SaaS Metrics School cover art

All Episodes

SaaS Metrics School — 386 episodes

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Title
1

Why AI-Powered SaaS Dashboards Are Making ERP Reporting Obsolete

2

How AI Is Writing 84-Data-Point Board Reports — And Why CFOs Can Trust Them

3

Should AI Run Your Board Meetings? A CFO's Framework for AI-Prepped Board Packages

4

How to Vibe Code Finance Dashboards for Your SaaS Metrics

5

The 2026 ARR per Employee Benchmarks: Where Top-Quartile SaaS Actually Lands

6

How Much Are Tech CFOs Actually Making in 2026?

7

The Latest GRR Benchmarks

8

Why AI ARR Alone No Longer Lifts Your Software Valuation

9

Here's What Separates the 9 Public SaaS Companies that Trade Above 10x

10

12 Steps to Creating an Outcome-based Pricing Plan

11

5 Takeaways for CFOs from the 2026 AI Pricing Report

12

Your AI Subscription Pricing Is Losing Money on the Customers You Care About Most

13

4 SaaS P&L Metrics That Break When You Kill Per-Seat Pricing

14

Per-Seat Pricing Is Dying: What the Shift to Usage-Based SaaS Means for Your Margins

15

The Two SaaStr Annual Slides Every SaaS Operator Needs to See Today

16

2 AI Metrics Every SaaS CFO Should Track Today

17

What Belongs in AI COGS? The Financial Framework SaaS Companies Are Scrambling to Build

18

How Claude Opus 4.7's New Tokenizer Quietly Raised Your AI Bill by Up to 35%

19

Why Token Usage Tells You Almost Nothing About Your AI Product's Real Value

20

Salesforce Invented a New KPI on an Earnings Call — Here's Why You Should Too

21

Should You Price on Outcomes? What HubSpot's $0.50 Bet Means for Your SaaS Revenue Model

22

AI Inference Costs Are Crushing SaaS Gross Margins — Here's What to Do About It

23

How to Track Digital Labor in Your SaaS P&L

24

Where Tech Funding Is Flowing in 1Q26: AI Infrastructure, Vertical SaaS, and Enterprise Wins

25

Why Feeding Raw Data to AI Is Killing Your FP&A Accuracy

26

The SaaSpocalypse Is Overblown: 4 Reasons Your SaaS Company Isn't Dead Yet

27

3 Ways AI Could Kill Traditional SaaS

28

CFOs We are Implementing AI Backwards

29

What Started the SaaSpocalypse?

30

Here's Why AI is Not Killing SaaS

31

Top FP&A Solutions Used by Software Companies

32

Top Invoicing Solutions Used by Software Companies

33

Top Accounting Solutions Used by Software Companies

34

Moving Beyond Spreadsheets to Calculate Your SaaS Metrics

35

Stripe, MRR, and the Retention Metrics Nobody Warned You About

36

The Difference Between Bookings, Invoices, and Revenue

37

Can You Actually Prove the ROI of Customer Success?

38

The Pitfalls of Using Your CRM to Report Official ARR Numbers

39

Why a Perfect SaaS P&L Can Still Hide Serious Problems

40

The Hidden Complexity Behind ARR Disclosures

41

Common ARR Disclosure Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

42

Why ARR Is So Often Misstated: 5 Questions to Get It Right

43

How Public Tech Companies Are Categorizing ARR

44

Demystifying SaaS Revenue: A Hierarchy for Predictability & Valuation

45

Where is Your Cost of ARR Trending This Year?

46

The ROSE Metric is Your Key to Durable Growth in 2026

47

CFO Confidence at a 4 Year High

48

Change of Control Provisions in Customer Contracts Can Kill Your Exit

49

How to Call BS on Your 2026 Sales and Marketing Budget

50

Demystifying SaaS Revenue: A Hierarchy for Predictability & Valuation

51

My Top 3 Go-to-market Efficiency Metrics You Should Track

52

Should Your Customer Success Team Count Towards CAC?

53

How Leading Public Tech Companies Report AI Value Creation

54

Should Expansion Revenue Be Included or Excluded From LTV

55

Why Your Low Margin AI Company Must Be 6x Larger Than SaaS Peers

56

The Real Economics of SaaS versus AI Companies

57

Don't Forget to Allocate Your CAC

58

Do You Know the Difference Between SaaS Math and AI Math?

59

When Should Founders Fire Themselves as the CFO?

60

The Dirty Secrets Behind SaaS Gross Margins

61

Legal Readiness Can Make or Break Your SaaS Exit

62

Are SaaS Metrics Really Dead?

63

Your Implementation Team Could Be Killing Your Gross Profit Margin

64

Should Your Implementation Team Be Coded to COGS or OpEX?

65

Essential SaaS Metrics for a Series A Raise

66

Is LTV Flawed with Multi-year Contracts?

67

Aggregate Metrics Are Dangerous to Your SaaS Health

68

How Does Net Revenue Retention Impact Your Valuation?

69

Gaps in Your MRR Schedule Wreak Havoc on Retention

70

Great SaaS FP&A Requires These 4 Data Sources

71

Renewal Rate vs. Retention: What SaaS Leaders Must Know

72

Defining AI ARR to Your Board and Investors

73

Top Financial Metrics Tracked by Usage-based Companies

74

5 Metrics Every SaaS Leader Must Master

75

Oracle Stock Jumps Over 30% Based On This One Metric

76

SaaS COGS Explained: Get Gross Profit Right

77

Understanding the SaaS Magic Number — Benchmarks, Nuances & Investor Insights

78

7 Metrics a Strategic Acquirer Wants to See in Your SaaS Business

79

Customer Concentration Risk Will Kill Your Fundraise or Exit

80

What Gross Margin Should I Use in CAC Payback Period

81

Are AI Companies Out Funding Pure-Play SaaS?

82

Top SaaS Metrics When Scaling to $1M ARR

83

The Top 3 SaaS Metrics That Drive Your SaaS Valuation

84

How to Code Executive Expenses in Your SaaS P&L for Accurate Metrics

85

How to Align ARR Growth with Sales & Marketing Spend

86

Is Revenue Recognition Messing Up Your Retention Numbers?

87

RPO Explained: The Overlooked SaaS Metric That Signals Growth

88

How SaaS Companies Turn Usage Revenue into ARR

89

Want a Private Equity Exit? Start Tracking This Metric

90

How to Handle Reactivation MRR in GRR vs NRR

91

This Public Company Restated Its Headline ARR Number

92

Benchmarking Your CAC Payback: How Do You Compare to Top SaaS Performers?

93

Adapting CAC Payback Period for Usage-Based SaaS Models

94

CARR Is the New ARR? A SaaS Operator's Guide to This Hot Metric

95

Should You Target 80% Gross Profit in SaaS? Let’s Break It Down

96

How Much Should You Invest in Sales and Marketing This Year?

97

61% R&D Spend?! What SaaS Benchmarks Reveal by Revenue Size

98

What Top SaaS Performers Spend to Acquire a Dollar of ARR

99

Don't Make this LTV Mistake

100

What Is Subscription ARR? 3 Common Definitions Explained for SaaS Operators

101

Why SaaS Metrics Break Without Proper MRR Layering

102

What’s a Healthy G&A Budget for SaaS? Benchmarks by ARR Stage

103

How Verint Defines AI ARR and Why You Need to Know This

104

Can a Properly Formatted SaaS P&L Increase Your Valuation Multiple?

105

Are Public Tech Companies Defining ARR?

106

The Top 3 Metrics to Determine if You Have a Scaling Problem

107

Growing vs. Scaling? You Must Know the Difference

108

What Metrics to Track from 5 to 10M ARR

109

What Metrics to Track from 3 to 5M ARR

110

What Metrics to Track from 1 to 3M ARR

111

What Metrics to Track from 0 to 1M ARR

112

You Must Define Your Type of Variable Revenue

113

Can the Large Software Incumbents Survive the Agentic AI Competitive Threat?

114

Don’t Believe the $5M ARR per Employee Hype

115

Founders Please Close Your Books On Time

116

Billing Pauses Wreak Havoc on Your Revenue Retention

117

Cohort Retention is NOT the Only Retention Method

118

Am I a Software Co with Hardware or Hardware Co with Software?

119

Should Rev Ops Report to the CRO or CFO?

120

What is the Purpose of an MRR Schedule and Why You Should Care

121

Should I Count Payment Processing Revenue as ARR

122

How to Calculate Services Backlog in Months

123

The Difference Between Booking Date and Revenue Start Date

124

How to Build Your Metrics Foundation in 2025

125

How to Size Your R&D Budget for Next Year

126

You Can’t Scale without Bookings Data

127

When Should Your Hire a Fractional SaaS CFO?

128

Your SaaS Metrics Playbook for 2025

129

How Much Are SaaS Companies Raising in Series C and D Rounds?

130

How Much Are SaaS Companies Raising in Series A and B Rounds?

131

How Much Capital Should You Ask for in a Pre-seed and Seed Round?

132

How to Size Your Sales and Marketing Budget for Next Year

133

Onboarding is NOT a Sales Cost

134

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Margins

135

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Billable Utilization

136

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Backlog in Months

137

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Backlog

138

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics

139

How Do We Handle Churn When Customers Hit Pause

140

Tracking GRR with a V1 to V2 Product Migration

141

My Top 4 Sales and Marketing Efficiency Metrics You Should Be Measuring

142

12 Top SaaS Metrics Every CEO Should Measure for Sustainable Growth

143

How to Measure Your GTM ROI on Tradeshows

144

Should I Offer 15% Discounts for Annual Subscriptions?

145

How Should I Report ARR Bookings in a Multiyear Contract?

146

Should I Use CARR or MRR or Exit ARR in My Reporting?

147

Can Your SaaS Beat the $1.50 Labor Efficiency Test?

148

What’s the Impact of This Customer Downgrade Scenario?

149

Don’t Make This Top Mistake in MRR Due Diligence

150

My Top Critiques of Your 3 to 5 Year Forecast

151

These Are the Top Billing Solutions in SaaS

152

How to Calculate Retention with Both Perpetual Licenses and SaaS

153

These Are the Top Rev Rec Solutions in SaaS

154

You Need a Forecast Model for a Series A and B Raise

155

The Metrics that Matter to Investors

156

How to Handle Resellers and End Users in Your CRM and Metrics

157

The Big Assumption You’re Overlooking in Your CAC

158

Can You Pass This Real Go-to-market SaaS Metrics Quiz

159

Should I Invoice Out of My CRM or Accounting Software

160

Your Sales Team Does NOT Own Billing and Collections

161

What is a Good Revenue Churn Rate

162

What is a Good Customer Churn Rate

163

Don’t Exit Without Preparing These 4 Key Finance Data Sources

164

The Canary in the Coal Mine Subscription Metric

165

What Churn Metric Do I Use in LTV

166

Should I Code Wages and Benefits to COGS

167

Where Do I Code Tradeshow Expenses

168

9 Legal Strategies for a $100M Exit – Tactics 7 to 9

169

9 Legal Strategies for a $100M Exit – Tactics 4 to 6

170

9 Legal Strategies for a $100M Exit – Tactics 1 to 3

171

Ignore Your Accounting Pay the Price Later

172

I’m Struggling with Your Bookings Data

173

What to Do When Your Accounts Receivable and Aging Are Out of Control

174

How Late is Late for a Late Payment?

175

Not All CARR is Created Equally

176

Your Accounting Team Needs a Close Calendar Checklist

177

Parent Child Relationships Can Cause a Big Metrics Mess

178

Founder / Investor Fit is Critical for Fundraising Success

179

Is LTV to CAC Dead as a Metric?

180

How Do We Track Retention When We Offer Multi-year Contracts

181

I Rarely See This Metric Tracked in SaaS Companies

182

How to Tackle Your Retention Problem

183

Do Your VC’s Not Care Anymore?

184

Improving Your DSO and Cash Flow

185

Do I Really Have to Code All Expenses to a Department?

186

How to Segment Your CAC

187

The Ultimate SaaS Metrics Checklist for Your Business

188

My ARR when Switching from Long-term Contracts to Consumption Model

189

You Are Less Than 2M ARR and Want to Exit

190

Your MRR Schedule is Worth its Weight in Gold

191

The Foundation of CAC Part 4

192

The Foundation of CAC Part 3

193

The Foundation of CAC Part 2

194

The Foundation of CAC Part 1

195

What SaaS Metrics Are Relevant When Passing $10M ARR?

196

What Metrics and Data Do Acquirors Want to See ASAP?

197

Do I Really Need to Use SaaS Metrics Benchmarks?

198

How Do I Count Reactivation MRR in My Metrics

199

Calculating CAC When You Have SLG and PLG Motions

200

Don’t Do This When Allocating Your CAC Expense

201

Can CAC Be Calculated Per Product Line?

202

Should We Include Customer Success Cost in Our CAC?

203

Sales Cycle Impact on S&M Efficiency Metrics

204

Bookings Data is Finance Data Source 1

205

Contracted MRR vs P&L MRR

206

Please Code Your Expenses to the Department Level

207

Founders You Must Be Profitable on Your Services Revenue

208

How Do I Calculate Retention if I Have Consumption Revenue?

209

How I Use the Rule of 40 When You Are Less Than 10M ARR

210

Pass 90% of Your SaaS Peers with These 4 Finance Steps

211

How I Assess the Setup of Your SaaS P&L

212

Where Does Customer Success Expense Belong on Your SaaS P&L

213

Does Expansion MRR or ARR Include Renewals?

214

What is the Impact of Gross Revenue Retention on Valuation?

215

What Revenue Streams Should Be Included in Our MRR Schedule?

216

What is the Source of Truth for Bookings Data?

217

Can We Treat One-time Purchases as Variable Revenue?

218

If You Can’t Close Your Books Timely This is What Happens

219

4 Mistakes When SaaSifying Your Accounting Foundation

220

I’m Running Financially Blind and I Don’t Know What to Do

221

Who Should Track Time In Your SaaS Company

222

This is the Tech Being Used in SaaS Companies

223

Don’t Comingle Your Revenue Streams

224

The Big Bucket of Expenses and Running Financially Blind

225

The Advisors You Need When Selling Your Company

226

I Need at Least 3 Months to Prep Your Metrics for Due Diligence

227

VC Fundable Growth Rates

228

How to Handle Unknown Churn in Your Reporting

229

The Ultimate SaaS CFO KPI Checklist

230

You Need Bookings Alignment with Your Forecast

231

Do I Need an “Operational” CFO for My Company?

232

5 Drivers of SaaS Valuations per ICONIQ

233

Trends in Revenue per FTE According to ICONIQ and Lemkin

234

Bookings Data is one of the Biggest SaaS Data Mistakes

235

How to Unbundle Your COGS Expenses for Greater Margin Clarity

236

Do I Really Need to Track Revenue on Daily Basis?

237

Is Your First Quarter ARR Number Already Baked?

238

You’ve Got to Hit Your Q1 Budget Number

239

$1M or $100M ARR the Foundation of CAC is Still the Same

240

What is the Difference Between Retention Rates and Renewal Rates?

241

When Do I Count a Customer Cancellation?

242

Is It Correct to Allocate Engineering Expense to COGS

243

How to Track Pilot or Proof of Concept (POC) Revenue and Bookings

244

How to Calculate Your Expansion ARR Target Based on Retention Targets

245

Should I Be Worried if I Have a 60% Gross Profit?

246

Revenue per FTE Trends for Public Companies per Meritech Capital

247

Net Revenue Retention Trends for Public Companies per Meritech Capital

248

The Key to Scaling is Your Org Efficiency and the ROSE Metric

249

Only 0.4% of SaaS Companies Pass 10M ARR per SaaStock

250

A Common Financial Trait of EBITDA Positive SaaS Companies

251

ACV versus ARPA When Segmenting Your Customer Base

252

Implement an Internal Discounting Policy for Better Pricing Controls

253

Is My SaaS Company at a 3x or 10x ARR Valuation?

254

Coding Your Employee-related Expenses

255

Coding Your Contractor Expense

256

Behinds Scenes Look at the SaaS Revenue Cycle

257

Contract Dates versus Invoice Dates

258

Is Your Services Backlog in Months Increasing or Decreasing?

259

Do You Have an FTE Report?

260

I’m Passing 5M in ARR What S&M Efficiency Metrics Should I Calculate?

261

Do I Need Cohort Analysis for My Revenue Streams?

262

73% of Your SaaS Peers Raised Their Prices in 2023

263

The 4 Pure Play SaaS COGS Departments

264

The 6 Possible Revenue Categories on Your SaaS P&L

265

Can You Really Define ARR?

266

Make Sure You Code Software Expenses Correctly

267

What ARR Number Should We Use in ARR Multiples?

268

What is CARR and Why Do I Care?

269

How to Calculate the Cost of Expansion ARR

270

Are You Tracking the Billable Utilization of Your Services Team?

271

Track Your Professional Services Backlog Number

272

What is Professional Services?

273

Do You Have Balance Between CAC Payback and Retention?

274

The Perfect Storm for Cash Burn

275

What Should Be Included in Your Dev Ops Expenses?

276

Human Powered vs Product Powered Revenue | You Gotta Get This Right

277

Top 5 Accounting Software for SaaS Companies

278

Levers to Pull in Sales Compensation Planning

279

Should Downgrades Count Against My Booked ARR?

280

Am I Ready for Debt Financing to Fuel Growth?

281

I’ve Got My SaaS P&L Set Up | What’s Next?

282

High Growth High Confusion

283

Mind the Gap in Your Renewal Dates

284

Code Your Consultants and Contractors Separately

285

What’s Lurking in Your G&A Expenses?

286

How Do I Handle Spikes in Sales and Marketing Expenses

287

How Do I Start Implementing SaaS Metrics?

288

How to Really Determine What Should Be in COGS

289

Do You Include Sales Operations in S&M Expenses?

290

What Churn % Should I Use for LTV

291

CAC Calculation and Multiple GTM Strategies

292

These are the 4 Source Data Inputs for SaaS Metrics

293

Have You Heard of the Dollar-based CAC Payback Period?

294

What Metrics Should I Measure as I move from $2M ARR to $4M ARR

295

What Should I Include in My Sales and Marketing Expenses?

296

How Much Should I Spend in S&M as a Percentage of Revenue?

297

How Much Should I Spend in G&A as a Percentage of Revenue?

298

How Much Should I Spend in R&D as a Percentage of Revenue?

299

What is the Ideal Revenue Mix for a Pure-play SaaS Valuation?

300

What Advisors Do I Need as a First-time SaaS Founder?

301

How Do We Count Expansion in Our Bookings Report and CRM?

302

What Month Do I Count Churn?

303

Should I Track ARR or TCV with Multi-year Contracts?

304

Be Careful with Your Coding of Reseller Revenue

305

Should Price Increases Be Counted as Expansion?

306

Are Onboarding Expenses a COGS or Sales Cost?

307

Should I Code Bonuses to COGS or OpEx?

308

When Should I Implement the Rule of 40 Metric?

309

What’s the Difference Between Tech Support and Customer Success

310

Don’t Record Discounts Separately from Your Subscription Revenue

311

Where Do I Code Platform Fees

312

Make Sure You Understand and Define What a Customer Means

313

When Do You Need a Fractional CFO?

314

Your CPA and Bookkeeper Need to Break Up

315

How to Run Retention Analysis When You Have Two Revenue Streams

316

How Do You Measure MRR When It’s Usage with No Minimums?

317

What is Managed Services?

318

When Does a Renewal Become a Booking?

319

How Do We Track Usage that Exceeds Pricing Tiers?

320

What Month Do We Report a Churn?

321

What is the Difference Between a Cross-sell and an Upsell?

322

How Do You Measure Bookings with Multi-year Contracts?

323

How to Benchmark Your SaaS Business

324

Timing Mismatch Between Bookings Date and CAC

325

Usage-based Revenue and Your COGS Setup

326

Never Multiply by 12 to Annualize Your Retention Numbers

327

Net Revenue Retention is a Must-have Metric

328

You Must Calculate Your Gross Revenue Retention

329

Your P&L is Wrong If You Are Reporting > 10M ARR and 90% Gross Margin

330

Finally SaaS Metrics Pillar 5 Focuses on Efficiency and ROI

331

SaaS Metrics Pillar 4 Focuses on Your Financial Profile

332

SaaS Metrics Pillar 3 Focuses on Your Gross Margin Profile

333

SaaS Metrics Pillar 2 Focuses on Retaining Your Customers

334

SaaS Metrics Pillar 1 is the First Stop on Your Metrics Journey

335

Is Your SaaS Company Valued on One Metric or Many?

336

Two Methods to Run Retention Analysis

337

What is Cohort Analysis?

338

Klaviyo’s Gross Profit Performance and OpEx Profile at Scale

339

Klaviyo’s Net Revenue Retention Formula and Performance

340

Klaviyo Filed Their S-1 and Gross Revenue Retention Formula

341

What is Churn in SaaS?

342

TCV vs ACV vs ARR

343

One of the Biggest SaaS Data Mistakes

344

How to Call BS on a Bookings Forecast

345

Your SaaS P&L is Wrong

346

What is the R&D Index?

347

What is the R&D Payback Ratio?

348

How Should I Track COGS With Usage-based Revenue

349

What is Your SaaS OpEx Profile?

350

These Are the Top 3 SaaS Metrics Said Every Blog Post and Webinar Ever

351

The Right Metrics for the Right Stage of Your Business

352

What Do You Mean by a Gross Margin Adjusted CAC Payback?

353

ARPA | The Forgotten SaaS Metric

354

What is The Proper Close Date for a Software Booking

355

Why CAC Is Like Debt

356

System Reboot: Your ARR Has Been Corrupted

357

Does Usage-based Revenue Count as a Booking?

358

A Renewal is Not a Booking or Is It?

359

Do Price Changes Count as a Software Booking?

360

What is the Difference Between an Upsell and a Cross-sell?

361

If I Offer Self-service SaaS Do I Still Track Bookings?

362

What is a Software Booking?

363

The Advanced Lifetime Value Formula and Its Dangers

364

LTV is NOT a Standalone Metric

365

Should I Use LTV If I Target High ACV Customers?

366

LTV is a Point in Time Metric

367

What is Customer Lifetime Value

368

Don’t Forget Sales Cycle Length in Your S&M Metrics

369

Why is Department Coding So Important?

370

What Is This Chart of Accounts That I Hear About?

371

Why Is the Rule of 40 Back in Style?

372

Have You Adjusted Your Sales and Marketing Efficiency Metrics for Variable Revenue?

373

What Time Period Should I Measure for Revenue Retention?

374

Do You Know Your Margins by Revenue Stream?

375

How to Correctly Calculate Your Overall Gross Margin

376

COGS vs. OpEx | Why Is This SO Important?

377

Should Customer Success Be Coded to COGS or OpEx or Both?

378

Your SaaS Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) Is Probably Wrong

379

Are You Tracking Your Renewal Rate?

380

Your MRR Schedule Could Cost You Millions in Valuation

381

What’s the Difference Between Forecasting, Planning, and Budgeting?

382

Should I Segment My SaaS Metrics?

383

CAC Payback Period | One of My Favorite Metrics

384

What Does CAC Mean

385

You Need to Allocate Your Sales and Marketing Expenses Between New and Expansion

386

What is the Cost of ARR