The honest CFO math, not the marketing math. Where the labor savings come from, what the consultant line item collapses to, and the recovered capacity you can actually point to on the operating budget.
Most security-tool ROI pages list "$4.45M average breach cost avoided" and call it the case. Your CFO will not buy that. They want to know what shifts on a line item they can name, on a budget cycle they can see, with a savings figure that survives audit. This page is that case, written for the conversation you actually have with finance. The numbers below are drawn from the pilot pattern across the customer base; your environment will deviate. The math is replicable, and we'll do the worksheet with your CFO during the demo if you want.
Where the savings actually come from.
Five sources, in the order they show up in the operating budget. The first three are concrete and easy to defend. The last two are real but harder to attribute, so use them as upside, not as the base case.
~$119k annual base case at a ~$200M-revenue SMB. Insurance and breach-cost effects sit above as upside.
1. Internal labor on inventory reconciliation
The single biggest line. Two to three FTEs at most SMBs spend three to five weeks each year reconciling the CMDB against the network inventory, then chasing down ownership for the orphans. At $150k loaded cost per senior engineer (salary, benefits, overhead), three weeks of capacity is roughly $8,500 per FTE per cycle. Two FTEs across two cycles per year (audit and renewal): $34,000 of labor reclaimed annually, conservatively. Larger SMBs with quarterly audit cycles see the number scale linearly.
2. Consultant displacement on evidence engagements
Most SMBs above $50M revenue use outside consultants for annual inventory-and-evidence work, especially in HIPAA and PCI environments. Typical engagement cost ranges from $40k for a focused inventory reconciliation to $120k for a full evidence-and-gap-analysis project. Continuous evidence collapses or eliminates the engagement; you still pay your assessor (QSA, CPA firm, C3PAO), but you stop paying twice for the work upstream of the assessment.
3. Audit fee reduction from fewer follow-ups
Auditors bill for back-and-forth. Each round of "can you produce evidence for control X" costs you time and the assessor's time. Continuous evidence cuts the cycles. Pilot customers report 15–30% reductions in net assessment-fee invoices, depending on the framework and the assessor's billing model. Conservative case: a $40k SOC 2 Type II engagement drops to $32k. Healthcare environments with HIPAA + PCI overlap see the larger end of the range.
4. Insurance premium effect
Carriers won't put it in writing that a specific tool produces a specific discount. What they will tell brokers is that "continuous evidence" environments price differently from "annual attestation" environments. The premium effect ranges from negligible (carrier already priced the risk low) to substantial (carrier was about to non-renew). Treat this as upside; don't put it in the base case. If your renewal is in the next two quarters, your broker can put the artifact-first conversation on the table and tell you what the carrier moved.
5. Cost of a near-miss avoided
The breach-cost-avoided framing is real but hard to defend with the CFO because nothing happened. The conservative version: count the near-miss events the pilot surfaced (unmanaged switches, banned-vendor hardware, USB attack-tool detections) and value them at the cost of the discovery cycle if the auditor had found them instead. That's a defensible number you can put in the appendix.
A worked example. ~$200M-revenue healthcare SMB, two facilities.
Anonymized from the pilot pattern, not a single customer. Inventory-reconciliation labor: 3 senior engineers × 4 weeks × $150k loaded ÷ 52 weeks = roughly $34,600 annually. Consultant displacement: $75,000 annual inventory-and-evidence engagement, fully eliminated. Audit fee reduction: 20% off a $48,000 HIPAA + PCI combined assessment = $9,600. Total annual hard-savings base: roughly $119,000. CybrIQ cost at this scale: per-deployment recurring, varies with environment shape. Payback well under 12 months in this example. Insurance-premium effect (upside): not counted. Breach-avoidance value (upside): not counted.
Lead with the labor reclaim and the consultant displacement. Both are concrete and defensible. The audit-fee reduction comes in year two when you have a clean engagement letter to compare against. The insurance and breach-avoidance numbers belong in the appendix, framed as upside the CFO can choose whether to credit. The honest case is stronger than the inflated one.
What you should not count.
Two numbers that show up on most security-vendor ROI pages should not be in your CFO conversation. Industry-average breach cost (the $4.45M figure or its successors) is calibrated against enterprise-scale incidents and does not translate cleanly to SMB exposure. Quoting it makes the CFO discount the rest of your math. Hours-saved-from-automation on tasks the team wasn't actually doing manually is similarly suspect. The labor savings in this page are tasks your team is doing now and will stop doing, which is the defensible version.
If you want the CFO to come out of the conversation believing the math, the test is whether they can re-derive each number from their own records: payroll for the labor reclaim, AP for the consultant spend, last assessment's engagement letter for the audit-fee baseline. Every line we put on the worksheet maps to a record the CFO already maintains.
Want to run the worksheet with your CFO?
A live demo of the platform and a conversation about whether CybrIQ fits your environment. The ROI calculator is available as a follow-up resource if you want to work the math against your own cost structure post-demo.
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