Companies that sell software, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), often struggle to automate complex financial processes and subscription billing and gain meaningful insight into current and future business operations and performance. Some may be considering going public and need to ensure their accounting systems are robust and highly auditable. Every SaaS company is subject to a new set of complex regulations covering revenue recognition for contract billing transactions, meaning that timely and accurate accounting is more important than ever.
To keep their operations growing, more and more top SaaS companies are moving to Sage Intacct, the accounting and financial management solution designed to handle the nuances unique to this industry, like sales tax complexity. What makes Sage Intacct a good fit for top SaaS companies?
1. Build your recurring revenue stream with subscription billing capabilities
Contract and subscription billing is inherently complex. Most financial and ERP applications are designed to handle the routine, traditional, transactional sales model of selling widgets. However, when you sell a solution that consists of combinations of software subscriptions and services, typical ERP applications fall flat. Sage Intacct is designed to help you grow your recurring revenue stream, with sophisticated subscription billing capabilities including:
- A range of automated pricing and billing models
- Automated billing schedules and automated renewals
- Regulatory compliance surrounding revenue recognition
- Visibility into billing at a contract level
2. Gain actionable insight with real-time metrics
Companies in every industry benefit from real-time metrics into their business operations, but that insight can be very difficult to obtain when you factor in a subscription billing model. Sage Intacct delivers top SaaS companies quick and reliable access to hard-to-measure metrics including:
- Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR)
- Annual or Monthly Recurring Revenue (ARR or MRR)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Churn
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
3. Dimensions add perspective
We’ve sung the praises of dimensions in Sage Intacct before, but it’s worth another mention in this context. Think of dimensions as bits of user-defined information associated with any transaction, and a transaction can have multiple dimensions. Use Sage Intacct dimensions to analyze SaaS metrics by the attributes that matter to you: project, customer, location, department, vendor, item, employee, class, and more. You can also leverage dimensions to track different kinds of SaaS revenues — think new customers, add-on purchases, upgrades, churn, and renewals.
4. Fully integrated workflows with API
Sage Intacct’s best-in-class approach is possible due to their robust application programming interface (API). Currently about 70% of all transactions done in Sage Intacct are done through an API – that’s how popular (and useful) it is. For example, a lot of SaaS companies are or will soon be using a 3rd party subscription billing solution, such as Chargebee. With Sage Intacct’s API, Chargebee and Sage Intacct are combined to support your workflows, like high volume subscription billing and revenue recognition schedules. Everything built in the front end, through the user interface, has an associated API to allow for easy and extensive integrations with other Cloud systems.
Sage Intacct also guarantees that its releases will not break integrations, with automated testing & machine learning driving a continuous build model. For example, there are more than 25,000 tests done for a weekly release and over 350,000 tests run for a quarterly release. This seamless AI allows for integrations with the solutions you use today or might use in the future. We find this provides clients with the flexibility and sustainability they need to grow as there are a lot of options when you are truly best-in-class.
Sage Intacct is sold as a SaaS solution itself, so it makes sense that it has the model nailed. With rock-solid financials, deep operational insights, easy management of subscription lifecycles, and simplified management of multiple entities, Sage Intacct is an ideal option for top SaaS companies.
