MIND THE GAAP

Encore Week 1

A week after release, why we're keeping a low profile, a smarter Model Builder, a change journal born from a holiday-party argument, and last week's polish.

Rusty Luhring · · 4 min read

Out in the Wild

Encore was technically put out in the wild a week ago, but we are intentionally keeping a low profile. The goal for this quarter is to sign up 5 or 10 early adopters and offer them white glove service to help us tweak and prove the product. Not for free, mind you. We want customers with skin in the game.

So far we have table stakes: a basic website, a free trial, and a path to purchase. Plus a brief announcement on LinkedIn.

New Model Builder

I have wanted to make one more pass at the Model Builder feature, and finally I have an excuse. We're going to need to build a ton of models in the coming weeks, and it will be nice to have a tool that does the heavy lifting.

I had Claude build the first demo model after using ChatGPT to help pick an industry. It came up with a 3 location HVAC sales and service company as a good one to start with.

Claude did a great job of building out the model and reporting system, and coming up with credible sample data. The balance sheet balances for all time periods! Do you know how hard it is to do by hand? I do. Claude even included a nifty sensitivity exec file that automates sensitivity to maintenance contract renewal rates and even reports the lowest cash point for each scenario. (See sample PDF.)

But I realized I know nothing about how these businesses operate. It made it tougher to put on a credible demo.

The next model is going to be a new demo model, and I will use it to further improve the model building experience.

Part of the value that Encore proves is the 870 line markdown file it passes to an LLM with guidance on how to build a model. The overall design philosophy:

An Encore financial model should be understandable, auditable, and durable.

The logic file should read like a structured financial statement, not like a pile of spreadsheet formulas. Imported data, calculated statements, projections, validation checks, non-financial drivers, and KPIs should each have their own visible place in the model.

The goal is to make the model explainable to a CFO, maintainable by a model builder, executable by the Encore engine, and understandable by Trusty or another AI assistant embedded inside Encore.

Besides fine tuning of the markdown file, the current release of Encore (1.1.32 or later) includes an addition to the Model Builder. The last step before "Finish" is "Model Guide." It builds a complete guide on how to run the model, and the guide is available under the Help Menu.

Change Logging

I did a demo for the finance team at Issuetrak, and we were using a real live model to update our projections for the rest of the year. We needed to account for my brother Hank's latest crazy ideas, a change in month for the holiday party, and a welcome spike in add-on sales to current customers.

The three of us got into an argument over what we agreed to use for Travel Expenses for our remote employees to attend the holiday party. Vicky and I remembered one number, while Taylor insisted it was twice as much. (It turns out Taylor was right.)

Then both of them said: it sure would be nice if changes to the projections were logged so we could tell when a change was made and why.

We are doing the budget for 2027 in the next couple of weeks, and it sure would be nice to have this feature in time for that!

That was a couple of days ago. Me and Claude Code got right to work. See it in version 1.1.32!

Last Chance for us to screw around with the UI

Here's a summary of what was done last week:

Main screen and grid

  • Back button and Esc exit the By Row, By Column and Drilldown views.
  • Grid zoom with Ctrl+wheel, Ctrl +/-/0 and a View menu item, remembered per user.
  • Column-name drilldown: a year opens its quarters, a quarter its months, YTD its months.
  • Cells in columns written by column statements drill into their source columns. Drilldown also drops its dependency map whenever the compiled logic changes, which fixed the Northfield "no dependencies" report.
  • The chart stays up across tab switches, drilldowns and view changes until the next click. YTD mode now charts the last actual month's YTD for every year. A crash when dragging a row onto a line chart inside a column drilldown is fixed.
  • Typing into a protected cell beeps and shows a short notice beside the cell.
  • The Forecast action button became Change Log, the Change Journal viewer uses pick-lists for row and column filters, and Show Logic now finds where a row is calculated rather than only where it is used.
  • Tours and Did You Know tips were rebuilt twice to match the new layout.

Change journal

  • Core model, recorder and archive with tests, then every user action journaling its changes, manual notes with authorship, a history viewer, Trusty and MCP tools, the SAVEJOURNAL exec command, and preferences plus an instance-level switch.

Trusty, exec and salary projection

  • Brief replies toggle on the chat toolbar that also quietens the chat pane. The read_file tool opens Excel workbooks with sheet and range options.
  • DECIMAL, COMMAS and BRACKETS format numbers in DISPLAY, MSGBOX, WRITE and WRITELINE.
  • Salary projection warns before the first forecast month overwrites actuals.
  • Export Model's save dialog starts in the model's own folder.
  • Row sync treats a row that only moved in the logic as out of sync.

To get the latest version, download the free trial from the website if you haven't already done so.

Otherwise, from the Encore End User screen, select Help → Check for Updates.