And those deals are, as you mentioned, profitable and cash flow positive. So this one just sort of happened to come first. We do have some other steps that we think we can execute on, that in addition to our operational improvement of Resolute’s performance was, accretively from a cash flow and profit standpoint as well.
Allen Klee: Thank you. In terms of — so the other — okay, how do you think about how you’re budgeting — how you would like to think about operating expense growth in fiscal ‘24 relative to revenues, like, excluding what I’m viewing as kind of one-time costs related to the proxy and acquisitions?
Bill Nurthen: Sure. Yeah, the answer to that is we’re basically not in the core business budgeting high growth rates and expenses. We essentially give our employees raises which on average amount to about 5%, so payroll would probably go up 5%. But otherwise in the core business, there is not sort of new investments we’re launching or additional expenditures of headcount that are material to the business. What I will say is, the costs related to getting the acquisitions done from a legal perspective as well as all the costs associated with the proxy issue we’re dealing with are very material. And so, we will — when we report Q1, we’ll itemize this stuff out and give everybody a clear picture and be transparent about sort of what is operational versus what we think is unique.
But it kind of goes back to my comments in the script. Core business really hasn’t changed, but there are some material things we’re dealing with on the acquisition side. I think that will prove out to be wise investment in the legal spend in the long term to get these deals done and in-house. But they will impact us in the short term.
Allen Klee: Okay, great. And then in terms of quarterly adding of ARR, how do you think about the actions you’re taking? Do you think that’s kind of the run rate for the last two quarters of incrementally added ARR, that’s probably a reasonable rate going forward, or is there any reason to think that either macro or things that you’ve done might change that?
Roy W. Olivier: Well, I don’t know how to answer that. We do remain concerned about some of the macro environment we’re seeing. We are continuing to see a lot of companies that have spending freezes in place, others that want to reduce their spend through reducing number of seats and that sort of thing. So, I am concerned about that, but I don’t know that I have any data to support a specific number.
Allen Klee: Okay, I have a housekeeping question. Can you tell us what your current share count is and maybe what the average share count was for the fourth quarter?
Roy W. Olivier: Bill?
Bill Nurthen: Yeah, sure. Current share count is probably, it was 29.5 million at quarter end. We’ll put our K out for filing shortly, and that will probably show about 29.6 million shares outstanding. As far as the average, I think that is — for the — basically for the year, I think it was around 29.1 million on a diluted basis — 29.1 million shares.
Allen Klee: Okay, great. Okay, thank you so much.
Roy W. Olivier: Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question is from Peter Rabover with Artko Capital. Please go ahead.
Peter Rabover: Hey, guys. Well, first I’d like to make kind of a statement on the proxy battle. I think it’s incredibly embarrassing for Peter and Paul to even engage in this. And Paul’s presence as a shareholder has been more negative than positive. And so, Paul, if you’re listening, we’re more than happy to help buy out your stake. So I would highly encourage for this matter to be settled as soon as possible and to stop the very expensive stuff that’s going on. So like I said, very embarrassing and I hope you guys stop it. With respect to questions, Bill, you have mentioned that there was an inflection point with new platform customers increasing transaction growth. And I was wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
Bill Nurthen: Yeah, so I mean, and I think — what we’ve historically seen on the transaction side of the business is pretty low growth and sometimes even negative growth rate on transactions. And that was basically historically, again, the company moving a lot of its existing transaction customers to the platform. And then when they go on the platform, they are typically experiencing cost savings which is one of the huge sort of benefits of our — that the platform offers to customers, a savings on their transaction spend. And so basically, transactions have been a headwind for us to overall company growth because typically each year they are flat to down. The analysis that we did was basically saying, hey, if we continue to onboard new customers at material rates which we did, especially in fiscal year 2022, and then again to a lesser extent, but still materially in fiscal year 2023, that those transactions — those customers who tend to spend three times their annual fee on transactions are going to start to offset the transaction savings that the older customers are getting.
And I think that’s what we’re seeing here as we look at the growth. Now that growth as we see in Q3, Q4 is a little bit exaggerated because of FIZ, which I talked about, but more of the growth rather than less of that growth is organic and we expect that organic growth can continue as we move into this fiscal year. So that’s just a trend where I think we sort of have turned the corner, whereas in the past it’s always been hard to predict that. And in some cases we’ve been, again, like down or flat.
Peter Rabover: Okay, great. That was very helpful. I’ll jump off now. Thanks.
Roy W. Olivier: Thank you.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Roy Olivier for any closing remarks.
Roy W. Olivier: Well, thank you. And thanks, everyone, for joining us on our call today. We look forward to speaking to you in November to discuss our first quarter fiscal 2024 results. Have a great day.
Operator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
