Financial Dashboards and Metrics for Software Companies

Article credit: Sage 

If you’re the CFO of a subscription billing company, you want to bring clarity to decisions, understand where to invest, and track cash-flow and SaaS metrics, in the chaos of dynamic, competitive markets. The best CFOs balance out this equation by giving their departments clarity and direction with SaaS metrics and role-based financial dashboards. 

It’s a common saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. But in the SaaS world, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t go anywhere because you’ll never generate any traction.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and financial dashboards will help pave the way to your success. KPIs give you a real-time snapshot of your business’s performance at different points: monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. 

They also allow you to analyze your revenue and cash flow patterns, identify where you’re wasting money, and more.

Financial dashboards are just as important. They give every person on your team a customized one-page view of all the financial information they need. With modern software tools, you can say goodbye to the headache of hunting down five different manual folders to gather data for an upcoming board presentation. 

But before we get deeper into dashboards, let’s break down the major KPIs and look at why they matter so much.

Unlock continuous improvement through KPIs

Tracking KPIs is one of the most critical essential responsibilities of any CFO and the broader finance team behind them. Identifying and charting your most valuable SaaS metrics enables your entire company to understand its position in the broader marketplace. 

KPIs offer insight into where you’re succeeding, so you can double down on those strategies. And just as significantly, they raise red flags about what’s failing, so you can alter or abandon bad ideas.

Some of the most important metrics for you to watch and report on include your: 

• Customer Acquisition Cost: Your CAC measures how much money you spent to acquire a customer or customer set. It helps you track which customers may not be worth the investment you’re making to obtain their business and which customers give more value than they take to acquire.

• Customer Lifetime Value: Your CLTV indicates how much revenue a given customer generates for your company before they unsubscribe from your product or service. Customers with a high CLTV should be prioritized for upsell cross-sell attempts, and you should target prospects with similar characteristics.

• Churn Rate: SaaS churn is a crucial metric. It measures how many of your users unsubscribe over a given period. A high churn rate could point to problems with your product or market fit, an issue with your payment processor leading to involuntary churn, or something else. Churn should be looked into and corrected quickly.

Keep your SaaS metrics at the top of your hierarchy of business values. Treat them like your guiding lights in the rough seas of a competitive market because that’s precisely what they are.

Stay organized with financial dashboards 

Financial dashboards are an incredible organizational tool for finance teams. They help every member of your team stay organized by condensing all the information that a particular person needs into one convenient screen.

These single-glance screens are known as role-based dashboards in the SaaS community. They allow your team to accomplish more in less time by eliminating manual accounting processes and reliance on outdated spreadsheet-based tech. 

With financial dashboards from SaaS accounting automation solutions, all it takes is a single glance for different members of your team: 

• The CFO Dashboard: This view allows CFOs instant access to all the cash flow data and metrics that your board (and investors) will want to know about.

• The Controller Dashboard: The Controller view puts every piece of information your Controller needs in one centralized location. A single click will give them access to cash flow metrics, wage and salary info, budgeting data, and more. 

If you’re sensing a common theme between SaaS metrics and financial dashboards, you’re right on the money. It’s all about staying organized and the quantum leap in results you can access by analyzing where you are, and where you’d like to go.

Invest in your success 

Investing in the power of automation is one of the greatest gifts any CFO can give their finance team and their broader company. 

The organization, clarity, and heightened effectiveness that accompany an investment in high-quality accounting software speak for themselves. But if you’re still not convinced, contact us and find out how Sage Intacct can boost your business.