3 Benefits of Combined Billing and FinOps for SaaS
The SaaS market is changing. Rapidly.
Customers want more control over what they pay, when they pay, and how they pay for your SaaS—sometimes that means signing up for a free trial, and sometimes it means working directly with a sales rep.
It’s your job to give buyers options. If you don’t, your competitors will.
However, pricing flexibility is only possible when you have the systems and tools to support it. This is the main hurdle that SaaS companies face when designing a competitive pricing strategy.
Even if you do manage to offer competitive pricing, the problem soon shifts to finance’s shoulders as they attempt to recognize and report on a new revenue model while maintaining GAAP compliance. This friction puts sales/product and finance teams at odds with each other, especially when you’re trying to create a competitive GTM strategy.
By combining your billing and financial operations tools, you can avoid this scenario entirely—here are three other benefits you can expect.
1. Scale your business
There’s a slim chance you’ll nail your pricing strategy on the first try. Even with significant customer and market research, SaaS pricing needs to be tested, reiterated, and tested again to find what works. With a subscription billing platform built for B2B SaaS, you can experiment with different recurring billing models to align your pricing strategy with how customers consume your products.
In a best-case scenario, your updated pricing will help you expand into new markets, upsell customers, and land target accounts—effectively scaling your SaaS business.
However, without a finops solution to account for rapid changes in your pricing, your back office’s financial records will quickly fall apart. Standard accounting tools like spreadsheets (Excel, Google Sheets, etc.) were not designed for data warehousing, and trying to maintain version control, recognize multiple streams of recurring revenue, and maintain GAAP compliance isn’t feasible.
By combining billing and finops in one platform, SaaS companies can offer flexible pricing and packaging without creating headaches for their finance department.
2. Increase trust among investors
Building a flexible pricing strategy that you can adjust based on the ebbs and flows of market demand is certainly one way to impress potential investors. However, throw accurate financial records into the mix, and they’ll be sold.
A combined billing and finops solution gives SaaS companies the ability to quickly pull reports on SaaS metrics that are based on the same data sets as their financials. With accurate metrics on hand, you can validate your company story, gain the trust of investors, and potentially boost your company’s total valuation.
“After I guided investors through SaaSOptics, their only remaining request was to see our balance sheet. SaaSOptics gave them an understanding of the business, so there was no need to formalize or process additional information. They had more confidence in our business because of SaaSOptics.”- Peter Ord, GuideCX
3. Get cash in the door faster
Maintaining consistent cash schedules is arguably the most important part of running a business—especially in an investor-backed early-stage company with a high capital burn rate. In a B2B SaaS company with varying term agreements, having the ability to invoice your customers efficiently and collect payment quickly is crucial.
Basically, if your billing and pricing are the foundation of your GTM strategy, then your ability to get cash in the door is the engine that keeps your business moving forward. With combined billing and finops, you can create custom pricing offers for customers and then automate much of your A/R management process to speed up the customer payments process.
Pricing flexibility or financial integrity? You can have both.
You shouldn’t have to choose between flexibility and your finance team’s sanity. With Chargify and SaaSOptics, you don’t have to.
SaaSOptics and Chargify are the leading providers of financial operations and subscription billing management solutions for subscription businesses. Our SaaS revenue management and advanced subscription billing solutions cover the full spectrum of the subscription lifecycle: subscription management, recurring billing, GAAP/IFRS-compliant revenue recognition, SaaS metrics, revenue retention, expense recognition, usage, and events-based billing.
With our complete billing and financial solutions, your SaaS business isn’t forced to choose between pricing flexibility and financial integrity. Instead, you can break into new markets, capture market share, and increase retention by giving customers the options they’re looking for.
Now, SaaSOptics and Chargify are coming together to form Maxio, a subscription and revenue management platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Head over to Maxio to see how we’re helping subscription businesses offer flexible pricing and packaging—without the financial headaches.
