals not yet implemented, or, in the AR case, even won.