AcctTwo Blog

Private Equity and Venture Capital firms with SaaS and subscription businesses in their portfolios face unique challenges in providing strategic financial guidance to their portcos, particularly new ones. Often, you'll find undeveloped internal controls and manual tracking methodologies that inevitably result in delayed, inaccurate financial data. In this blog series, we'll explain how investing in purpose-built, real-time private equity software solutions that are specifically designed for SaaS and subscription-based reporting and metrics can help PEs and VCs overcome these challenges and jumpstart growth.

People of faith believe in the importance of stewardship. The word steward refers to a person who manages—but does not own—a household. In ancient times, a good steward was trustworthy and accountable for everything from a household’s finances and property to its reputation. Today, we see it as taking good care of the things that God entrusts to us.

Often, there is a church finances committee, council, or board of trustees. To fully engage all these stakeholders and religious donors, faith-based nonprofits are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of tithes, offerings, bequests and endowments on the dual missions of helping people and supporting the congregation. Precise accounting and complete, transparent reporting of church finance are the hallmarks of stewardship.

After six blog posts going in-depth on the subject of using outcome metrics to measure nonprofit impact - why they’re important, why they’re elusive, what metrics they involve, and what it takes to track them - we hope that two things are clear:

• Nonprofits need to monitor their finances and program performance carefully, and then report on the outcomes extensively. Building trust with funders – donors, granters, members etc. – depends on being a transparent and accountable organization that turns investment into impact.
• Tracking outcome metrics takes data from all parts of the nonprofit integrated together and analyzed to understand how inputs (money, time, staff) translate into outputs (meals served, classes offered, members gained etc.).

One of the primary challenges many SaaS and subscription businesses face is determining what metrics to track. While all B2B SaaS and subscription businesses are different, there are a handful of key metrics that most can benefit from to optimize performance, propel growth, and attract investors. We’ve outlined the metrics investors are looking at during each of the SaaS growth stages to see if you’re on track and to help you prepare for what’s ahead.

Nonprofit outcomes. That’s the subject of this ongoing blog series highlighting why (and how) organizations must prove their mission is working to keep funding streams flowing.

Nonprofit dashboards are the final component of any effort to track outcomes. After identifying what KPIs to track, and how, nonprofit dashboards offer a means to put those outcome metrics to work on behalf of the mission; where the rubber meets the road.

In our previous blog article from AcctTwo’s series about tracking nonprofit outcomes, we highlighted some of the metrics that nonprofits can define their success with. You can use these indicators to assess whether the nonprofit is on the right track, and prove your positive results to donors and grant managers who want to invest in effective nonprofits only.

Knowing what to track is an important start, but the hard part comes next: figuring out how. Nonprofits are in the dark about outcomes because the necessary data is hard to capture, categorize, and quantify in a meaningful sense without the right nonprofit dashboard indicators.

Halfway through our six-part blog series on nonprofit outcomes, we have explored why outcomes are so important (funders insist on seeing results) and why they’re so obscure (lack of good data). In this article, we’ll address the most important subject of all: The metrics for your nonprofit KPI dashboard you can use to measure your own success in terms of outputs and outcomes.

The good news is that these metrics exist, and when tracked correctly, they put success in the clear, quantifiable terms that funders insist upon. The bad news is that defining success isn’t simple, and tracking it isn’t either. Think of your own organization: Are you certain you’re fulfilling the core mission and values, and if so, to what extent?

The annual and monthly recurring revenue is the driving force behind B2B (or B2B2C) SaaS and subscription-based businesses, but presents a unique set of challenges, particularly in the early and growth stages. While recurring revenue is integral to long-term financial health, early- and growth-stage businesses must establish cash flow and recapture startup and operational costs at a time when they may still be determining product-market fit. Measuring key SaaS metrics can provide critical insights into organizational health, help businesses optimize their sales and marketing, and ultimately position them for long-term growth.

This is the second blog in our series exploring outcome KPIs for nonprofits. In our previous article, we wrote about how today’s nonprofits need to track the outputs and outcomes of their efforts – the actual impact of their mission in action. Why? To build and maintain the confidence of funding sources that expect transparency and accountability like never before.

Before we address how to measure and track nonprofit outcomes in later posts, we need to debunk a common myth: That most nonprofits understand their performance already. Rather, most organizations make some attempt to understand it but come up shorter than they realize.

Having a clear sense of perspective into KPIs and metrics is a requirement for a comprehensive understanding of both the predictability and sustainability of a SaaS business model's growth. Fully automated, cloud-based, and built directly on Sage Intacct, AcctTwo's SaaS Intelligence application provides this ideal vantage point. For the sake of visibility and ease of use, our R1 2021 Release has added some notable features, SaaS reporting metrics and functions.