Business Budget Forecasting Software: Financial and Operational KPIs in Dashboard Reports

In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that famed archeologist and his father risk their lives in search of the Holy Grail, a precious goblet. The Holy Grail for software and SaaS companies are the financial and operational KPIs—numbers that are critical for improving sales and revenue forecasting, as well as gaining insights to boost customer retention and reduce churn and acquisition costs.

Unlike Indiana and Henry, however, these companies don’t have to flee fire and escape booby traps to find their Holy Grail. Critical KPIs are readily accessible with Sage Intacct ERP and best-in-class business budget forecasting software from Adaptive Insights. Now you can plan, monitor, and analyze subscription bookings and revenue with confidence, thanks to software-specific metrics and templates for budgeting, forecasting, scenario modeling, dashboards, and reports.  Here’s how:

Align revenue plans with corporate objectives

With Adaptive Insights budgeting software, you can set revenue goals based on historical data, business drivers, and growth objectives. In addition, you can plan monthly and annually recurring revenue (MRR and ARR) streams from new and renewal software subscriptions. Revenue waterfalls can be used to model recognition timing for subscriptions and services. And strong integration lets you incorporate sales data from Sage Intacct ERP as well as your CRM system for a comprehensive view of your revenue.

Get insights from software KPIs to grow customers

Adaptive Insights business budgeting software provides intuitive dashboards to continuously visualize and explore subscription revenue metrics, such as MRR and ARR, annual contract value (ACV), and average revenue per account (ARPA). This lets you accurately plan investments in marketing, development, and sales. You can also track and gain insights underlying customer metrics, including customer acquisition costs (CAC), customer lifetime value (LTV), churn and renewal rates, to better understand how to grow and retain customers while reducing acquisition costs.

Forecast subscription, renewal, and services bookings with accuracy

Use budgeting software to create a holistic bookings forecast for new subscriptions, renewals, and services. You can set subscription sales targets in sync with your sales and services teams, plan bookings by business cohorts, and use sales capacity scenarios to determine headcount needs to meet quota. Then compare the sales forecast with actual bookings using variance reports. With Adaptive Insights, you can accurately forecast, track, and adjust your bookings, and project your sales growth.

Compare your budget and actuals on a monthly basis against critical financial and operational benchmarks for peer SaaS companies

Confidently plan hosting, sales, and operating expenses

Plan the expense of your software operations with expense budgets based on targets, roll ups of personnel, and cost-of-sales (COS) data. Adaptive Insights also makes it easy to model sales rep compensation and productivity, accounting for on-boarding ramp rates, and forecast commissions based on varying attainment scenarios. It lets you budget ongoing hosting and other operating expenses (OPEX), and determine project capital expenditures (CAPEX) for new and growing data centers. With a complete picture of SaaS expense planning, you can increase margins through the reduction of CAC and ongoing support costs.

Integrate financial and key operational benchmarks into your reporting and dashboards

Now you can compare your budget and actuals on a monthly basis against critical financial and operational benchmarks for peer SaaS companies. Choose from detailed benchmarks for peer companies by size of revenue, growth rates, funding stage, and business model. You can use these benchmark comparisons to:

• Identify areas of inefficiency and room for improvement
• Get the executive team to agree on targets
• Drive your company to better performance