Optimising SaaS reporting
We transformed system data into detailed analytics and KPI dashboards which now inform management decisions.
Company profile
High-growth private equity-backed global SaaS business that supports major financial institutions
The client was a high-growth private equity-backed global SaaS business that supports global financial institutions.
Due to our client’s size, complex business model and rapid growth, they had extensive amounts of data but required a consolidated real-time view of the business.
The main goal of the engagement was to improve the understanding of how changes in operations impacted revenue on an ongoing basis. This involved two separate stages:
- Current year and pipeline analysis – building a dynamic bespoke tool to monitor in-year performance in real-time, both on a customer and revenue stream basis ; and
- Historical revenue analysis – conducting a deep dive into historical customer behaviour.
During this engagement, we worked with the CEO, CFO, COO, head of revenue operations and senior financial controller.
1. Current year and pipeline anaylsis (3 weeks)
Problem
Our client’s business model is highly intricate, with their professional services team managing a significant number of live project deployments concurrently – often over 100 at any given time. As a result, it was essential that the budgeting process involved not only the finance department, but all senior management team members. This ensured that all key stakeholders had a comprehensive understanding of the organisation’s trajectory.
Solution
Leveraging our data engineering processes, we were able to aggregate multiple data sources and develop sophisticated financial models to forecast revenue. This forecast covered both the current and upcoming fiscal year, providing a breakdown of revenue by customer and by type.
This gave the client new insights into their financials, allowing them to make data-driven decisions and develop a comprehensive budgeting strategy aligned with their business goals.
We also built a process for tracking changes so that management could clearly see on weekly basis any changes to the status of current projects or to opportunities which were in the pipeline.
Impact
Our solutions allowed them to quickly understand how changes to individual customer deployments impacted revenue and cash.
This meant that all management team members were:
- aligned on the goal ;
- confident in the underlying data (as it pulled directly from their systems) ; and
- able to make more informed strategic decisions to help them achieve the targets.
This tool also helped the finance team monitor changes to delivery timelines on fixed-price professional service engagements to ensure that revenue is being recognised in accordance with IFRS 15.
This is a perfect example of how we can develop bespoke solutions for a specific requirement (setting current-year revenue targets), which become pivotal in understanding the business’s health.
2. Historical revenue analysis (3 weeks)
Problem
The client’s data contained some duplications and inconsistencies, particularly when trying to reconcile from multiple sources. This impacted the reliability of their historical accounting information and made it challenging for management to perform a detailed analysis of past performance.
Solution
We were engaged to build repeatable data engineering processes to clean and transform the raw revenue data from their accounting system into detailed analytics. This allowed the management team to focus on developing growth strategies and analysing the SaaS KPIs driven by the detailed customer analysis.
Our robust and automated workflows meant that the management team were able to deepen their understanding of their customers’ behaviour. The interactive dashboards are now used to help management make more informed data-driven decisions.
Impact
Our collaborative approach, combined with clear and transparent analysis, meant that all stakeholders understood our work and could verify its accuracy. This has increased their confidence when making critical business decisions.