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All Episodes

SaaS Metrics School — 371 episodes

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Title
1

2 AI Metrics Every SaaS CFO Should Track Today

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

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

7

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

8

How to Track Digital Labor in Your SaaS P&L

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

3 Ways AI Could Kill Traditional SaaS

13

CFOs We are Implementing AI Backwards

14

What Started the SaaSpocalypse?

15

Here's Why AI is Not Killing SaaS

16

Top FP&A Solutions Used by Software Companies

17

Top Invoicing Solutions Used by Software Companies

18

Top Accounting Solutions Used by Software Companies

19

Moving Beyond Spreadsheets to Calculate Your SaaS Metrics

20

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

21

The Difference Between Bookings, Invoices, and Revenue

22

Can You Actually Prove the ROI of Customer Success?

23

The Pitfalls of Using Your CRM to Report Official ARR Numbers

24

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

25

The Hidden Complexity Behind ARR Disclosures

26

Common ARR Disclosure Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

27

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

28

How Public Tech Companies Are Categorizing ARR

29

Demystifying SaaS Revenue: A Hierarchy for Predictability & Valuation

30

Where is Your Cost of ARR Trending This Year?

31

The ROSE Metric is Your Key to Durable Growth in 2026

32

CFO Confidence at a 4 Year High

33

Change of Control Provisions in Customer Contracts Can Kill Your Exit

34

How to Call BS on Your 2026 Sales and Marketing Budget

35

Demystifying SaaS Revenue: A Hierarchy for Predictability & Valuation

36

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

37

Should Your Customer Success Team Count Towards CAC?

38

How Leading Public Tech Companies Report AI Value Creation

39

Should Expansion Revenue Be Included or Excluded From LTV

40

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

41

The Real Economics of SaaS versus AI Companies

42

Don't Forget to Allocate Your CAC

43

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

44

When Should Founders Fire Themselves as the CFO?

45

The Dirty Secrets Behind SaaS Gross Margins

46

Legal Readiness Can Make or Break Your SaaS Exit

47

Are SaaS Metrics Really Dead?

48

Your Implementation Team Could Be Killing Your Gross Profit Margin

49

Should Your Implementation Team Be Coded to COGS or OpEX?

50

Essential SaaS Metrics for a Series A Raise

51

Is LTV Flawed with Multi-year Contracts?

52

Aggregate Metrics Are Dangerous to Your SaaS Health

53

How Does Net Revenue Retention Impact Your Valuation?

54

Gaps in Your MRR Schedule Wreak Havoc on Retention

55

Great SaaS FP&A Requires These 4 Data Sources

56

Renewal Rate vs. Retention: What SaaS Leaders Must Know

57

Defining AI ARR to Your Board and Investors

58

Top Financial Metrics Tracked by Usage-based Companies

59

5 Metrics Every SaaS Leader Must Master

60

Oracle Stock Jumps Over 30% Based On This One Metric

61

SaaS COGS Explained: Get Gross Profit Right

62

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

63

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

64

Customer Concentration Risk Will Kill Your Fundraise or Exit

65

What Gross Margin Should I Use in CAC Payback Period

66

Are AI Companies Out Funding Pure-Play SaaS?

67

Top SaaS Metrics When Scaling to $1M ARR

68

The Top 3 SaaS Metrics That Drive Your SaaS Valuation

69

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

70

How to Align ARR Growth with Sales & Marketing Spend

71

Is Revenue Recognition Messing Up Your Retention Numbers?

72

RPO Explained: The Overlooked SaaS Metric That Signals Growth

73

How SaaS Companies Turn Usage Revenue into ARR

74

Want a Private Equity Exit? Start Tracking This Metric

75

How to Handle Reactivation MRR in GRR vs NRR

76

This Public Company Restated Its Headline ARR Number

77

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

78

Adapting CAC Payback Period for Usage-Based SaaS Models

79

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

80

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

81

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

82

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

83

What Top SaaS Performers Spend to Acquire a Dollar of ARR

84

Don't Make this LTV Mistake

85

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

86

Why SaaS Metrics Break Without Proper MRR Layering

87

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

88

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

89

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

90

Are Public Tech Companies Defining ARR?

91

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

92

Growing vs. Scaling? You Must Know the Difference

93

What Metrics to Track from 5 to 10M ARR

94

What Metrics to Track from 3 to 5M ARR

95

What Metrics to Track from 1 to 3M ARR

96

What Metrics to Track from 0 to 1M ARR

97

You Must Define Your Type of Variable Revenue

98

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

99

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

100

Founders Please Close Your Books On Time

101

Billing Pauses Wreak Havoc on Your Revenue Retention

102

Cohort Retention is NOT the Only Retention Method

103

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

104

Should Rev Ops Report to the CRO or CFO?

105

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

106

Should I Count Payment Processing Revenue as ARR

107

How to Calculate Services Backlog in Months

108

The Difference Between Booking Date and Revenue Start Date

109

How to Build Your Metrics Foundation in 2025

110

How to Size Your R&D Budget for Next Year

111

You Can’t Scale without Bookings Data

112

When Should Your Hire a Fractional SaaS CFO?

113

Your SaaS Metrics Playbook for 2025

114

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

115

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

116

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

117

How to Size Your Sales and Marketing Budget for Next Year

118

Onboarding is NOT a Sales Cost

119

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Margins

120

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Billable Utilization

121

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Backlog in Months

122

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics – Services Backlog

123

My Top 4 Professional Services Metrics

124

How Do We Handle Churn When Customers Hit Pause

125

Tracking GRR with a V1 to V2 Product Migration

126

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

127

12 Top SaaS Metrics Every CEO Should Measure for Sustainable Growth

128

How to Measure Your GTM ROI on Tradeshows

129

Should I Offer 15% Discounts for Annual Subscriptions?

130

How Should I Report ARR Bookings in a Multiyear Contract?

131

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

132

Can Your SaaS Beat the $1.50 Labor Efficiency Test?

133

What’s the Impact of This Customer Downgrade Scenario?

134

Don’t Make This Top Mistake in MRR Due Diligence

135

My Top Critiques of Your 3 to 5 Year Forecast

136

These Are the Top Billing Solutions in SaaS

137

How to Calculate Retention with Both Perpetual Licenses and SaaS

138

These Are the Top Rev Rec Solutions in SaaS

139

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

140

The Metrics that Matter to Investors

141

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

142

The Big Assumption You’re Overlooking in Your CAC

143

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

144

Should I Invoice Out of My CRM or Accounting Software

145

Your Sales Team Does NOT Own Billing and Collections

146

What is a Good Revenue Churn Rate

147

What is a Good Customer Churn Rate

148

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

149

The Canary in the Coal Mine Subscription Metric

150

What Churn Metric Do I Use in LTV

151

Should I Code Wages and Benefits to COGS

152

Where Do I Code Tradeshow Expenses

153

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

154

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

155

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

156

Ignore Your Accounting Pay the Price Later

157

I’m Struggling with Your Bookings Data

158

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

159

How Late is Late for a Late Payment?

160

Not All CARR is Created Equally

161

Your Accounting Team Needs a Close Calendar Checklist

162

Parent Child Relationships Can Cause a Big Metrics Mess

163

Founder / Investor Fit is Critical for Fundraising Success

164

Is LTV to CAC Dead as a Metric?

165

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

166

I Rarely See This Metric Tracked in SaaS Companies

167

How to Tackle Your Retention Problem

168

Do Your VC’s Not Care Anymore?

169

Improving Your DSO and Cash Flow

170

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

171

How to Segment Your CAC

172

The Ultimate SaaS Metrics Checklist for Your Business

173

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

174

You Are Less Than 2M ARR and Want to Exit

175

Your MRR Schedule is Worth its Weight in Gold

176

The Foundation of CAC Part 4

177

The Foundation of CAC Part 3

178

The Foundation of CAC Part 2

179

The Foundation of CAC Part 1

180

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

181

What Metrics and Data Do Acquirors Want to See ASAP?

182

Do I Really Need to Use SaaS Metrics Benchmarks?

183

How Do I Count Reactivation MRR in My Metrics

184

Calculating CAC When You Have SLG and PLG Motions

185

Don’t Do This When Allocating Your CAC Expense

186

Can CAC Be Calculated Per Product Line?

187

Should We Include Customer Success Cost in Our CAC?

188

Sales Cycle Impact on S&M Efficiency Metrics

189

Bookings Data is Finance Data Source 1

190

Contracted MRR vs P&L MRR

191

Please Code Your Expenses to the Department Level

192

Founders You Must Be Profitable on Your Services Revenue

193

How Do I Calculate Retention if I Have Consumption Revenue?

194

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

195

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

196

How I Assess the Setup of Your SaaS P&L

197

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

198

Does Expansion MRR or ARR Include Renewals?

199

What is the Impact of Gross Revenue Retention on Valuation?

200

What Revenue Streams Should Be Included in Our MRR Schedule?

201

What is the Source of Truth for Bookings Data?

202

Can We Treat One-time Purchases as Variable Revenue?

203

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

204

4 Mistakes When SaaSifying Your Accounting Foundation

205

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

206

Who Should Track Time In Your SaaS Company

207

This is the Tech Being Used in SaaS Companies

208

Don’t Comingle Your Revenue Streams

209

The Big Bucket of Expenses and Running Financially Blind

210

The Advisors You Need When Selling Your Company

211

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

212

VC Fundable Growth Rates

213

How to Handle Unknown Churn in Your Reporting

214

The Ultimate SaaS CFO KPI Checklist

215

You Need Bookings Alignment with Your Forecast

216

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

217

5 Drivers of SaaS Valuations per ICONIQ

218

Trends in Revenue per FTE According to ICONIQ and Lemkin

219

Bookings Data is one of the Biggest SaaS Data Mistakes

220

How to Unbundle Your COGS Expenses for Greater Margin Clarity

221

Do I Really Need to Track Revenue on Daily Basis?

222

Is Your First Quarter ARR Number Already Baked?

223

You’ve Got to Hit Your Q1 Budget Number

224

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

225

What is the Difference Between Retention Rates and Renewal Rates?

226

When Do I Count a Customer Cancellation?

227

Is It Correct to Allocate Engineering Expense to COGS

228

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

229

How to Calculate Your Expansion ARR Target Based on Retention Targets

230

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

231

Revenue per FTE Trends for Public Companies per Meritech Capital

232

Net Revenue Retention Trends for Public Companies per Meritech Capital

233

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

234

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

235

A Common Financial Trait of EBITDA Positive SaaS Companies

236

ACV versus ARPA When Segmenting Your Customer Base

237

Implement an Internal Discounting Policy for Better Pricing Controls

238

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

239

Coding Your Employee-related Expenses

240

Coding Your Contractor Expense

241

Behinds Scenes Look at the SaaS Revenue Cycle

242

Contract Dates versus Invoice Dates

243

Is Your Services Backlog in Months Increasing or Decreasing?

244

Do You Have an FTE Report?

245

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

246

Do I Need Cohort Analysis for My Revenue Streams?

247

73% of Your SaaS Peers Raised Their Prices in 2023

248

The 4 Pure Play SaaS COGS Departments

249

The 6 Possible Revenue Categories on Your SaaS P&L

250

Can You Really Define ARR?

251

Make Sure You Code Software Expenses Correctly

252

What ARR Number Should We Use in ARR Multiples?

253

What is CARR and Why Do I Care?

254

How to Calculate the Cost of Expansion ARR

255

Are You Tracking the Billable Utilization of Your Services Team?

256

Track Your Professional Services Backlog Number

257

What is Professional Services?

258

Do You Have Balance Between CAC Payback and Retention?

259

The Perfect Storm for Cash Burn

260

What Should Be Included in Your Dev Ops Expenses?

261

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

262

Top 5 Accounting Software for SaaS Companies

263

Levers to Pull in Sales Compensation Planning

264

Should Downgrades Count Against My Booked ARR?

265

Am I Ready for Debt Financing to Fuel Growth?

266

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

267

High Growth High Confusion

268

Mind the Gap in Your Renewal Dates

269

Code Your Consultants and Contractors Separately

270

What’s Lurking in Your G&A Expenses?

271

How Do I Handle Spikes in Sales and Marketing Expenses

272

How Do I Start Implementing SaaS Metrics?

273

How to Really Determine What Should Be in COGS

274

Do You Include Sales Operations in S&M Expenses?

275

What Churn % Should I Use for LTV

276

CAC Calculation and Multiple GTM Strategies

277

These are the 4 Source Data Inputs for SaaS Metrics

278

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

279

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

280

What Should I Include in My Sales and Marketing Expenses?

281

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

282

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

283

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

284

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

285

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

286

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

287

What Month Do I Count Churn?

288

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

289

Be Careful with Your Coding of Reseller Revenue

290

Should Price Increases Be Counted as Expansion?

291

Are Onboarding Expenses a COGS or Sales Cost?

292

Should I Code Bonuses to COGS or OpEx?

293

When Should I Implement the Rule of 40 Metric?

294

What’s the Difference Between Tech Support and Customer Success

295

Don’t Record Discounts Separately from Your Subscription Revenue

296

Where Do I Code Platform Fees

297

Make Sure You Understand and Define What a Customer Means

298

When Do You Need a Fractional CFO?

299

Your CPA and Bookkeeper Need to Break Up

300

How to Run Retention Analysis When You Have Two Revenue Streams

301

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

302

What is Managed Services?

303

When Does a Renewal Become a Booking?

304

How Do We Track Usage that Exceeds Pricing Tiers?

305

What Month Do We Report a Churn?

306

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

307

How Do You Measure Bookings with Multi-year Contracts?

308

How to Benchmark Your SaaS Business

309

Timing Mismatch Between Bookings Date and CAC

310

Usage-based Revenue and Your COGS Setup

311

Never Multiply by 12 to Annualize Your Retention Numbers

312

Net Revenue Retention is a Must-have Metric

313

You Must Calculate Your Gross Revenue Retention

314

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

315

Finally SaaS Metrics Pillar 5 Focuses on Efficiency and ROI

316

SaaS Metrics Pillar 4 Focuses on Your Financial Profile

317

SaaS Metrics Pillar 3 Focuses on Your Gross Margin Profile

318

SaaS Metrics Pillar 2 Focuses on Retaining Your Customers

319

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

320

Is Your SaaS Company Valued on One Metric or Many?

321

Two Methods to Run Retention Analysis

322

What is Cohort Analysis?

323

Klaviyo’s Gross Profit Performance and OpEx Profile at Scale

324

Klaviyo’s Net Revenue Retention Formula and Performance

325

Klaviyo Filed Their S-1 and Gross Revenue Retention Formula

326

What is Churn in SaaS?

327

TCV vs ACV vs ARR

328

One of the Biggest SaaS Data Mistakes

329

How to Call BS on a Bookings Forecast

330

Your SaaS P&L is Wrong

331

What is the R&D Index?

332

What is the R&D Payback Ratio?

333

How Should I Track COGS With Usage-based Revenue

334

What is Your SaaS OpEx Profile?

335

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

336

The Right Metrics for the Right Stage of Your Business

337

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

338

ARPA | The Forgotten SaaS Metric

339

What is The Proper Close Date for a Software Booking

340

Why CAC Is Like Debt

341

System Reboot: Your ARR Has Been Corrupted

342

Does Usage-based Revenue Count as a Booking?

343

A Renewal is Not a Booking or Is It?

344

Do Price Changes Count as a Software Booking?

345

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

346

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

347

What is a Software Booking?

348

The Advanced Lifetime Value Formula and Its Dangers

349

LTV is NOT a Standalone Metric

350

Should I Use LTV If I Target High ACV Customers?

351

LTV is a Point in Time Metric

352

What is Customer Lifetime Value

353

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

354

Why is Department Coding So Important?

355

What Is This Chart of Accounts That I Hear About?

356

Why Is the Rule of 40 Back in Style?

357

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

358

What Time Period Should I Measure for Revenue Retention?

359

Do You Know Your Margins by Revenue Stream?

360

How to Correctly Calculate Your Overall Gross Margin

361

COGS vs. OpEx | Why Is This SO Important?

362

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

363

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

364

Are You Tracking Your Renewal Rate?

365

Your MRR Schedule Could Cost You Millions in Valuation

366

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

367

Should I Segment My SaaS Metrics?

368

CAC Payback Period | One of My Favorite Metrics

369

What Does CAC Mean

370

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

371

What is the Cost of ARR