SaaS Intelligence
Automatically see the key performance indicators (KPIs), bookings activity and customer unit economics that expose the levers you can adjust to drive predictable and sustainable growth. Baker Tilly Digital’s SaaS Intelligence was made based on our extensive experience working with numerous, sophisticated SaaS companies all struggling to achieve the same objective.
Understanding SaaS Intelligence
Watch this short video to learn what SaaS Intelligence is and how it can help your business or organization.
Get actionable insights to drive growth
- Robust CMRR analysis
- Dashboards for functional focus
- Detailed expansion and contraction behaviors
- Control churn and cancellations
Automated CMRR categorization
SaaS Intelligence completely automates the tracking and bucketizing of key 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.
Organize your insights by function
To give you the most actionable insights from your SaaS metrics, your insights are organized into five SaaS KPI dashboards focused on critical functions of your SaaS and Subscription KPIs and trends, including:
- Growth – focused on CMRR and customer growth momentum trends and includes 16 different categories of CMRR
- Retention – designed to highlight customer and revenue retention and renewal metrics
- Unit economics – see critical metrics like customer acquisition costs, months to recover customer acquisition costs (CAC), lifetime value (LTV), and LTV:CAC as a ratio
- Cash – know precisely where you stand with regards to what's in the bank and the status of your current cash balances, working capital, burn rates and runway.
- Audit – gain visibility into future renewal events and the CMRR that will be at stake
Automated, granular insights
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.
Get the utmost visibility into attrition
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.
You get dozens of KPIs and CMRR categories
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.
- Total CMRR
- Total ARR
- Total Bookings
- CMRR per Customer
- Average New Deal CMRR
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Payback in Months
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
- LTV:CAC Ratio
- Customer Retention Rate
- Customer Renewal Rate
- Customer Churn (% up for renewal)
- CMRR Roll Forward and Snowball
- Total Customer Churn (% of total)
- Gross Dollar Retention Rate
- Net Dollar Retention Rate
- Gross CMRR Churn
- Net CMRR Churn
- Gross CMRR Renewal Rate
- Renewal Add-On CMRR
- SaaS Quick Ratio
- Gross Burn Rate
- Net Burn Rate
- Runway (Months)
- Total Billings
- Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)
- New: The increase in CMRR from new customers.
- Recovered: The increase in CMRR from customers who have previously churned and returned.
- Acquired (via M&A): The increase in CMRR as a result of the acquisition of another legal entity's existing CMRR balances.
- Add-on: The increase in CMRR on an existing customer from the sale of additional subscription products or an increase in quantity of existing subscriptions (ex: user count).
- Uplift (↑ Renewal Price): The increase in CMRR on an existing customer from an increase in price (or the reduction of discount) on an existing subscription at time of renewal.
- Downgrade: The decrease in CMRR on an existing customer from the debooking of existing subscription product or an decreased in quantity of existing subscriptions (ex: user count).
- Markdown (↓ Renewal Price): The decrease in CMRR on an existing customer from a decrease in price (or an increase of discount) on an existing subscription at time of renewal.
- Churn: The decrease (loss) of CMRR from churned customers.
- Cancellation: The decrease (loss) of CMRR from cancelled customers (i.e. those customers that never fully adopted/onboarded).
- Debook: The decrease (loss) of CMRR from debooking of existing subscription (i.e. item-level cancellation during an active subscription period).
- Pending Renewal: The amount of CMRR up for renewal (available to be renewed) in a given month.
- Renewed: The amount of existing CMRR renewed in a given month.
- Foreign Exchange: The change (increase or decrease) in CMRR on renewals of foreign currency transactions due to exchange rate fluctuations from originating booking to renewal.
- Currency Change Uplift: The increase in CMRR on foreign transactions due to the combined effect of a change in transactional currency (i.e. prior contract was GBP, and renewal contract is EUR) and derived foreign currency fluctuations.
- Currency Change Markdown: The decrease in CMRR on foreign transactions due to the combined effect of a change in transactional currency (i.e. prior contract was GBP, and renewal contract is EUR) and derived foreign currency fluctuations.
Advanced Features
Track sell through by channel partners or resellers
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.
Enhanced adjustment capability
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).
Technology company discovers actionable insights with SaaS Intelligence
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.
According to Robertson, "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)."
Built on Sage Intacct
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 Digital 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.
- Automatically links your SaaS metrics dashboard to the transactions that created them for easy drill-down research and audit-ability of the results.
- Leverage native Sage Intacct reporting features to generate your own custom Dashboards, KPIs, Performance Cards, Reports, and Graphs.
- Build your own dashboards and reports to integrate key financial reporting with the SaaS metrics delivered by SaaS Intelligence.
- Direct access to your ERP system of record for live financial and statistical information provides real-time data for variety of vital metrics including customer acquisition costs, gross margins, cash burn, etc.
- Have confidence in the reliability of your metrics to share with your other Executives and Investors alike.