For the CFOSee exactly what your software development produces
Software is the largest line you sign off and the least legible. Arrio makes it as readable as the rest of the books: value per cost, vendor by vendor, team by team, and whether the AI spend is actually paying off.
The problem
The one line you cannot read
Every other major line in the accounts can be traced to what it produced. Software cannot. It is often the biggest number in the budget, it rises every year, and no one can tell you in business terms what it returned.
The gap is not yours alone: 49% of CIOs name the assessment of technology ROI as a point of contention with their CFO, and only 20% of CFOs are satisfied with the visibility they have into it (KPMG, 2025). Meanwhile AI budgets rise on faith, with only 25% of organisations seeing the returns they expected (IBM, 2025).
You cannot defend, renegotiate or reallocate a number you cannot see. What is missing is not another dashboard for the engineers, but an independent read of the value, in the language of the budget.
- Of CIOs name the assessment of technology ROI as a point of contention with their CFO. (KPMG, 2025)
- 49%
- Of CIOs name the assessment of technology ROI as a point of contention with their CFO. · KPMG, 2025
- Of CFOs are satisfied with their visibility into software spend. (KPMG, 2025)
- 20%
- Of CFOs are satisfied with their visibility into software spend. · KPMG, 2025
- Of enterprises achieve substantial ROI from their AI investment. (Master of Code, 2026)
- 5%
- Of enterprises achieve substantial ROI from their AI investment. · Master of Code, 2026
What you get
Value per cost, vendor by vendor
What every team and external vendor produces on one independent measure, set against what each of them costs.
The AI business case, proven
The AI-built share of the work measured against what it delivers, so the spend is defended with evidence rather than assumed.
Budget defence that starts from truth
An independent number to bring to the board and to procurement, one the people being measured did not produce.
Renegotiation leverage
Every vendor and external team on the same scale, against what they charge, before the next renewal.
How a CFO uses it
Not a dashboard to check. A sequence that turns the least legible line in your budget into one you can defend, question and redirect.
01Ask the question you cannot answer today
Pick the number you have never been able to defend at board level: what last year of software development actually returned, or whether a given vendor earns what it charges. That question becomes the scope.
02Read value against cost, line by line
Every team, division and external vendor on one independent measure of what they produced, set against what each of them cost. For the first time the software line behaves like the rest of the accounts.
03Take it into the renewal
Vendor invoices stop being a matter of trust. You walk into the renegotiation with an outside measure of what each supplier delivered against what they billed, produced by a party with no stake in the outcome.
04Settle the AI question with evidence
How much of the work is now AI-built, and whether that is showing up in delivered value. Either the business case is proven and you fund it harder, or it is not and you stop paying for a promise.
05Speak the same language as your CTO
The most useful outcome is often the least dramatic. Finance and engineering stop arguing from different numbers, because there is finally one independent measure both sides accept.
Questions
The questions worth asking
Can this be measured without slowing our teams down?
Yes. Arrio reads what the organisation produces from the codebases directly, read-only. There is no self-reporting and no time-tracking, so nothing is taken from delivery to produce the measure.
Is this surveillance of individual engineers?
No. The unit is the work, not the worker. Arrio measures output and value at the level of teams, divisions and vendors, and never ranks individuals. It is designed as budget defence, not monitoring.
How quickly would I see something useful?
Within days. The first reading includes history, so it arrives with a trend already in it rather than a snapshot that needs a year to mean anything.
Sources
- KPMG, 2025 49% of CIOs (against 39% of CFOs) name the assessment of technology ROI as a point of contention; 20% of CFOs satisfied with visibility.
- IBM, 2025 Only 25% of AI initiatives delivered the expected ROI (2025 CEO Study, 2,000 CEOs).
- Master of Code, 2026 Only 5% of enterprises achieve substantial ROI from AI.
Make the biggest line in your budget the most readable.