As the third installment of our Spotlight series draws near, we shift our focus to various finance and accounting strategies for SaaS companies. Before we get in-depth knowledge from concepts our expert speakers will talk about, here’s a sneak peek at one of the preliminary topics at the Fireside Chat portion of the event.
The Importance of Finance Tech Stacks for Companies
In any organization, one can’t just have a profitable or award-winning project in their hands without setting a solid foundation for it first. The same can be said for your finance strategy and how you plan on modernizing it so your business sees exponential growth—and this is what tech stacks are primarily for.
Having a well defined finance tech stack can move a SaaS company beyond initial use of an outdated legacy system, with heavy Excel usage. As everything migrates to the digital space, incorporating technology and automation into financial processes has now become a necessity, so that accurate data can efficiently be made available for all without impeding operations.
So how exactly do you build a finance tech stack that would best fit your business? Speakers David Appel, head of Software and SaaS Vertical at Sage Intacct and Ben Murray, founder of TheSaaSCFO.com goes more into detail about it in this insightful interview.
- Can you guys give us a high-level overview of what you will be talking about?
DA: Life is easier when you can see the trail that others have left behind for you—why and where they had the missteps, which of those you want to take for yourself, and what you want to make unique in taking the road less traveled.
And Ben—with all the many conversations he’s had and the annual surveys he does—thousands of customers tell us they’ve been in the pitfalls just trying to collapse all that into a series of best practices and decisions that you can make in order to be successful. And it all revolves around what you do at each stage of the company, what your investors want to see from you, how success is going to be defined, and how you can automate the process used to collect the data so you can make decisions faster than your competition.
BM: In my career in Finance, it’s always been interesting to see what your colleagues are doing – what best practices are out there, always interesting because you’re running your finance and accounting department – how are those doing now? What have they learned to improve those finance and accounting functions? And when I look at building out my finance departments, it’s always about people, process, and technology.
- How essential is technology in stabilizing the operations of finance and accounting departments, particularly those of SaaS firms?
BM: Technology has become such a big thing because there’s so much data trapped within a SaaS company, and I think someone said SaaS is Math because there’s so much data. And recurring revenue streams are almost old-school now – usage, transactions, even hardware – that’s what used to be in the old days. That’s why it’s so important to leverage technology within your finance department so you could be efficient, but also so you could provide the analysis and function in a better way. Technology is one of the key pieces to implement and move along within your organization.
- What are the key factors to consider when deciding which technology to adapt or integrate into processes?
DA: And what you pick is different depending on who your customer is, what your average selling price is, what size or stage you’re on, your cadence, and if you’re product-led or sales-led. There’s a lot of unique elements in the decision tree that will guide you on how you can make those decisions.
See our full list of Spotlight on Finance speakers and save your seat for June 2nd here.