Most founders find out what their company is worth during an exit process. A letter of intent (LOI) gets sent over, and you’ll see the buyers’ valuation ranges. Some way low. Some in a reasonable range. Usually, not on the high side of expectations. But how do you know what valuation range to expect? Valuation […]
The SaaS Billing Stack Is Breaking
For years, the SaaS revenue model was relatively simple. Sell a subscription. Charge by the seat. Generate a monthly or annual invoice. Collect the cash. SaaS finance has never been easy, but the underlying revenue engine was fairly predictable and simple. AI did not break pricing ground here. Usage-based pricing is nothing new, but AI […]
How to Structure Your SaaS Chart of Accounts for AI Revenue and Costs
On the surface, the traditional SaaS P&L looks as clean and predictable as it did five years ago. You have recurring subscription revenue, your cost of goods sold (COGS) is represented properly, and your operating expenses (OpEx) are categorized as R&D, S&M, and G&A. But underneath the hood, AI is completely changing the financial rules. […]
AI Spend Management for CFOs: A 2027 Budget Framework
AI spend is becoming a real finance problem. Price check, please. For the last couple of years, most companies could treat AI as experimentation. Let’s max out on tokens! Employees signed up for ChatGPT or Claude, engineering teams started using AI coding tools, and AI capabilities appeared inside existing software tools. The dollars were often […]
AI COGS Is Now an Earnings Risk
In one week, August 4 to 7, 2026, two software companies told investors the same story from opposite ends of the AI COGS spectrum. Canva cut its full-year 2026 growth forecast from 30% to 20% and said that the cost of serving an AI task had gotten too high. Love the honesty, Canva. Wix said […]
ARR per Employee Benchmarks for SaaS Companies (2026)
For the last decade, our SaaS efficiency conversations lived in several places. The Burn Multiple. The Rule of 40. But neither one tells you how many humans it took to produce a capital efficient organization. Revenue per FTE has been around for a long time. But it regained prominence with the birth of AI. ARR […]
How to Calculate the Burn Multiple
There is a metric that I see frequently in the software startup world. Investors and board members ask: “What is your burn multiple?” If you do not have a clean answer to that question, let’s get you prepared. If your finance team is not calculating this metric at least quarterly, you are flying blind to […]
2026 CFO and VP Finance Compensation: Base, Bonus, and Equity Benchmarks
Every board and CEO that hires a finance leader asks the same question. What is the market rate? This year we can answer that question with fresh data. The SaaS CFO partnered with Benchmarkit, DualEntry, and the FIF Collective on the 2026 Technology Finance Executive Compensation survey. It was fielded in March and April 2026. […]
What Cisco’s AI Finance Playbook Means for SaaS CFOs
Cisco’s CFO told Fortune that AI now produces 80% to 90% of the first draft of the company’s MD&A, the mandatory narrative section in every public company’s SEC filing. That is a striking number from a Fortune 500 company with a revenue base above $60 billion. It is also easy to misread. The AI writes […]
Your 88% GRR Benchmark Is Gone. The New Median Is 84%.
Something important happened to SaaS retention in 2025. The data is in, and every SaaS CFO and founder needs to see it. The 2026 Benchmarkit B2B SaaS & AI-Native Metrics report, one of the most comprehensive benchmark studies of private B2B SaaS and AI-native software companies, delivered a finding that should be in every operator’s […]