If you work for a software as a service (SaaS) business and are responsible for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and understanding customer and revenue dynamics, you already know how important good data is. The right data – presented in the right way – helps you quickly identify trends, spot potential issues, guide investments and better manage cash flow. But extracting ERP and CRM data and creating clear, insightful reports is often a time consuming, manual task.
ZoneReporting offers a solution that brings data from ERP systems into PowerBI, where it can be combined with data from CRM and other systems to produce meaningful reports. It begins with a library of pre-built report templates that you can customize to unlock the performance, customer and revenue insights that drive informed decisions for your SaaS business.
In the article below, we highlight several report templates that our SaaS customers have found extremely valuable, using fictitious data to show you the benefits they’ve achieved. These include better control over data, new insights that aren’t possible using native ERP or CRM capabilities, at-a-glance answers to complex questions asked by the board or executives, and the ability to quickly find supporting details when you need them.
Track KPIs and financial metrics in an all-in-one financial dashboard.
The financial overview in Figure 1 reveals several KPIs you can use to monitor the fiscal health of your SaaS business and make sound planning decisions. This overview includes the following metrics with supporting KPIs – all on one screen and all without requiring you to manually import or reformat data:
- Active customers: This chart shows the total active customers by month over a given timespan, overlayed with churn rate data to provide a snapshot of customer success and retention.
- Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): MRR is one of the most accurate measures of SaaS revenue health over time. It also provides a benchmark for the impact of sales and marketing programs and serves as a key input for fine tuning strategies and investments. Year-over-year (YoY) growth is also displayed to reveal long-term trends.
- Monthly revenue per customer (MRPC): Graphing MRPC along with customer acquisition cost (CAC) provides deep insights into customer value and the sales and marketing investments that have helped drive it.
- Customer lifetime value (LTV): By gauging customer LTV, you can see the combined result of how long customers are staying and how much they’re willing to pay. Adding CAC data to this view helps you further refine sales, marketing and pricing strategies.
These ratios are produced by joining multiple sets of transaction data, which businesses often perform manually using spreadsheets due to challenges with NetSuite’s native join structure. But since ZoneReporting replicates 100% of NetSuite’s transaction lines in PowerBI with unlimited joining capability, we make it fast and easy to produce these reports while giving users the ability to filter their data by date range, revenue type and even cohort.
Gain deep insights into customer cohorts using a cohort analysis waterfall report.
Viewing KPIs and key ratios for various cohorts can reveal significant insights for SaaS providers that want to understand customer behavior and revenue dynamics over time. For example, ZoneReporting offers a cohort waterfall report that groups subscribers based on the quarter in which they were onboarded and provides data about their performance for certain KPIs.
In Figure 2, we see that the 3/31 and 6/30 cohorts are showing a decline in net revenue retention beginning at the 12-month mark. This could indicate challenges with renewals linked to performance issues, usability concerns, pricing problems or feature shortfalls for this range of go live dates. These milestones, depicted in Figure 3, can indicate that changes are needed to reduce renewal friction and improve net revenue retention for future cohorts.
ZoneReporting allows you to dig deeply into cohort data. In Figure 4, we can see a report on customer churn by cohort quarter. This view identifies churn patterns that repeat across cohorts, which can indicate systematic issues that fall outside of natural trends and fluctuations. When you need even more information, ZoneReporting can help you filter this data by factors such as revenue group, revenue type and subsidiary name, or produce more detailed views that allow a deep dive into the supporting data.
Improve visibility into deferred revenue using a ‘revenue by item’ report.
SaaS providers often use a mix of pricing models and subscription terms to make their offerings affordable and attractive to a wide variety of customers. This can make it difficult to accurately report revenue recognition without dedicating hours of manual work to it each month.
ZoneReporting helps you quickly and easily understand deferred revenue. This can be particularly useful for companies that use advanced revenue management (ARM), helping them optimize their revenue recognition processes, maintain compliance with accounting standards and gain better visibility of financial performance.
In Figure 5, we can see a revenue analysis for items that generate deferred revenue. This view is typically a challenge to produce for companies using ARM since they often have revenue recognition journals that don’t correlate with particular items. This makes it impossible to break out revenue for those items.
ZoneReporting can create this report because it allows unlimited joins. This means we can connect the revenue recognition journal back to the revenue arrangement or revenue element, and even all the way through to the original transaction from the ERP that contains the item detail and customer detail. By making these important data connections, ZoneReporting can also produce a deferred revenue waterfall report as seen in Figure 6. This is an extremely valuable view if you want to understand deferred revenue balances and project the financial trajectory of your business.
In Figure 6, we show the credit balance to a fictitious company’s deferred revenue account, which is broken down by customer in a monthly view. In this report, we see the beginning and ending balances and any credits from billings or debits from revenue recognition that reduce that balance. The deferred revenue waterfall report accommodates multiple currencies, which is helpful if your business operates in multiple countries or has international subsidiaries. And since it doesn’t require you to spend hours extracting and correlating data manually using spreadsheets, this report is fast and easy to create with ZoneReporting.
Get the insights your SaaS business needs.
The right report views can help you make informed decisions that enhance financial planning, increase customer retention and improve revenue management. But to be truly helpful, businesses must be able to produce these reports quickly and efficiently. Manual data extraction, spreadsheets and multi-year data integration projects just aren’t practical.
We created ZoneReporting to easily bring the data you need from your ERP system into PowerBI, where it can be combined with your CRM and other data to produce the reports you need and unlock deep insights to improve your SaaS business' performance.
Want to see ZoneReporting in action? Try the self-guided product tour or book a personalized demo with one of our experts.
