Somewhere in your contract book there's a clause that lets you raise prices every year, usually by inflation, sometimes by a fixed percentage. Pull ten contracts and set them against ten invoices. In a lot of software businesses, the clause is there and the increase isn't.
That's common. Simon-Kucher's 2025 Global Pricing Study, of more than 2,200 business leaders, found 53% of companies use contract indexation, and only half of those apply it consistently.
What happens to it in a sale
A buyer's diligence team reads contracts and invoices side by side. They'll find the gap. Then one of two things happens, and neither pays you for it.
Either they treat it as their upside: a value creation lever for year one of their ownership, in their model, priced at their multiple, which you've just handed over. Or they read it as a sign of weak pricing power and discount the rest of your growth plan accordingly.
The arithmetic
An illustration. On a business valued at four times ARR, £1m of recurring revenue from uplifts your contracts already allow is worth around £4m of enterprise value. Collected late as a one-off back-bill, it's worth £1m, once. Left alone, it's worth nothing to you and £4m to the next owner.
Why timing matters here too
Uplifts applied 18 months before a sale, with renewals that held, are part of your recurring revenue and your retention curve. Uplifts applied in the quarter before the data room opens look like window dressing, and a buyer will treat them that way. They'll also look straight at gross retention in the next cohort, because a price programme that pushed customers out is worse than no programme at all.
Doing it properly
1. Abstract every live contract: term, renewal date, uplift rights, caps, and anything that limits what you can charge.
2. Reconcile what each contract entitles you to invoice against what you invoiced.
3. Set uplifts by a matrix that reflects the customer's value and risk, not one flat number for everyone.
4. Have your account managers hold the conversation at renewal, as a commercial conversation, not a letter from finance.
5. Watch gross retention on every cohort you touch.
The clause is already in the contract. The only question is who gets paid for it.
Veridian Revenue Partners helps software businesses find and recover what their contracts already allow, with their own team having the conversations. See Exit readiness and Contract monetisation.