5 Reporting and SaaS Metrics Must-Haves for SaaS Finance

Article credit: Sage 

When it comes to being an effective and efficient SaaS CFO, a fintech automation tool can be one of your best friends. Your company probably uses a communication tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams, right? It enables people to stay organized and accomplish more in smaller increments of time. 

Think of your accounting automation tool in the same light. It’s a technology-driven extension of you and your team that helps you keep your reporting organized and perform at your peak capacity.

Let’s take a deeper dive into five primary reporting essentials for SaaS CFOs and how an automation platform can help put them in your grasp.

1. Seamless KPI Tracking

We don’t have to tell you that accurate reporting is one of your top responsibilities. You already know that. 

But you might not know how essential staying organized is to create a profitable year for your company. Savvy finance leaders utilize automation to massively cut down on manual processes and the mental and physical clutter they create. 

They opt for software solutions that can give them access to all their essential SaaS metrics at a glance: 

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value) 
• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
• Customer Churn Rate
• …And many more

Having all of these SaaS metrics immediately available in one location is critical (this is known as data centralization).

2. Reliable Forecasting Abilities 

It’s not enough to report accurately and efficiently, however. As a C-level finance professional for a subscription revenue company, you need to make accurate, actionable forecasts that enhance your company’s bottom line.

An accounting automation platform can help you make reliable forecasts by: 

• Providing instant access to your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), subscription upgrades and contractions, churn, and other essential figures for reliable forecasts.
• Using the analytical power of automation to forecast different scenarios and make various revenue projections based on each.
• Examine your pipeline at a microscopic level to capitalize on trends and identify your most profitable product and buyer segments.

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of staying organized in your reporting and forecasting, let’s take a quick look at enhancing personal accountability for SaaS finance teams.

3. Accountability in Front of Your Board

When you’re giving a presentation in front of your company’s board, few things are more important than being able to trace accountability back to your team members for their exact contributions.

It may look good when you lay out your grand strategic vision for the coming quarter. But no matter how inspiring that vision is, you’re going to need to come back and prove a few things to your board: 

• Which members of your team contributed to specific corporate milestones such as AR gains
• How did your strategies and ideas reduce the company’s DSO (the number of days that sales remain unclosed) to optimize cash flow
• What immediate and traceable impact did you and your team have on quarterly and annual profits? 

Sage Intacct’s streamlined role-based dashboard will enable you to answer these critical questions with clarity and confidence. And if things don’t go as planned for a given quarter, you’ll be able to formulate an effective plan to get back on course.

4. Instant Access to Your Bill-To-Order Ratio

Also called the book-to-bill ratio, your bill-to-order ratio measures how many orders you’re receiving versus how many orders are being billed and fulfilled.

So if you’re fulfilling every order in real-time or close to it, you’d have a ratio of 1. That’s par for the course. The bill-to-order ratio becomes more important when your ratio falls above or below 1. 

A number above 1 shows you’re receiving more orders than you’re completing and billing across a particular period. It shows that you might need to look for payment processing issues and other problems stemming from excessive user demand.

A number below 1, on the other hand, implies that user demand might be starting to wane a bit. Even though this may not seem like great news, it gives you a chance to analyze which customer and product segments might be losing steam.

Remember, knowledge is power, and if you can figure out how to fix bad news, you’re still well-positioned. An automation tool like Sage Intacct can help you and your team keep track of your bill-to-order ratio accurately and effectively, so you can develop strategies and solutions in real-time.

5. Strategic Bandwidth 

When it comes to reporting and forecasting, aim to maintain a firm grip on two things at once: the daily developments occurring in your business and a forward-looking sense of the coming months and years. 

As you can imagine, this can be a tall order for even the most experienced CFOs. Automation is one of the best and fastest ways to reduce data siloed, and increase your team’s strategic bandwidth.

Eliminating manual processes will enable you to orient your entire department around long-term strategic thinking and high-value activities. 

Empower Your Finance Team Today 

Automation is the only way to report and forecast with maximum reliability and effectiveness. Contact us today to learn more about how Sage Intacct can help your business.