Articles

What to Expect in 2H 2025: Balancing Growth, Profitability, and Uncertainty

June 5, 2025

As we move into the second half of 2025, continued macro uncertainty may result in several areas of concern for SaaS investors and operators. Whether you're leading a SaaS business or investing in one, understanding the scope of this “new normal” and how to measure success is key to operational efficiency.

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Predictions for 2019

Here are some predictions for 2019 and a review of my thoughts for 2018, many of which were wrong.‍

January 8, 2019

SaaS CFO Perspectives: Scaling Your Information Systems as You Grow

Too many SaaS companies don’t have a strategic systems roadmap to support their growth. As a result, they end up making endless tactical fixes and integrations to solve immediate problems but continue to struggle producing key reports and data analysis.In a recent OPEXEngine webinar, SaaS CFO Eric Mersch (Percolate and FLG Partners) and OpFocus CEO David Carnes discuss the people, processes and systems required to scale your information systems as you grow from $20M ARR to $200M ARR.

January 7, 2019

8 Keys for a Successful Financial Audit

Preparing for an audit isn’t usually on anyone’s list of favorite things but it’s a necessary evil. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses, audit preparation can be particularly stressful because the business model presents its own set of unique challenges related to financial operations that play a critical role in any audit. With the right preparation, however, an organization can breeze through SaaS audits.

January 2, 2019

Preparing a SaaS Company for a Capital Raise

Raising capital can be a challenging, sometimes grueling, process. In the last 20+ years, I have seen how the sausage is made from many different perspectives.

December 26, 2018

What are SaaS Boards Thinking about Going into 2019?

It's the end of the year, and it's time for us to make some predictions going into 2019. Here are the top five things we think the SaaS Boards are thinking about going into 2019.

December 21, 2018

Becoming SaaS: How CFOs Need to Manage the Transition from Perpetual to Subscription Models

‍At FLG, we’ve worked with many native SaaS companies as well as technology companies that have transitioned to SaaS. As strategic advisors, we help companies manage the financial and operational requirements of the SaaS model. One question we frequently hear from clients in transition is how to differentiate between perpetual (licensed) and subscription models.

December 18, 2018

How Do B2B SaaS Companies Count their Customers? Let Me Count the Ways

Yesterday, at the Boston SaaS Finance Meet-Up for the SaaS and Software benchmarking community, we discussed some of the issues with determining customer count for B-2-B SaaS companies. Last week, the same question came up at our San Francisco SaaS Finance Meet-Up as well, so it is clearly an issue. Many companies, especially those selling into the enterprise, struggle with counting whether a large organization is one customer or many. Some B2B SaaS vendors also sell to franchise organizations, and while the billing may go through one entity, the sales effort is undertaken at each local entity with hundreds of “customers.” In the same way, some large corporations may use one procurement system, yet there are many different business units purchasing through the same system but representing very different sales efforts. Is there a consistent way to define all these complex situations?

December 14, 2018

A Warning About SaaS Lifetime Value Calculations

When I first heard about the Lifetime Value (LTV) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) metric many years ago, the economics major in me got very excited. I was already well into the SaaS financing business at the time, and this ratio seemed like the most elegant way to express how the business model really worked. It is the unit economic driver of value and profits that is obscured by normal GAAP financials.

December 11, 2018

SaaS CFO Tips: Why Tech Debt is an Indicator of SaaS Performance

Best in class SaaS CFOs measure the percent of R&D spend associated with tech debt, just like they track financial debt. Tech debt simply defined is the accumulated cost of development short cuts and outdated technology. It is the interest a company pays for trade-offs made between quality and time to market – short cuts that may come back to bite you in terms of security vulnerabilities, outdated platform or integration issues. Over the long run, tech debt can seriously inhibit your ability to innovate, develop new products and acquire new customers. Tracking and benchmarking a company’s annual spending on tech debt as a percentage of R&D spend should be part of every SaaS CFO’s KPI reporting.

December 7, 2018