Lingua franca

The chart every PE deck already uses. Live, off your real books.

PE firms and CFOs read businesses in bridges. We made the bridge the centerpiece of every output — period bridges to diagnose what happened, plan bridges to prescribe what's next. Every bar drills to the entries that drove it.

See your bridge → Or back to diagnostics

Two flavors. One component.

Same waterfall. Different question.

Period bridge · diagnostic

Last period → this period.

Q1 EBITDA was $1.82M. Q2 was $1.94M. The period bridge decomposes the $120k gain by lever and account: price contributed +$180k, mix shift +$92k, labor drag −$48k. Each contribution attributed to the lever that most likely explains it, derived from your driver observations.

Plan bridge · prescriptive

Baseline → target.

Baseline EBITDA is $1.82M. Your Q2 Stretch scenario projects $2.09M. The plan bridge shows the path: price +4% adds $180k, mix shift adds $92k, the labor lever drags $48k. Drill any bar to see the projected entries by location, with intercompany eliminations attributed to a synthetic entity so they remain auditable.

Attribution

Every bar traces to a journal entry.

For period bridges, the attribution engine walks the lever-account mappings backward from each delta to identify the levers most likely to explain the movement. When multiple levers map to one account, the engine uses observed driver values to allocate the contribution — not a flat split, but a calibration on what your business actually did.

For plan bridges, the attribution is read directly from the projection. The projector already wrote per-lever contributions during projection; the bridge consumes that map. No re-derivation. Clicking any bar resolves to the specific journal entries (period) or projected line items (plan) that drove it.

Small contributions group into "Other" so the bridge stays readable (5% default threshold)
Per-entity attribution: which locations drove each bar, when scope is consolidated
Tooltip on each bar: value, percentage of swing, the historical envelope of the underlying driver
Click any bar → side panel with lever, accounts, transactions, and a link to the ledger view
Image and slide export sized for board-pack layouts (PNG, SVG, PPTX, PDF)

The bridge is intentionally a shared widget, not a dedicated page. It plugs into the EBITDA report (diagnostic), the Scenarios edit page (plan), the What-If page (live plan), the Sensitivity tornado tooltip (mini-bridge), and the Goal Seek solution view (plan with target marker). One component. Every output.

Lingua franca · one waterfall, everywhere

AI bar-by-bar explainer

Click any bar. Get the CFO summary.

Every bar on every bridge has an "Explain" popover that sends the bar's lever, the underlying delta, the driver envelope, and recent operator history on that lever to the AI — and returns a one-paragraph plain-English narrative. Why did this bar move? What lever caused it? How does it compare to what this business has done before?

The "Explain the bridge" header action does the same for the whole waterfall at once: a CFO-style summary suitable for paste into a board memo. Every call lands in the audit log; every claim cites the calibration source.