Five Critical Reports to Manage Your SaaS Business.

Note: this is part 1 of 5 of the key reports series

There are hundreds of reports that we could create to manage our SaaS businesses. In fact, I’m sure our CRM, accounting, and BI systems are littered with reports that no longer see the light of day.

With so much data trapped in our SaaS business, it can be extremely hard to limit our focus to just a few reports. However, there are several reports that should always be included in your monthly financial and operational reviews.

Below I list the first of five “must have” reports. These reports are the building blocks to financially manage your business. Of course, there are many more, but I like to start with the fundamentals and build from there.

To see this post in its entirety, check it out here.

Bookings Report

I cannot live without this report, and you shouldn’t either! Bookings are the life of every SaaS business. A bookings report tracks new and expansion business. Usually, you are focused on ARR bookings, but I track services bookings as well. Bookings data is stored in your CRM software.

What is a Booking?

A booking is an executed contract between you and your customer for software and/or services.

You speak the bookings language if your customers are required to sign formal master services agreements. This is common when selling into mid-market and/or enterprise customer segments with larger deal sizes. Your customer contract typically consists of several documents.

Enterprise Contract Construct

• Master services agreement (MSA)
• Purchase or sales agreement
• Product/service-specific addendums.

You may be saying, “wait a second, Ben. My customers don’t sign formal contracts.” Your customers sign up online and pay with a credit card. Even so, the concept is the same. You must still track and understand the source of new and expansion business.

In lieu of a bookings report from your CRM data, you can track sign ups from your payment data or revenue reporting engine. Rather than a bookings report, I recommend using the SaaS Quick Ratio to track your net inflow/outflow of MRR. It’s a great report and metric for tracking higher volume, low price point revenue models.

Bookings reports are important, because they help us understand the inflow of MRR or ARR into our business. In addition to tracking new business, we can also track expansion business by two segments, cross-sell and upsell bookings.

• Cross-sell – customer has product A and I now sell them product B
• Upsell – customer has product A and I sell them more seats and/or modules within product A

Marry your bookings report with churn and you’ll understand your monthly net inflow or outflow of ARR in your business.

When to Implement: Now! Even if you are just launching your first product!

Who Tracks: Sales and Finance/Accounting

Data Source: CRM or Payment Software (i.e. Stripe)