Methodology

Your next quarter,
mapped before it happens.

One client walks. Revenue drops 20%. Small businesses swing harder — and they’re the ones who need to see it coming most.

This engine gives you a range of scenarios, weighted by likelihood. The most likely card lands correctly 86.6% of the time. Counting the top two scenarios, the truth is captured 89.1% of the time. Out-of-sample validated: priors fit on pre-2020 data, predictions tested on 2020 and after — no leakage, no overfit.

359,896predictions · 18,423companies
0
Companies tested
0
Predictions validated
5,000
Sims / upload
3–7
Scenario cards
Why this matters

Every tool you have looks backward.

Your bookkeeper tells you what happened. Your accountant tells you what happened last quarter. Your bank statement tells you what happened yesterday.

None of them tell you what’s about to happen.

For a small business, the thing you don’t see coming is the thing that kills you.

0%
Forward visibility today
86.6%
This engine (next quarter, OOS)
By data depth

The more you share, the sharper the read.

Two numbers — revenue and costs — are enough. The engine reads your trajectory from those alone.

Share your balance sheet and it sharpens further. Cash runway, leverage pressure, margin compression — things revenue alone can’t show you.

Accuracy by data depth
What you uploadModal hitBand widthWhat the engine sees
Revenue + costs (2 fields)86.6%1.17×Growth trajectory, sector patterns, scenario probabilities
+ Balance sheet (9 fields)89.4%1.35×Above + cash runway, debt pressure, margin health, real cash-burn detection. Sharper modal hit, modestly wider bands, catches cash-burn cases the basic engine misses.

The 9-field engine fires on 98.9% of out-of-sample predictions where balance-sheet data is available. The balance-sheet signals adjust the engine's read toward your specific financial profile and overlay real cash-out detection. Modal hit rises to 89.4% (vs 86.6%), top-2 to 91.1% (vs 89.1%), and outside-any-band drops to 2.1% (vs 2.6%) — better across every accuracy metric. The cost is modestly wider bands (1.35× current revenue vs 1.17×): the engine knows more about what could go wrong and admits more uncertainty in the tails. Catches cash-burning rising-revenue cases the basic engine misses.

By company size

Honest numbers at every scale.

The pooled 86.6% number is pulled up by large, predictable companies. Here’s the breakdown:

<$1M
50%
$1–10M
72%
$10–100M
83%
$100M–1B
87%
>$1B
91%

Larger businesses are inherently more predictable — diversified revenue, stable customer bases, less exposure to single-client swings. Smaller businesses swing harder, and the engine reflects that honestly.

The sub-$1M tier is dominated by pre-revenue junior explorers, speculative shells, and biotech capital-raising vehicles — not operating businesses. The 50% reflects how unpredictable those are and is included in the pooled number for transparency, not because we think the engine is broken.

How it works

Your data goes in. Scenarios come out.

Upload a spreadsheet. The engine reads your revenue trajectory, calibrates against thousands of similar businesses, and simulates hundreds of possible futures for next quarter.

Those futures cluster into 3–7 natural groups. Each group becomes a scenario card — a revenue range, a probability, a direction.

1
Spreadsheet
5,000
Simulations
3–7
Scenario cards
By sector

Some industries are more predictable than others.

The engine classifies every uploaded business into one of four cost-structure cohorts. Each cohort carries its own benchmark — what "typical" looks like for that kind of operation. Out-of-sample modal hit, broken out by cohort:

Out-of-sample modal hit by engine-classified cohort
CohortWhat it capturesModal hitTop-2Predictions
Standard servicesAgencies, professional services, B2B software, consulting88.0%90.5%73,505
Low-margin retailCafes, shops, e-commerce, F&B87.8%90.3%108,522
Capital-heavyManufacturing, logistics, infrastructure-dependent86.0%88.5%69,030
High-margin servicesSolo consultancies, design studios, knowledge work84.9%87.4%108,839

The cohort assignment is automatic — read from your numbers, not a self-report. Standard services and low-margin retail (the SEA SMB sweet spot) hit 88%; high-margin services slip slightly — they're a harder cohort to characterise confidently.

By region

Some markets work. Some don’t.

The pooled 86.6% hides a wide regional spread. The engine hits its highest accuracy exactly where Simpler is launching — and its lowest where public markets are dominated by speculative shells with corrupted reporting.

Out-of-sample modal hit by region
RegionPredictionsModal hitTop-2Outside any band
Latin America (Mexico, Brazil)4,32493.2%94.6%0.8%
East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, HK)191,92590.7%92.7%1.1%
Southeast Asia (MY, ID, TH, VN, PH, SG)54,84288.9%91.1%1.9%
North America (Canada-listed; limited US)18,70185.2%87.6%3.8%
Europe (UK, DE, FR, NL, Nordics)71,36281.7%84.8%3.9%
Oceania (Australia)18,74256.9%62.7%14.0%

Why Southeast Asia leads. SEA exchanges are overwhelmingly real operators — manufacturers, retailers, industrials, logistics — on mandatory quarterly reporting. The engine was designed for businesses like these, and the 88.9% accuracy reflects it.

Why East Asia is highest. Mainland Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese main boards mandate quarterly reporting and are dominated by established operators — a calibrated read on a well-disclosed market.

Why Europe and Oceania run lower. Both contain markets that file financials semi-annually rather than quarterly. The data feed reconstructs quarterly figures from those half-year filings, and the resulting series carry artifacts that any prediction engine will read as extreme volatility. On real-quarterly-reporting markets the numbers sit in the high 80s.

The Oceania subset remains in the pooled 86.6% headline. We don't exclude regions that look bad.

Every region number above is raw — no reweighting, no region-specific tuning, no cherry-picking.

So what does clean data look like?

Full data: 86.6%. Clean data: 87.3%. Almost no gap.

We ran the whole validation twice. First on the full dataset — every quarterly-reporting company, shells and commodity cyclicals and semi-annual-synthesis exchanges included. Second on a cleaned subset that excludes companies with (a) three consecutive identical revenue quarters (the semi-annual-as-quarterly synthesis pattern), or (b) raw sector classification in Basic Materials, Energy, Utilities, or biotech — the "real operating businesses on clean quarterly data" cohort a rigorous critic would demand.

Full data versus clean data modal hit rates
CohortPredictionsModal hitTop-2 hitOutside any band
Full data359,89686.6%89.1%2.6%
Clean data268,23087.3%89.7%2.1%
Δ clean − full+0.68pp+0.64pp−0.52pp

The clean-vs-full gap is under 1pp. Shells, cyclicals, and semi-annual-synthesis exchanges drag the pooled number by less than a percentage point. The engine handles messy inputs without hiding behind them.

Both published. 86.6% is the honest "include every messy input" number a critic would audit; 87.3% is what the math does on clean operator data. Neither is more correct; they answer different questions.

Output

Scenario cards, not spreadsheet rows.

Each card carries a probability, a revenue range, and a direction.

4%
76%
15%
5%
Sharp decline
Steady course
Moderate growth
Breakout quarter

The top card is your most likely quarter. The tail cards are what to watch for. Example output from a test business.

Convinced? Try it. Still skeptical? Keep scrolling.

Try with your numbers
Scale invariant

The math sees growth rates, not dollar amounts.

A bakery doubling from $5K to $10K and a listed company doubling from $50M to $100M are the same event to the engine.

Verified by running the same companies at six different revenue scales, from $100/quarter to $100M/quarter. Accuracy was identical at every scale.

What we miss — and why

More than 9 in 10 land in the predicted band.

When we miss, it’s almost always a business that just doubled or halved.

The engine misses about 7% of predictions. We characterized every miss:

81%of misses had revenue changes exceeding ±50% — doublings or halvings 94%had changes exceeding ±20% 85%median revenue change for misses 12%median revenue change for hits

The engine correctly captures normal business variation. It correctly misses the extreme events — a sudden major contract, a key client walking, a market shock. No spreadsheet predicts those.

Validation

359,896 predictions. One method.

Use the history available at that point in time. Predict next quarter. Compare against what actually happened. No peeking. No retraining on the answer.

These numbers validate the probabilistic math — the part that turns your spreadsheet into scenario cards with revenue ranges and probabilities.

Out-of-sample validation
MetricOut-of-sample
Correct scenario card (modal hit)86.6%
Correct in top 2 scenarios89.1%
Revenue lands in some predicted band97.4%
Engine's stated confidence (mean modal probability)72.5%
Calibration gap (hit − stated)+14.1pp under-claims
Width ratio (dominant band / current revenue)1.17×
Predictions tested359,896
Companies tested18,423

Out-of-sample protocol: sector priors are fit on pre-2020 data only; predictions are tested on 2020-and-after quarters with no leakage from the test period. Every number above comes from a single unified run, 5,000 Monte Carlo trajectories per prediction. Engine = source of truth: probabilities, ranges, and labels emitted by the engine flow through unchanged to these numbers — no post-hoc massaging.

Calibration

Stated 72.5%. Actual 86.6%.

“Bands too wide” is a fair criticism of any probabilistic forecast with a high hit rate. If the engine’s confidence in a card doesn’t match the empirical hit rate, the probability is lying. So we measured every one of 359,896 out-of-sample predictions — the modal card’s assigned probability vs whether the actual revenue fell in that card. A well-calibrated engine has them matching.

Calibration of the engine
MetricValueInterpretation
Modal hit rate86.6%Actual in the top-probability card
Mean modal card probability72.5%Engine’s own confidence in the top card
Calibration gap (hit − probability)+14.1ppEngine substantially under-claims confidence
Truth lands somewhere in our scenarios97.4%Outside-any-band rate is just 2.6%
Top-2 hit rate89.1%Truth in the modal or second-most-likely card
Mean width ratio (modal band / current revenue)1.17×Bands are wide enough to admit honest uncertainty

The engine substantially under-claims confidence — stated 72.5%, actual 86.6%, a 14pp gap in the safe direction. Truth lands inside some emitted scenario 97.4% of the time. Bands are wide by design — for an SMB operator, “revenue could be $X to $Y” is more useful than “revenue will be $Z” because the second is a lie that lets you plan wrong. When the engine says a range, the actual outcome lands inside it at the stated rate or better.

Design philosophy

Built for operators, not analysts.

The engine errs toward caution. An operator who plans for the cautious scenario and gets a better outcome has surplus. An operator who plans for optimism and gets worse has a crisis.

The cards don’t soften bad news. If the numbers say −30%, the card says −30%.

Limitations

What we can’t do.

No unlisted SMB validation yet. All 18,423 companies in the validation set are publicly listed. The math is scale-invariant (verified), but a 20-person private company in Southeast Asia may behave differently in a cash crunch than a publicly traded corporation. We're actively building a private SMB dataset in parallel — when it reaches statistical significance, both engines get re-validated against real Main Street behaviour, and the results published alongside these public-company numbers.
Reporting and validation methodology. The engine needs quarterly data — companies that file only semi-annually are excluded from validation. The 86.6% OOS modal hit number above is post-2020 only with priors fit on pre-2020 data. The 18,423-company comparison pool is what the engine reads against new uploads, regardless of what region the user is in.
The math doesn't read the news. The engine reads your trajectory and your sector's historical patterns — it doesn't numerically model recessions, pandemics, or regulatory changes in the probability bands.
Survivorship bias. Every company in the validation set survived long enough to have data. Companies that died before filing are absent.
Two fields, not twenty. Revenue and costs are enough — but they’re also limited. A company burning cash with rising debt looks identical to a healthy one if you only see the top line. The enriched engine sees deeper, but only if you share the data.
Forward validation

When user data arrives, we re-validate.

The current numbers are from public company data. Public companies are not pilates studios.

A private SMB dataset is being assembled in the background. When it reaches statistical significance — and as Simpler users accumulate 6+ months of uploads — we re-run validation on real Main Street businesses and publish the results, including every miss.

Pre-registered. No retroactive selection.

Try it with your numbers

This engine provides directional intelligence based on historical patterns. It is not financial advice, and past validation accuracy does not guarantee future performance. Do not make business decisions based solely on these projections. Consult a qualified financial advisor for decisions involving significant capital.