Unlock SaaS insight with ZoneReporting: Full service insights for your industry

Learn how ZoneReporting eliminates manual Excel work and delivers pre-built SaaS reports—so you can track ARR, MRR, retention, churn, deferred revenue, and more with ease.

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Transcript

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Hi, and thank you for joining today's session on Unlocking SaaS Insight with ZoneReporting. My name is Jim, and I'm a Solution Consultant here at Zone & Co. And for the next 10 to 15 minutes, I'm going to be walking you through how we are transforming reporting for our software clients using our Zone Data Platform, which provides pre-built reporting for NetSuite data in Power BI.

We'll spend most of today in a demonstration, but before I hop into the product, I do want to spend a couple minutes talking about the challenges that we built this product to overcome. And these are challenges that we, being in the NetSuite space for years, have heard repeatedly from clients and so really built this tool to help overcome.

First are the single level record joins that you find in native NetSuite. This can make it very difficult to get all the data that you need in one place, in one view so that you can calculate your complex SaaS KPIs. That can include billing data, ARM data, transactional data around revenue, NetSuite natively has only those single level joins, and so it can be difficult to get everything in one picture.

Whereas in Power BI, where we control the model, we can link everything that we need to, and it unlocks an extra layer of reporting that you can't really achieve in native ERP.

We're also able to, because we're building these reports in Power BI incorporate data from all your different applications and systems. And so that helps knock down silos of information that may exist across departments and across those different systems that your departments may be using. That means we can bring in project management data, time tracking data, CRM data, data from different various billing platforms, even incorporate spreadsheet data to look at things like forecast or budget versus actuals and many more.

That's one of the biggest advantages of being built in Power BI is that there's a huge ecosystem of pre-built connectors that we can leverage to bring that data in, blend it with your ERP data and really give you the reporting that you're looking for.

We also have the ability in Power BI to define a relatively complex KPI logic to calculate your SaaS metrics, the way your business needs them. I mentioned ARR, MRR, actual and deferred revenue. Things like retention, churn and also the ability to look at these statistics and these KPIs from a trended and comparative point of view. So whether it's year over year, month over month rolling or trailing 12 month, we have a ton of flexibility in Power BI to essentially define the business logic and set these KPIs up in a way that is dynamic and really meets your business's needs instead of being something more cookie cutter or limited flexibility in defining those that you sometimes find in your ERP.

And then finally, Power BI is a great tool for actually publishing those reports out. Once they're built, how do we get them into the hands of the end user so that they can make decisions? And then also reducing any manual report building in Excel. Probably 90% of the clients that I meet with are doing a manual export to Excel to build out their reports, whether it's a custom sort of income statement view or another report.

What we want to do is, is automate those reports so you don't have to do that monthly, your monthly Excel gymnastics. We can totally eliminate that for you. So those are the challenges that we're really solving for on the way. We do this is with our Zone Data Platform and specifically ZoneReporting.

So the, the product consists of three main components. The first is a native connector that we've built. This extracts your NetSuite data. It's called tactical connect and it extracts that data into a data warehouse that we manage. This managed data warehouse. Then has your curated data sets containing all your NetSuite data in them.

We can actually provide you access to that managed data warehouse as an additional service. If you have your own data warehouse and you just want the ability to tap into NetSuite data in SQL, we can open this up for you. So that, that's a whole other service we provide, but thought I'd just mention that.

And then we take that data from your managed data warehouse and we model it in Power BI, essentially replicating NetSuite's data model in Power BI. And then provide you prebuilt measures, which are those KPI calculations. We can also adjust them depending on how you need things calculated as well as report templates. So you, you have some some basis to get out the door running.

And those report templates include a full library of SaaS reports. And so here you can see across the top. Those pre-built report templates we provide. And these are what we'll hit in a second. We've got SaaS financial overview, operational overview. We can look at MRR, ARR, we have the ability to look at revenue by different key segments such as item, customer class. We can do cohort analysis. So looking at groups of customers based on when they onboarded. And then another big one is deferred revenue waterfall. We can look at that credit balance to your deferred revenue account on all those different rev rec events. As as they go.

So let's take a look at what what this actually looks like. So switching over to Power BI. So I'm logged into Power BI, currently. There is a desktop version you can use, I'm logged in through the web version. Just like NetSuite, you just need access to the internet and a web browser.

And I'm logged in with a unique user ID that governs my access and permission when it comes to the data I can view. So we can still control what users are able to interact with and view when it comes to a data standpoint.

And I have all my Power BI navigations across the top. I see my prebuilt reports listed here on the left. These are what we'll hit in a second, these templates. But before I do that, I just want to hit edit, which exposes our data model that you can now see on the right.

This is that NetSuite data model that we have replicated in Power BI. This is where the majority of the value is for our clients because NetSuite is such a complex system. We've taken the time to build out that record structure here. So you should see some familiar NetSuite tables: chart of accounts, class, department, location. We bring in your items, your customers, your arm tables, revenue elements, revenue arrangements, all the way down to the transaction lines. We bring in 100% of your transaction lines. So we actually reconcile to the penny back to your ERP. And then on top of all of this, we can bring in any custom fields, custom records, custom segments, as well as additional data sources.

Like here you see some Salesforce tables. We have pre-built reporting for Salesforce CRM because it's such a common tool that our clients use. We've built that out, but we can also bring in any other data sources that you may need to blend with your ERP data to get the full picture.

And then on top of this, we have our measures, which are those prebuilt calculations for all the different metrics that we see on the screen. This is how we convert that NetSuite data back into the language of business. And so we've got customer KPIs, new loss, net new customers, customer lifetime, lifetime value versus customer acquisition cost. We've got ARR, MRR, we've got software P&L measures so we could build out an income statement or have EBITDA calculated as a line at the bottom.

So all these measures you have available to you, you'll see them in the pre-built templates, but then know that you can also build out reports on your own. So once you have the model to support it, you can configure the pre-built or you could even build out reports as you as you need them. You're not restricted to just the pre-built report templates that we provide. It's important to know that.

So let's go ahead and take a look at some of these pre-built report templates, starting with our SaaS financial overview. So here we have the ability to look at our active customers trended, MRR trended, monthly revenue per customer and customer acquisition cost. And then here we've got our lifetime value versus customer acquisition cost.

We have all the time intelligence built out. So you'll notice we've got trend lines on all of these. And then the real value of Power BI is the ability to slice and dice this dynamically. So I can select different date periods. I can select different posting periods I want to look at this for.

And then I have my slicers on the right so I can look at these metrics for specifically software. I click on software, it's going to filter the page. Now we're looking at just that revenue type. And within software, maybe I want to look at our subscriptions, right, or our licenses. And see how we're performing in each of those different revenue groups.

You can adjust these slicers depending on the key segments and the way that you want to slice and dice your data. You don't just have to go with the prebuilt slicers that we're using here.

And then we also have measures built out so you can do cohort analysis. I mentioned earlier, this is going to group customers based on when they onboarded. So I can see how our 2021 cohort is doing on their metrics versus our 2020 cohort, or again, a quarterly cohort. We can even get that granular. If you, if you decide you want to do that.

We can also look at these metrics from a more operational point of view. This is, I would consider, more actionable if we're looking at areas where we can improve the business recoup revenue , reduce expense. Here I can see, again, we've got, we're looking at our total customer count, customer growth year over year, MRR, ARR, customer average lifetime value, acquisition costs. But now we start to layer in that churn, retention, so I can see my new returned and lost customers by month. We can see the impact that that has on our customer growth rate. And then I can see those churn rates here on a rolling 12 month basis.

And this allows me to start to target areas of the business. Like I said earlier. I could see, all right, we've got 0.87% average churn across all our products across all our classes. Well, where do we want to reduce churn? If I click software, I can see, okay, well, for our software revenue, we're actually below average churn rate across all of our products. That's great. But down, here, we've now filtered to show our software classes, and when I start to click through those, and keeping an eye on churn, I eventually get to Module 5. We're we're actually almost triple the average churn. So even though software as a revenue type is low churn, there is still a class in there, and this isn't negligible, that's 157 customers, $4M in ARR, where we have a triple the average churn rate. And so this has helped me identify a class that we can target if we want to reduce churn.

That's the idea of these reports is because you can slice and dice and you can look at the data in so many different ways, and Power BI is a great tool for that, you can really take action based on these reports and find areas where you can improve the business.

This shows a lot of the data that we're looking at, but we can see it now in a table form. Some clients, the visualizations are great because they help you see and then sort of tell the story of the business, but you can also create just views that look at it in table format. And the other thing to note about this tool is that it's, it's drillable. So, all of these reports, you can actually right click on them and drill in and see the underlying data if you need to.

Here we're going to visualize all those different KPIs and, and still be able to slice and dice them by revenue type, by revenue group, by cohort year, and see how we're doing across the board on some of our most important KPIs, trended.

Revenue by analysis and I, and I'm hitting kind of the key reports in here, I'm not going to go through all of them, but we can certainly go through all of them on a separate session if you're interested. Here we've got revenue by group, revenue by item, revenue by customer. This is one of those reports that we've heard from clients time and again, they have difficulty seeing when they're using NetSuite's advanced revenue management module, because the revrec journal, where you're actually recognizing revenue, doesn't have an item on it. And because you, you are restricted to single level joins in NetSuite, it can be difficult to see actual recognized revenue by item. Whereas in Power BI, we can connect that revrec journal back to the revenue element, revenue arrangement, all the way through to the original transaction that does have customer detail, item detail, all that segmentation detail at the transaction level that you'd be interested in.

And now you can start to slice and dice your actual revenue by those different attributes that you may lose visibility of if you're not using a tool like Power BI that enables those unlimited joins. We hear that time and again from clients that they're not able to see something like this, just basic actual revenue by item, because ARM is decoupling those transactions and those records in their ERP and it makes it really difficult to see this. So this is a great report when it comes to showing the value of the unlimited joint capabilities. And we can look at it by customer, by group or by custom segments or custom fields that you may capture in that suite as well. We can bring all that in.

Here we have a cohort waterfall. This allows us to look at our groups of customers. So here are quarterly cohorts, and we can see how they're performing on these SaaS KPIs quarter over quarter. This allows you to identify trends across cohorts that may need improvement. For example, here we can see all right, net revenue retention is dropping right around that one year mark, and we see that for our first cohort, and then we see that repeated for our second cohort. So there's something happening at that one year mark that's causing net revenue retention to drop. Maybe that's a renewal process, maybe that's a go live, depending on the type of product we're selling, but something about that that checkpoint in the customer life cycle is impacting that revenue retention. And so we need to focus on that if we want to improve that metric. And it looks like we've actually been able to address that and improve it. And now we're seeing it's not repeating in subsequent cohorts.

So again, with the cohort analysis, now we're not just looking at customers based on attributes of the items that they're purchasing or attributes of those customers themselves, but also by time attributes, get that time intelligence in there and group them and see if there are trends repeating across cohorts.

And then finally, last one I'll hit here is our deferred revenue waterfall. This is going to show us, and then we've had software companies that have basically bought ZoneReporting just for the ability to create these different views of deferred revenue.

This deferred revenue waterfall is showing a credit balance to that deferred revenue account by customer. So I can see my customer here on the left. We have the, the credit balance to that deferred revenue account, any new billings, and then we can see any revenue recognition events that happen, and then that ending balance, that ending credit balance to that deferred revenue account.

So if I look here at Admiral Administrative, we can see, okay, it looks like there was billings. We build them on that first month. And then we recognized revenue for that first month and then we roll into the next month We've got that beginning credit balance to deferred revenue looks like we did some additional billings and then we recognized it. Now I've got our ending balance and then that rolls forward as we continue to recognize that that deferred revenue. Really difficult report to build if you're not using a tool like Power BI. Most clients that we talked to prior to using his own reporting are spending hours every month building this out in Excel manually, which, of course, takes a ton of time, you can't refer to it throughout the month. It's not going to be real time. And then you're also opening yourself up for manual errors, which we want to avoid.

So hopefully this shows you, gives you a good taste of what we're able to achieve with Power BI when it comes to SaaS reporting, reporting on NetSuite data for software companies.

Again, I'm going to flash up the reports. The pre-built SaaS templates that are included that we looked at. We looked at a few of these, but know that this isn't all inclusive. You can certainly build your own reports. We can build custom reports for you, but this does give you a good start when it comes to specifically SaaS reporting.

Thank you for joining our session today. Feel free to reach out if you want more information, and we're happy to go through a more tailored demo for you.