A free business case checker. Score your business case against the gaps that stall CFO approvals — assumptions, data sources, scenarios, ownership — in three minutes.
Business cases rarely fail because the initiative is wrong. They fail because the document supporting it is incomplete in ways the author did not see. The benefit drivers are missing baselines. The downside scenario is implied rather than modeled. Risks are listed in the abstract rather than tied to specific assumptions. There is no clear owner for the largest savings line. The payback timeline conflicts with the implementation plan. None of this is visible to the team that wrote the case — but every bit of it is visible to the finance partner, the CFO, and the executive committee that will decide.
Readiness is the discipline of catching those gaps before the meeting. A ready business case is one where every projected benefit is anchored to a baseline metric the buyer already tracks, every key assumption has a sensitivity range and a named owner, downside and upside cases are presented alongside the base, dependencies are disclosed, and the path from approval to measurable value is explicit. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between an immediate yes and a request for more analysis that quietly never restarts.
The Business Case Readiness Diagnostic is a structured way to find the gaps before they cost you the approval. It does not write the case for you and it is not a template. It evaluates the case you already have against nine questions finance reviewers actually ask — about who owns the assumptions, where the data came from, and whether the financial logic can be traced — and returns a readiness score with the specific items to fix.
Run it before the readout. The diagnostic takes three minutes. The cost of skipping it is a stalled deal and a buyer who will treat the next version of the case with more skepticism than the first.
How well are the assumptions in your business case attributed and validated?
The diagnostic asks nine multiple-choice questions in three sections of three: assumption ownership, data sources, and financial logic clarity. Each answer scores from 0 to 3, so the total runs from 0 to 27. Every question counts equally — there is no hidden weighting.
Assumption ownership asks who provided the baseline data (named client stakeholders with dates score highest; your own assumptions or industry averages score zero), whether improvement rates have been reviewed and agreed by the client, and whether every key assumption has a named owner. Data sources asks where baseline cost and volume data comes from, how current it is — within the last three months scores highest, older than a year or unknown scores zero — and whether you can cite the source for every number in the model. Financial logic clarity asks whether someone unfamiliar with the model could trace any output back to its inputs, whether you have conservative, expected and optimistic scenarios, and whether output precision matches the quality of the inputs.
The result is a score out of 27 with a readiness band — CFO-Ready at 22 or above, Needs Work from 15 to 21, High Risk below 15 — a risk flag for every question where you chose one of the two weakest answers, and up to five improvement actions for questions where you did not choose the strongest answer.
The right time to run the diagnostic is after the business case draft is stable but before it is presented externally — typically two or three days before the executive readout. By that point the structure is set and the inputs have been pressure-tested internally, but there is still time to address what the diagnostic surfaces. Running it earlier produces too many noisy gaps; running it later means the fixes happen under deadline pressure or, worse, after the case has already been rejected.
The tool is built for the people who own the case. That includes value engineers and value consultants drafting deal-specific business cases, account executives writing the case that goes to procurement, customer success managers preparing renewal or expansion justification, sales engineers translating technical fit into financial language, and finance business partners reviewing vendor proposals before approval. Buyers also use it as a structured way to evaluate inbound vendor business cases without having to read through an entire deck.
It is less useful for very early discovery — the diagnostic assumes you have an actual draft to evaluate, not a placeholder. If the case has not yet been written, start by getting to a first number: the free SaaS ROI calculator and cybersecurity ROI calculator each turn a handful of discovery inputs into a first model. Come back to the diagnostic once the draft is in place.
After the nine questions, the diagnostic returns a score out of 27, a readiness band, risk flags and improvement actions. Here is an example for a case with client-supplied but unattributed baselines, improvement rates borrowed from past implementations rather than agreed with this client, data up to a year old, and a single scenario.
Risk flags
Improvement actions
The flags and actions are the most useful part of the output. Each flag names a specific gap a finance reviewer will find, and each action is the concrete change that closes it, which makes the result easy to take back to the document. The score itself is secondary — the goal is not to maximize the number, it is to fix the items that would have stalled the approval.
Treat the result as a punch list and start with the risk flags. Each one maps to a specific fix: an assumption register with a named owner for every estimate, client sign-off on improvement rates, a refresh of any data older than six months, a source citation for every input, a short methodology note that traces outputs to inputs, and conservative, expected and optimistic scenarios in place of a single set of numbers.
Once the fixes are in, run the diagnostic a second time — a score of 22 or more puts the case in the CFO-Ready band. For the method behind these fixes, the CFO-Proof Business Case Guide shows how to sort assumptions by evidence quality and build logic, evidence and stress defenses before the review.
This diagnostic checks whether the case as a whole is attributed, sourced and traceable. The ROI Defensibility Checker stress-tests the ROI itself: how improvement rates were derived, whether sensitivity on key variables has been tested, and how much the return depends on client execution, implementation timelines and external dependencies. Run it next if your case leans on projected improvement rates or a large implementation.
Common questions about business case readiness, how the diagnostic works, and how to use the result.
Business case readiness is the degree to which a written business case is prepared to survive executive and finance review without rework. It is not the same as the strength of the underlying ROI. A business case can have strong economics and still fail readiness — and a moderate ROI with a complete, well-sourced case will frequently outperform a stronger ROI built on shaky inputs. Readiness covers assumptions, data sources, scenario coverage, ownership, risk disclosure, and the connection between projected benefits and the buyer's reporting system.
A template gives you the structure. The diagnostic evaluates the substance. You can fill out a polished template and still have a case that finance will reject because the assumptions are unsupported, the scenarios are missing, or the benefits cannot be tracked after the deal closes. The diagnostic checks the substance — whether the content inside the template will hold up under scrutiny.
Nine specific gaps, one per question: baseline data with no client attribution; improvement rates that have not been validated with the client; assumptions without a named owner; baseline costs or volumes taken from benchmarks or your own standard assumptions instead of the client's financial systems; data that is more than six months old; numbers with no documented source; calculation logic only the model's creator can explain; a single scenario with no sensitivity analysis; and false precision such as $2,847,329. Each weak answer produces a risk flag naming the gap and an improvement action that fixes it.
About three minutes for nine questions. The questions are multiple-choice, no documents need to be uploaded, and the result is generated immediately on the same page. There is no email gate.
Value engineers, account executives, customer success managers, sales engineers, and finance business partners — anyone authoring or reviewing a business case that will go to a buyer's executive committee or CFO. It is also useful for buyers reviewing inbound vendor proposals; the diagnostic gives a structured way to find weak spots without reading through fifty pages of supporting material.
After the business case draft is stable but before it is presented externally. Two to three days before the executive readout is the sweet spot — the inputs are settled enough to evaluate, and there is still time to fix what the diagnostic surfaces. Running it after rejection is informative, but the time to fix issues was earlier.
The score, out of 27, reflects how many of the standard finance-review questions the case already answers well. 22 or more is CFO-Ready: most obvious objections are pre-empted in the document itself. 15 to 21 is Needs Work, and below 15 is High Risk. A low score does not mean the underlying initiative is wrong — it means the written case has gaps a reviewer will surface in the meeting, which materially reduces the odds of an immediate approval.
No. The diagnostic is structured around the questions any executive committee asks about a discretionary investment — software, services, internal projects, transformation initiatives. The wording is most natural for vendor business cases because that is the most frequent use, but the underlying questions are domain-agnostic.
No. It is diagnostic, not generative. It tells you where the case is weak and what needs to change. The fixes themselves — gathering baseline metrics, building sensitivity scenarios, naming assumption owners — still have to be done in the underlying document.
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