Our previous post examined the year-over-year change in RPO among various large companies from Q3 2024 to Q3 2025. Typically a rising RPO number is a good thing, because it suggests that the company is signing more contracts with more customers and is building a large pipeline of future revenue — but that’s not always the case. It could also mean the company is betting more future revenue on fewer customers, and if those customers don’t fulfill their revenue promises then everything melts down.

Today we want to study companies that report RPO by future period. Many companies make those disclosures, and with the right analysis you can get a better sense of what the future pipeline looks like. For example, Figure 1, below, shows the RPO by future period for Dell ($DELL).

This tells us that Dell has lots of future revenue already under contract. (For comparison purposes, Dell reported $95.6 billion in total revenue for 2024, and $71.6 billion through the first three quarters of 2025.) Even better, two-thirds of that $51 billion in total RPO is due within the next year; the sooner revenue is due to arrive, the less chance there is that some future event would disrupt your plans. 

Now consider another example from the tech world: Oracle ($ORCL). Earlier this summer Oracle announced a huge deal to provide data center services to OpenAI, but most of that revenue is back-loaded in the far side of a five-year deal. So Oracle’s expected RPO looks more like this, in Figure 2.

That RPO structure is very different from Dell’s. Much more revenue is tied up in later years, which means more time for some unexpected event to derail those projections. Moreover, lots of that future revenue is supposed to come from OpenAI (although Oracle doesn’t specify exactly how much). So if OpenAI does grow like crazy and deliver all that revenue to Oracle within the next five years, Oracle has a big problem.

By now astute readers will also be saying, “Wait a minute — Dell reports three tranches of RPO, but Oracle reports four. What’s up with that?” 

Good catch. GAAP accounting rules require all companies to report total RPO, but they aren’t required to report separate tranches of RPO (one year out, two years out, other future years, and so forth) according to any fixed format. 

For example, Google ($GOOG) reported total RPO of $157.7 billion in its most recent quarter. Fifty-five percent of that amount ($86.73 billion) is due within the next two years, but we don’t know whether the $86.73 billion is equally divided between year one and year two or falls along some other pattern.

How to Research RPO

This brings up another important point: not only can companies report RPO in a variety of formats; they can report it in multiple places in the earnings release and the 10-Q as well. For example, Boeing includes RPO inside a paragraph titled “Backlog” within its segment and revenue disclosure; Microsoft reports RPO in Note 11, Unearned Revenue; while RTX labels it directly as an RPO disclosure.

To complicate matters even more, many companies report RPO in the earnings release, but save disclosure of specific tranches of RPO for the subsequent 10-Q. 

Anyway, don’t worry. Calcbench has you covered. 

If you want to find RPO, you can start on our Multi-Company page. We track RPO as one of our standard disclosure metrics, so just enter the company or companies you want to research, type “remaining performance obligation” in the standardized metrics field, and see what comes up. See Figure 3, too, as an example.

From there you can use our Trace feature to see the specific RPO disclosure in the footnotes, which is where you’ll also find any information about tranches of RPO divided into future years. 

If you already know the specific company you want to research, you can also use our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page and search for “RPO” or “remaining performance obligation” or something like that, to dig up the exact RPO disclosure and all its data.

Or, if you’re a diehard XBRL user and have the Calcbench API, you can mainline all that RPO data right into your Excel models as soon as it arrives.