The lunch remains our base period

During the lunch, the prospective client said the proposal sounded interesting. Three weeks later, she chose a smaller project, postponed the start and asked why discovery required a deputy chair. Our Constant Customer Office has restored her original interest. The revised forecast excludes the subsequent events because they occurred after the sandwiches.

We now maintain a reference customer for every engagement. This customer has the budget discussed at kickoff, the authority implied by the job title and no colleagues who need convincing. He answers clarification emails immediately. He has never received a competing bid. Delivery finds him unusually easy to work with, although nobody has managed to locate his accounts-payable department.

Vera has built a scale model of the reference market. Every miniature office contains a decision-maker, a signed scope and a clear route to approval. There is no procurement desk. The model was over budget until we classified its missing procurement desk as a saving.

A bridge with several missing destinations

An adjustment earns its place by answering a defined question. Holding exchange rates constant helps isolate one influence on a comparison. It does not eliminate the need to inspect the reported result, and it cannot establish that customers will purchase more work next quarter. Our analysts understand this. Their difficulty is explaining it on the slide immediately after the partner has announced an excellent quarter.

To assist them, we have introduced a reconciliation bridge. It starts with the revenue we actually earned, then adds back the contract we nearly won, the renewal we deserved and the expansion a client would have approved if she had understood our presentation. By the far bank, our growth is difficult to distinguish from ambition.

Cash continues to use the unadjusted figure

The distinction matters when a business has to choose what to fund. A useful comparison can reveal an operating trend; a forecast still needs explicit assumptions about demand, price, timing and delivery. If every unfavorable change becomes an adjustment, management loses the explanation it needs precisely when it most needs one. Our firm has resolved this tension by assigning explanations to a different committee.

Chip still prepares the cash schedule from the actual contracts. It is shorter, which Finance considers an accessibility improvement. He has suggested putting it beside the adjusted forecast so leadership can see both views at once. We have declined. The meeting room has one screen, and two views would require somebody to turn their head.

Flint has approved the reference market for immediate commercial use. The miniature customers are already receiving invoices. Chip asked what happens when they fail to pay. We will hold collections constant at the level of confidence expressed during the lunch.

Behind the brief: IBM’s third-quarter 2026 consulting results

IBM announced third-quarter 2026 results on October 21. It reported consulting revenue of $5.3 billion, flat year over year as reported and up 2% at constant currency. Constant-currency comparisons adjust for exchange-rate effects; they do not assume customers bought work they did not buy. SoftBoulders’ constant-customer measure, reference market and invoices above are its own invented response, not IBM policies or accounting practices.

News date: Oct 21, 2026. Article published: Oct 26, 2026. The policies and proposals in this article are SoftBoulders’ comic response; the linked sources describe the underlying events. Editorial notes.

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