Your professional services team plays an important role in your SaaS company. Botch a customer onboarding and you may have just lost valuable ARR. Services means different things to different companies. It could be a one-hour onboarding call or a twelve-month implementation project. Either way, we must understand several key concepts to effectively manage our […]
SaaS Metrics
Quantifying Investments in Customer Success and Retention
CFO’s like to analyze and quantify as much as possible. Our utopia is data-driven decisions while avoiding analysis paralysis. We are known for saying “no” a lot, but really, we want to enable. So when it comes to the Customer Success function, how do we quantify this investment? Or general investments in retention programs? In […]
How to Calculate Your SaaS R&D Investment Efficiency
We make constant capital tradeoffs in our SaaS business. Even if we have a ton of cash in the bank, we still need to prioritize the investments in our business. Investment in our product roadmap is a constant discussion. Are we fixing technical debt, responding to whimsical feature requests, or investing in features and modules […]
The ROSE Metric | The Return on Your Most Important SaaS Asset
There are a ton of SaaS metrics measuring sales efficiency, margins, revenue, and more. These are all important metrics (depending on the stage of your business) that you should be constantly monitoring in your SaaS organization. But I have a gut feeling that we are missing an important metric around organizational efficiency. Something that will […]
Average Cost of Service and Economies of Scale
Average Cost of Service (ACS) is an important but obscure SaaS metric for SaaS finance. I reference this metric when speaking with SaaS founders and finance teams about the balance between their cost structure and pricing plans. It’s also a component of my SaaS Scalability Index (SSI). Average cost of service helps us determine if […]
Understanding Remaining Performance Obligations in SaaS
Metrics that provide forward-looking visibility are golden in SaaS companies. Remaining performance obligations (RPO) is a relatively new revenue metric, but it’s a fascinating combination of important SaaS concepts. RPO’s are a required disclosure for US public companies, and I believe it’s popularity will gain in private SaaS. Let’s dive into the importance of deferred […]
How to Calculate Your Renewal Rate
The health of your recurring revenue in SaaS is paramount. Healthy revenue drives predictable cash flow and higher valuations. Typically, you measure Gross Dollar Retention and Net Dollar Retention to assess the stickiness of your revenue. However, there is another metric that compliments retention. It’s called the renewal rate. You need to understand more than […]
What is Cash-adjusted EBITDA
At some point in your SaaS journey, you will be asked about your EBITDA. And then someone will calculate your cash-adjusted EBITDA. Say what? EBITDA represents Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It’s a widely used measure of financial profitability. EBITDA attempts to eliminate non-cash and non-operating items. Over the long run, it measures […]
How to Accelerate Your Financial Maturity
Financial discipline never goes out of style. CFO’s have a good laugh when the market and pundits start calling for financial awareness. When times are good, let’s grow as fast as possible and burn a ton of cash. However, when market sentiment turns negative, let’s control spend and assess our cash runway. Harder economic times […]
SaaS Operating Leverage | Key to Better Margins and EBITDA
As your SaaS business moves into growth and scale mode, you will be very focused on SaaS gross margins, EBITDA, and EBITDA margins. With this financial focus, there are two ways that I think about profitability and margins. I manage my P&L by splitting it into two distinct sections to understand my operating leverage. The […]