Investment governed
end-to-end.

Submission → financial appraisal → stakeholder sign-off → executive decision → benefits realisation. Every approval signed, timestamped, and attributable. The audit trail is generated as a side-effect of using the workflow.

“I want one view of every approved investment, the case behind it, and the contract that came out of it.”

§ CFO / Investment Boards
BC-2026-Q1-047 · ledger ° APPROVED
09:41:02SUBMITA. Patel · Submitter£1.4m
10:17:38REVIEWFinance · M. Singh£1.4m
11:02:15APPRAISE5 Case ModelNPV +£3.2m
14:33:09SIGN-OFFCFO · J. Adeyemi£1.4m
15:41:55APPROVEDInvestment Board3-yr horizon
+ laterBENEFITRealisation tracker+£3.7m
II — CAPABILITIES

Five Case Model
without the spreadsheets.

Strategic, economic, commercial, financial, management — every dimension of the case captured in a structured form, comparable across submissions, with the maths done for you.

Five Case Model templates

HMT Green Book-aligned templates for strategic, economic, commercial, financial, and management dimensions. Comparable across submissions.

Configurable approval paths

Bands by value: £250k, £1m, £5m approval thresholds. Per-band approver groups. Parallel or sequential.

Financial appraisal

NPV, IRR, payback, sensitivity. The maths is in the platform — not in someone’s laptop spreadsheet.

Benefits realisation

Approved-vs-realised tracking past go-live. Quarterly check-ins. Slippage flags before the auditor finds them.

Audit trail by default

Every comment, attachment, decision, and rejection logged immutably. Reconstructed history is impossible — the history is the workflow.

Connected to the rest

Approved cases link to the contracts that came from them, the suppliers selected, the services they support, the ADRs they shaped.

III — CONNECTIONS

How it connects.

A business case isn’t a standalone document — it links forward into delivery and back into governance.

→ Contracts. Approved cases produce contracts. Spend tracked against the case that funded it.
→ Suppliers. Selected suppliers attached. Risk rating re-checked at sign-off.
→ Service catalogue. Cases reference the services they enhance, replace, or retire.
→ ADRs. Architecture decisions made under the case are linked back to it.
→ Audit trail. Every transition signed, timestamped, attributable — database-immutable.
II·b — CONTEXT

The Five Case Model, governed end-to-end.

HM Treasury’s Five Case Model is the standard framework for public sector investment decisions. The five cases — Strategic, Economic, Commercial, Financial, and Management — require that every investment is assessed not just for financial return, but for strategic alignment, market value, and delivery confidence. NHS organisations, government departments, and regulated bodies operating under public procurement rules are required to follow this structure for significant spending decisions.

Private sector financial services firms use equivalent frameworks under different names. The substantive requirement is the same: demonstrate that investment decisions were made against documented criteria, reviewed by appropriate authority, and that the reasoning is traceable if challenged by a regulator, an auditor, or an internal review board.

The practical failure is rarely the framework itself. It is the process around it. Business cases drafted in Word, approved by reply-all, filed somewhere that only the author can find. When the investment goes wrong — or when it goes right but the benefits are never measured — there is no record of what was committed to and when.

HelixGate business case governance provides a configurable approval workflow with authority bands based on investment value, a structured case template that maps to the Five Case Model, and benefits realisation tracking that connects the case to the outcomes agreed at approval. Every approval is stamped, attributed, and immutably logged. The audit trail does not require reconstruction.

Further reading
§ Closing statement

See it on a real case.

Bring an investment your team is wrestling with — we’ll walk it through the workflow on a demo tenant.