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 […]
Author: Ben Murray
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 […]
The AI Budget Reallocation Is Coming
Many SaaS CFO’s I talk to are dealing with the same problem whether they have named it yet or not. Their nascent 2026 AI budgets, most of which were set last October, are already blown. And they have not started planning for 2027. When budget season opens this fall, finance leaders will walk into something […]
How to Calculate Compute-adjusted LTV
The SaaS world already has a lot of metrics, and most companies are still working hard just to calculate the core metrics correctly. But AI is changing the cost structure underneath SaaS unit economics. Traditional software LTV assumes that gross margin is reasonably stable across your ENTIRE customer base. That assumption breaks when customers pay […]
How to Build an Outcome-Based Pricing Plan
Outcome-based pricing is easy to describe and hard to operationalize. The headline is simple: customers pay when your product delivers a defined result. The mechanics are a bit harder to define. You must define the outcome, prove it happened, decide what does not count, choose dollars or credits, handle the onboarding period before outcomes flow, […]