Sage Intacct for Private Equity Backed Companies

Most finance teams spend 80% of their time doing manual transaction support, and only 20% of their time doing strategic decision support. The best SaaS operational finance teams chose Sage Intacct to shift that to 20% manual, 80% strategic decision making. We have engineered our platform to eliminate manual, tedious processes that burn through weeks of work each month, such as manual entry of orders out of Salesforce.com and exceptions to contract revenue recognition and billing. We then provide access to the necessary real-time SaaS metrics, financial dashboards, and tools to enable strategic analysis, forecasting, and scenario planning that allow CFOs to recommend new initiatives that grow revenue, reduce churn, improve efficiency of customer acquisition, direct product development that delights customers, adjusts pricing to maximize customer acquisition and profitability, and deliver the churn, cash-flow, CMRR, and other metrics with confidence to impress investors and secure new funding.

Order-entry-only suites don’t allow you to manage SaaS revenue recognition, billing, nor SaaS metrics. And subscription-billing-only solutions don’t allow you to track expenses, see cash-flow, nor forecast scenario planning for the company.

Controller – I have hit a trigger of 100 invoices, 500 revenue schedules, and/or 2+ entities to consolidate and manually doing my accounting processes won’t allow me to scale to handle the increased volume.

I need automation of my core accounting processes, such as billing, AP, AR, and expenses, and the financial close, to free up to time to do strategic analysis on the numbers, all with controls, so can pass audits. To do this, I need APIs to move data into my accounting system, particularly with order information from Salesforce.com.

I need to do financial reporting to guide the business, and I’m doing it in Excel, which makes it delayed, and possibly inaccurate, particularly if I have multiple entities and/or complicated revenue recognition.

CFO – I need to have all the data, much faster, with dimensions and with statistical accounts, so that I can calculate and show trending analysis in our key financial information, such as cash, cash forecast, revenue recognition, billings forecast, and our financial statements, such as the balance sheet and statement of cash flow.

I also need to produce SaaS metrics, both looking backwards and forwards, with reporting and forecasting, to guide strategic decision making. Understanding our CLTV/CAC ratio, churn, average CMRR, number of customers, and other metrics, allow us to understand our product/market fit and sales efficiency, to know where to invest.

Revenue Operations/Revenue Accountant/Billing Manager/AR Manager – I need subscription billing that maximizes price-to-value, and differentiates from competition, such as usage-based pricing, tiered pricing, or land-and-expand models.

Accompanying that, I need revenue recognition across the customer lifecycle for ASC606, tracking the implicit and explicit performance obligations, so can do deferred and recognized revenue across unbilled, billed, and paid.

I have inconsistency in the orders and revenue is spread across order line items, so this is complicated and hard to track the exceptions. 20% of my transactions create 80% of my problems.

• Controller - automate billing, revenue, and expenses to close with controls
• CFO - know the strategic levers to be the business model architect
• SalesOps - integrate the quote to billing to speed quote-to-cash
• RevOps - create billing and pricing scenarios, with metrics to track
• Revenue Manager -- create deferred revenue reporting
• Billing Manager - automate invoicing and collections
• FP&A -- create forecasts and budgets/actuals for team to manage cash-flow and growth
• CEO - know the cash, billing, and SaaS metrics position of the company to make strategic moves

• AP, AR, GL, revenue recognition, expense management, financial reporting, forecasting, and HR, all in one solution
• API integration to 100s of applications
• Consolidation across multiple entities
• International currency, FX, and inter-company transfers
• Bank reconciliations
• Real-time GL entry outlier detections resulting in continuous close
• Real-time Salesforce integration
• Billing, AP, AR, GL, expense management, financial reporting, forecasting, and the financial close all in one solution
• API integration to 100s of applications
• Consolidation across multiple entities
• International currency, FX, and inter-company transfers
• Bank reconciliations
• Real-time GL entry outlier detections
• Handles most B2B billing models, such as usage billing, tiered pricing
• Handles complex high ACV invoices across multiple revenue types, such as subscription, SaaS, perpetual licensing, channel revenue, and professional services
• Handles MEA
• ASC 606/IFRS 15 compliant, allowing for parallel accounting on single performance obligations
• Tracks expenses, as well as revenue against a contract
• Native custom report writer
• Native FP&A tool
• Native SaaS metrics dashboard, calculating CLTV, CAC, Churn, CMRR, and other metrics
• Real-time reporting on deferred v recognized revenue, across unbilled, billed, and paid
• ASC 606/IFRS 15 compliant, allowing for parallel accounting on single performance obligations
• Tracks expenses, as well as revenue against a contract
• Native custom report writer
• Native FP&A tool
• Native SaaS metrics dashboard, calculating CLTV, CAC, Churn, CMRR, and other metrics
• Real-time reporting on deferred v recognized revenue, across unbilled, billed, and paid

Once upon a time ... Acquia, the leading provider of cloud-based, digital experience management solutions, was expanding internationally,

... and every day ... the finance team was manually managing the complex MEA transactions in their land-and-expand billing model,

... until one day ... they had to deploy ASC 606 at the same time as they were managing over 1,600 customer contracts

... and because of that ... they decided to deploy Sage Intacct’s subscription billing solution, over Zuora, due to its being the single source of financial truth for subscription billing and revenue management that automates forecasting on billings, cash, and revenue,

... and since that day ...

• Integrated the order to salesforce.com directly to the subscription billing in Intacct
• Cutting order to bill processing time by -50%
• Which also increased operational cash flow +15%
• They also cut revenue/AR close 10 to 3 days,
• So they now have Budget v Actuals to the business leaders 11 days after the month close,
• At the same time as they reduce the cash forecasting variance by 80%
• While becoming ASC 606 compliant.

“We have brought predictability to our revenue.”

–- Brett Belcastro, Worldwide Revenue Controller, Acquia