How Cloud Accounting Drives Higher ROI for Software and SaaS Companies

Cloud-based financial management and accounting solutions are the perfect fit for software, SaaS, and subscription-based companies. After all, they’re built on and deployed using the same technology as the products and services you’re offering to your customers. Automation, speed, agility, cost-savings, scalability—these are among the many benefits of using today’s web-based services, so you know first-hand there’s no reason you need to manage your financials manually using spreadsheets and outdated or on-premise software.

Let’s consider how a cloud solution can help you effectively address your top financial management and accounting challenges: 

Built for Today and Tomorrow

Cloud accounting solutions deliver the right information at the right time:

the accuracy of information, speed of information, and clear metrics and forecasting your software company requires to take advantage of growth opportunities. Whether you’re pursuing expansion or preparing to go public, you need both financial and operational insights to inform next steps.

Decision-makers today want to keep track of performance while tuning into real-time business intelligence—and cloud accounting systems, like Sage Intacct, provide users with multi-dimension reporting, drillable dashboards, and anytime/anywhere access to cash and critical SaaS metrics. And thanks to automation, both day-to-day and closing period financial activities are sped up, so executives (and other stakeholders, like potential investors) aren’t waiting for insights related to performance or forecasting.

What’s more, cloud-based software can easily be customized to centralize financial management for companies with multiple entities and even accommodate multiple currencies.

Syncs Front Office With Back Office

You want your back office to keep up with your front office—or even better, work seamlessly “quote-to-cash” so you can keep up with customer demands and boost the top and bottom lines. And you need a financial technology environment that can easily scale without adding accounting department headcount or making your existing workload more complicated than it already is.

Sage Intacct’s contract-driven financial management and accounting solution is built to align your sales workflows and accounting processes—with a focus on building relationships. Thanks to bi-directional integration between Intacct and Salesforce, both your sales team and accounting team have access to the same data. And it’s data that doesn’t need to be entered multiple times; data syncs and flows for optimal, interdepartmental use, with built-in collaboration tools for added efficiency.

As a modern software company, you have to be flexible with pricing and offerings to keep customers happy for long-term. The right financial management and accounting solution will make this easy, enabling you to customize customer contracts as well as revenue and billing workflows, even for subscription-based customers.

Supports Complex Revenue and Subscription Billing Management

Change happens fast and ensuring compliance can be nothing short of a headache for your accounting team. For starters, keeping all the guidelines and standards straight, like AICPA’s Statements of Position (SOP) 81-1, 97-2 and 98-9, SEC Staff Accounting Bulletins (SAB) 101 and 104, and EITF 00-21, 08-01 and 09-03, is cumbersome—especially if you’re using spreadsheets.

Plus, revenue recognition is difficult when you sell multiple elements bundled together with varying delivery schedules. Your company may have complex contracts with complicated billing requirements that practically beg for automated processes.

Cloud accounting solutions like Sage Intacct’s enable you to easily manage revenue recognition calculations and changes as well as complex billing options. It supports multiple price lists with appropriate pricing ratios support tracking, reporting, and auditing across product lines, channels, geographies, and time spans. And when it comes to renewal revenue, Sage Intacct empowers you with tools to maximize ongoing sales opportunities and bill customers in multiple ways, from recurring and usage-based to event-based percentage of completion.

To learn more, contact us.