Does Tollgate calculate ROI?

Short answer: yes, and deliberately no. Tollgate calculates ROI explicitly up front — as NPV, IRR and a payback date in the financial case — because that number is the target you’re committing to. What it does not do is keep a live, recomputed “actual ROI” running inside the tool as the governance signal. The forward number is a benchmark to steer against; it isn’t a scoreboard the tool maintains.

The number Tollgate computes: the target

At Approval, the business case carries a financial case — a P&L cashflow from which Tollgate computes NPV, IRR and payback (either from the model you build in the tool, or reconciled against figures you attach). That is a real, explicit ROI calculation, and it does what a forward number should: it forces the assumptions into the open and gives the investment a benchmark to be held against.

Through delivery, that target is one of the measures your outcome status and confidence are tested against — alongside the other things the case describes: the outcome statement, KPIs, and adoption. It’s a reference line you steer against, not a live tally.

See Build or attach a financial case for how the NPV/IRR/payback figures are produced.

The number Tollgate refuses to fake: the realised score

What Tollgate will not do is emit a single realised ROI — a variance percentage of actual-versus-expected return, recomputed and shown with a green tick. On a real technology investment that number is false precision, for three reasons:

Counterfactuals are invisible. To know the true return, you’d have to know what would have happened if you hadn’t made the investment — and that world never ran. You can’t measure against it.
Attribution windows are long. The benefits of a platform migration or a transformation arrive over years, tangled up with everything else the organisation did in the meantime.
Causal chains are contested. Whether the uplift came from this investment, the market, a reorganisation, or three other projects, is a matter of argument — not arithmetic.

A calculator that emits one realised number where all of that subtlety lives isn’t a precision instrument — it’s a polite fiction with a green tick, and a green tick is exactly what a steering committee trusts without interrogating. The forward target is a stated assumption you can argue with; a realised score pretends the argument is settled. So against the target, Tollgate’s signal is judgement, not a recomputed measurement.

What Tollgate holds instead: the target and the prose pair

The case file carries both the computed figures and the words. Two prose artefacts sit beside the financial case:

Return expected — authored at Approval, in the sponsor’s own words: what this is for, beyond the number. Immutable thereafter.
Return realised, as judged by the sponsor — authored at the twelve-month Realisation verdict, in prose, by the person who signed the cheque.

At realisation the NPV/IRR target is the benchmark; the verdict is the prose pair — what we said beside what we got — not a variance percentage against the target. When the next sponsor searches for prior investments of a similar shape, those two paragraphs (next to the original financial case) tell them far more than “ROI: 112%” ever could.

The declaration is the governance act

At the verdict, the sponsor declares Realised, NotRealised, or “not ready yet”. That declaration — a named, accountable human putting their judgement on the record, against the target they were given — is the governance act. Tollgate’s job is to put what we said next to what we got and make the judgement easy to make and impossible to lose. It doesn’t dress an estimate up as a measurement to make the judgement for the sponsor.

This is the same instinct as the rest of the method: above the line, Tollgate surfaces the case file — numbers and words — and lets the accountable person decide.

Failures are preserved more carefully than successes

Because the verdict is prose, not a score, a NotRealised investment carries an elevated lessons-learned field — and its record sits in the corporate memory more visibly than the successes, not less. The next sponsor about to fund a similar business case needs the honest account of the one that didn’t land. A single realised-ROI cell would have flattened that into a red square someone would rather not click. The prose keeps the lesson findable. (This is the “kill with dignity” principle in action.)

What this means when you’re using Tollgate

Build the financial case — Tollgate computes the NPV/IRR/payback target from it. That target is real, and it’s the benchmark.
Write return expected in plain language too — the sentence and the numbers are both part of the case.
Don’t look for a live realised-ROI variance dashboard — there isn’t one, on purpose. Outcome status is judged against the target, not recomputed from it.
At the verdict, write what actually happened, honestly. The value of the record is the honesty, not a percentage.

Build or attach a financial case — where the NPV/IRR/payback figures come from.
The SAM methodology — the realised-verdict principle in the context of the whole method.
Above the line — why judgement, not a recomputed score, is the right altitude at realisation.
Run a benefits-realisation review — how the verdict works in practice.