Sage for SaaS and Technology: real-time KPIs for efficient growth

Today’s technology landscape moves more rapidly than ever before, and competition for startup venture capital has never been fiercer.

If you want to compete and thrive as a company, you need a real-time connection to your SaaS metrics.

You can’t afford to strategize using outdated financial reports with stale data that no longer reflects reality.

You also need investor KPIs that align with your startup’s growth phase and funding objectives.

Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time securing the capital you need for smooth and efficient growth.

Here, we explore how Sage’s new software bundle, Sage for SaaS and Technology, helps tech companies sail through their funding rounds and unlock efficient growth at any stage with real-time SaaS KPIs.

Here’s what we’ll cover

KPIs are crucial for startups, but manual SaaS metrics can harm growth efficiency

For SaaS CFOs, your KPIs are essential strategic guideposts along your company’s journey to IPO.

They tell you whether your strategies are working effectively, how your customers feel about your products, and whether you need to change course to hit your financial goals.

On top of all that, it’s impossible for startups to progress through funding rounds without robust SaaS metrics because investors need to see very specific KPIs at each growth stage.

When SaaS companies rely on manual accounting to calculate and update their metrics, it’s hard to achieve the level of speed and fluidity that a scaling startup needs to win its market.

Beyond that, when organizations operate manually, errors steadily creep into their metrics, harming the accuracy of financial reports and limiting stakeholders’ ability to build growth strategies.

Manual SaaS metrics can also spell disaster for your startup’s funding rounds.

Imagine going into an important meeting for your Series A round and having to explain to investors that you don’t have all the data they’re requesting because your finance team is still crunching the numbers.

Or sending out an investor email with KPI corrections because someone in accounting made a mistake, and you gave out inaccurate data.

There’s absolutely no question that SaaS metrics are essential for startup growth.

However, the way you work with your KPIs matters just as much as having them in the first place.

Sage for SaaS and Technology is packed with investor metrics for every growth stage

With Sage for SaaS and Technology, startups can achieve smooth and efficient growth with real-time metrics fueled by best-in-class accounting AI. 

The software bundle supplies 200+ SaaS KPIs that venture capital investors prioritize at different funding stages, from pre-seed all the way to IPO and beyond.

As your company’s accounting requirements grow more complex, the software’s functionality seamlessly expands to keep pace with your operational needs.

This empowers companies to start small and scale big.

Early stage: pre-seed and seed rounds

For your pre-seed and seed rounds, you’ll need to prove to investors that your revenue model is viable, there’s a strong product-market fit, and your product provides ongoing value to customers.

Each of these objectives requires specific KPIs:

• Cash flow: Investors want to see that your cash inflows and outflows make for a sustainable business and that you’re being resourceful with your capital.
• Customer lifetime value: A high average customer lifetime value (CLTV) shows investors that users derive lasting value from your product, fueling reliable subscription revenue.
• Customer acquisition cost: At this stage, investors need to see a low customer acquisition cost (CAC) to prove that your revenue model is not only profitable but efficient. That means they’ll be looking for a low CAC to CLTV ratio.

Sage for SaaS and Technology can help you give early-stage SaaS investors the metrics they care most about: CLTV, CAC, monthly and annual recurring revenue (MRR and ARR), and dozens more, all updated in real time.

The software bundle has everything early-stage startups need to confidently prove their revenue model.

Growth stage: Series A and Series B

By the time you’re seeking your Series A funding, your startup will likely be generating between $2 million and $15 million in ARR. At this point, you’re scaling in a very real way.

However, investors will have a new set of KPI-related hoops you’ll have to jump through to prove the effectiveness of your recurring revenue model.

In your prior funding rounds, you established product-market fit and ongoing product value that keeps users hooked.

At the growth stage, investors want to see that your company can keep building on the momentum it’s generated up to this point.

Sage for SaaS and Technology equips your finance team with all the metrics you need for success as a growth stage startup:

• Revenue churn
• Customer churn
• Net dollar retention
• Net change in CMRR
• Upsells, renewals, and more

Sage’s software bundle for startups has all the KPIs that CFOs need to display dynamic growth for their Series A and Series B rounds.

Late stage: Series C+ and pre-IPO

By your Series C funding round, you’ve likely got an IPO in your near-term future.

You might also choose to pursue a Series D, Series E, or even a Series F funding round to better position your company to go public.

As a late stage startup, you need to prove to investors that your business and revenue model are predictable, repeatable, and capable of a sustained and self-fueling upward trajectory.

Sage for SaaS and Technology can help late stage startups achieve that with automated real-time KPIs:

• Gross margin: A high gross margin gives investors confidence that your company is being resourceful with its expenses. It also shows that your startup is achieving cost-effective growth.
• Operating profit margin: An attractive operating profit margin shows investors that your startup is financially healthy and can keep scaling even without further injections of venture capital.

• International currencies: For your Series C funding round, investors want to see that your company’s cash flow is made up of a strong mix of currencies. This lets them know that your startup has built momentum as a global enterprise and will likely continue experiencing strong international growth.

In addition to the metrics you need to secure funding as a late stage startup, Sage for SaaS and Technology includes everything you need to thrive as a global public company:

• automated revenue recognition and billing forecasts,
• role-based KPI dashboards,
• capitalization tables,
• multi-entity accounting,
• and much more.

Sage’s guided implementation offers immediate value

No matter what growth stage your startup is at, you can’t afford to slow your company down with a drawn-out and complex software deployment.

Your competition will be speeding past you as you’re sitting on the sidelines onboarding with your new accounting suite.

You could lose significant ground by the time you’re up and running.

Sage for SaaS and Technology features a simple guided implementation for immediate time-to-value.

Built on best practices that Sage has honed over several decades and thousands of software deployments, the guided implementation allows you and your team to hit the ground running with frictionless finance automation to scale through IPO.

Unlock frictionless growth with real-time KPIs and automated SaaS metrics

When raising and deploying capital, almost nothing is more important than having real-time, centralized access to your SaaS KPIs.

To learn more about how Sage’s software bundle can revolutionize the way you manage your metrics, click here