SaaS Intelligence
SaaS Intelligence was developed based on our extensive experience working with numerous, sophisticated SaaS companies all struggling to achieve the same objective: access to SaaS metrics that were real-time, automatic, reliable and insightful. Every one of them was ready to ditch their Excel-based models that were lagging weeks behind, were manual, error prone and lacked the details needed to truly analyze their business.
Stop struggling with spreadsheets and tools that aren't built for your needs. With Baker Tilly's SaaS Intelligence, you get granular insights you can act on and use to demonstrate growth potential and attract investors.
SaaS Intelligence completely automates the tracking and bucketizing of crucial SaaS metrics at a level of granularity that goes undetected and unmeasured by many other comparable systems.
With automated committed monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) categorization, SaaS Intelligence interprets transactions in real-time as they post, analyzes the activity and automatically categorizes the CMRR into the appropriate bucket.
You can easily track the renewal timing of existing CMRR value to provide a clear picture of the future. Accurately forecast renewals of recurring revenue to provide greater predictability and achieve alignment with your Customer Success/Renewals team.
The application does not rely on any user-driven category inputs to make decisions about the type of transactional activity that has occurred – it does it all for you. Easily configure your categorizations for additional flexibility.
To give you the most actionable insights from your SaaS metrics, your insights are organized into five dashboards focused on critical functions of your SaaS and Subscription KPIs and trends, including:
With SaaS Intelligence, you can analyze Expansion and Contraction at a more granular level than ever before. Empower your management teams with actionable insights into what’s actually happening with the business so they know where and how to react.
For example, while other applications may track general “Contraction,” they lack visibility into the underlying causes of revenue retention issues. SaaS Intelligence exposes the distinction between Downgrades and Markdowns to illuminate product-related attrition issues versus sales price reductions and discounting behaviors. Both of these will result in Contraction, but knowing exactly what’s happening on which Products for which Customers enables more effective action planning.
You'll even be able to isolate foreign exchange impact on the CMRR of multicurrency contracts. For example, where there are CMRR gains attributed to foreign exchange rates changing from the time of contract inception to renewal, SaaS Intelligence actually shows you how foreign exchange fluctuations are hurting or helping your CMRR growth.
Churn is an incredibly important and highly visible metric that drives a lot of your activities, so it's important to get it right. The last thing you want to do is inflate Churn and have the business in a frenzy. At times, customers can be delayed in renewing, so SaaS Intelligence does not immediately move CMRR to Churn at the end of a subscription. Instead, the late renewal status of customers is apparent to your business by tracking past-due renewals in “Pending Renewal CMRR,” allowing you to keep a pulse on potential churn, but without forcing that decision prematurely. In this way, the business can appropriately and proactively address late renewals or customer churn risks.
And if the customer is ultimately lost, the system allows for custom categorization via Churn Reasons (e.g., customer satisfaction, acquired, bankruptcy, etc.), which can be segregated into Avoidable or Unavoidable Churn for enhanced analysis. Not every churn event is the same, and certainly shouldn’t be treated as such!
And what about those customers that failed to launch and never generated revenue? Don’t fret: SaaS Intelligence enables you to Cancel (not Churn) those customers to more clearly distinguish and segregate those which were never fully onboarded in the first place. You get to decide how that type of customer situation is treated.
When you keep everything in Excel and split your data by year, it can make trailing twelve-month analysis difficult and it’s less likely that you’ll discover actionable insights and trends. With Baker Tilly’s SaaS Intelligence, we can do that kind of analysis easily.Sam Robertson, Corporate Controller, Quest Analytics
If you're ready to get advanced insights into your SaaS metrics, click the button to schedule a conversation with one of our Baker Tilly SaaS finance guides.
With SaaS Intelligence, you get real-time visibility into all the standard, SaaS finance metrics you expect, and more importantly, the ones that you didn’t! You'll have a robust selection of SaaS metrics that enable you to understand the health and trajectory of the business.
We found ourselves often saying ‘What does the spreadsheet say?’ and then ‘But what does SaaS Intelligence say?’ and that process has taught us a lot about our assumptions and our policies around SaaS metrics. It gives you the flexibility to look at things differently, to challenge your assumptions, and to look at true KPIs. It spurs conversations we didn’t use to have around things like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).Sam Robertson, Corporate Controller, Quest Analytics
As the company moved more of its products and services to the cloud, it became clear that Quest Analytics should be measuring itself against subscription business model metrics and evaluating its business as a Software-as-a-Service company. Upgrading their financials from QuickBooks and spreadsheets was a major step in that direction and the company chose Sage Intacct and SaaS Intelligence. Robertson knew they needed an ERP system, Sage Intacct, that could manage their increasingly complex billing and revenue recognition requirements, while also automating the tracking of crucial SaaS KPIs for the organization – for this, he turned to SaaS Intelligence.
According to Robertson, the implementation of SaaS Intelligence was straightforward. The team helped Robertson understand exactly how the metrics were being calculated. “The Baker Tilly team was super responsive and always provided me with a lot of detail whenever I had questions,” says Robertson. “The product works exactly as it was sold to us.”
Going in front of the Executive Team to present these metrics is spurring conversations about where to focus our efforts. Having these insights that are actionable and strategic come out of the finance department is really cool.Sam Robertson, Corporate Controller, Quest Analytics
Companies who sell subscriptions through channel partners, such as resellers or distributors, may want to track the underlying end customer to which the channel partner has sold the subscription in either a separate Sage Intacct dimension or in a text field so that they understand who the actual end customer is. SaaS Intelligence can track the subscription activity based on these end customer designations.
It's easy to make modifications related to contracts and contract lines if the contracts data that you receive from Sales has errors or requires adjustment. Sometimes those mistakes aren't caught until after you've already performed actions within the Sage Intacct contracts module such as Billing, Revenue Recognition or MEA Allocations. Those activities then lock down editing capability to preserve accounting compliance. While these errors may be minor they can have an adverse effect on how SaaS Intelligence interprets the subscription activity related to those contracts.
With our enhanced adjustment capability, you’re empowered to create SaaS adjustment transactions that are used by SaaS Intelligence as replacement for any errant contracts (either whole contracts or individual contract lines).
SaaS Intelligence is built on Sage Intacct’s top-rated financial management solution, the only cloud ERP endorsed by the AICPA. SaaS Intelligence leverages Sage Intacct's innovative general ledger to add analytical depth to your SaaS metrics by using your Sage Intacct dimensions. This enables your business leaders to slice and dice data by key business perspectives such as product and customer. Postings include important data such as Entity, Customer and Item for advanced cohort analysis reporting.
SaaS Intelligence by Baker Tilly is the only product that tracks your metrics across both the Sage Intacct Contracts and Order Entry Subledgers simultaneously. So it's no problem if you have transactions flowing through the Sage Intacct Contracts module, as well as through Order Entry from an external billing system or e-commerce site. SaaS Intelligence views subscription details across modules, interweaving and interpreting the data to give you the full picture.
