Modern Finance
8 Financial Planning Templates for SaaS Companies
Jumpstart the financial planning processes that matter most to your SaaS business and put your goals into action with these eight templates.
A chef tends to taste the sauce before it leaves the kitchen, destined for diners’ plates.
At Vena, we take a similar approach with our own technology.
Our finance team uses the Vena platform to manage several core processes, such as workforce planning, incentive compensation planning, quota planning and more.
As a SaaS company ourselves, we also know the unique challenges that SaaS companies encounter when evaluating business performance, forecasting future needs and effectively managing staffing and other essential business functions.
Given that we’ve been around the block a few times, we wanted to share some insights on how SaaS finance teams can measure business performance and allocate resources more strategically—and how our finance team does this in Vena.
For SaaS companies like Vena, human capital is perhaps the most important resource in their arsenal. It’s also the most expensive—more than 70% of many SaaS companies’ total costs tend to be related to people.
Those costs change, too, as employees come and go, and their salaries change as well.
Sizing up what those costs are, and how they’ll change, can be a monumental task for many FP&A teams. While this obviously isn’t a challenge that’s limited to the SaaS industry alone, given the human capital costs that are typical of the SaaS space, it carries extra weight.
What’s more, SaaS finance teams also have to contend with the potential disruption of their company’s workforce given the rise of AI, and how this will impact the organization’s structure and headcount.
It could mean that some jobs are eliminated or their main functions transformed. It could also mean that entirely new positions are created, and teams that support them.
Keeping up with changing people costs and understanding where to allocate your headcount most strategically is where processes like workforce planning and compensation review planning become critical.
Those challenges mean that at Vena, it’s essential that we have a good grasp of our human capital and people costs. Fine-tuning the planning and reporting processes around those costs is, naturally, pretty darn important, and we want to make sure we get it right.
What we’ve found is that by setting a strong foundation with our workforce data, we’ve been able to use that data to fuel other processes like our sales planning (for instance how we plan our commission structures and sales quotas, all at the individual sales rep level).
Part of what makes this possible is the flexibility of the Vena platform, and how easy it is to combine multiple data sources within the Vena database and add dimensions to your data model.
“We took our workforce planning module, and that’s what created the foundation for us to create compensation review planning and take it one step further to create quota/commissions planning as well,” says Toyin Olopade, Finance Systems and Operations Manager at Vena.
“Workforce data is really powerful,” she adds. “There are so many use cases when you would need that foundational data. […] You can start off with foundational workforce planning in Vena and you can take the data you have one step further to build something unique for your own use case.”
When you think of your FP&A processes in terms of how they can build on one another, one data set or specific insight can fuel multiple processes down the line, or open up entirely new ways to think about or look at business operations.
Here’s how our own FP&A team approaches this, with help from the Vena platform.
Our FP&A team uses Vena to get visibility into:
All critical metrics for SaaS businesses to be measuring.
We use Vena for workforce planning in several ways, including headcount reporting, and tracking headcount movement. Once we had our workforce planning module nailed down, it served as a foundation for further processes such as compensation review and quota planning.
Vena can be used to generate a number of workforce planning reports, such as headcount reports, compensation reports, performance reports, recruiting reports and variance analysis reports.
A look into how you can manage your labor expenses planning in Vena, with help from pre-built templates that integrate directly with Excel.
Compensation is critical in attracting and retaining talented professionals, especially, but not strictly, on the sales side. That’s particularly true for SaaS firms—the median sales and marketing budgets for SaaS companies was 38% of their previous 12 months’ revenue, according to a 2023 report from Meritech Capital. So, planning for salaries, salary increases, and bonuses, too, is increasingly important to maintain budgets.
It’s also important to note just how uniquely competitive the talent market is in the SaaS market, which makes compensation planning and review all the more important. In 2023, 82% of job candidates in the field negotiated base salary and variable compensation, which was a 20% increase over 2022—a sign that talent is flexing its muscles at the negotiation table.
As a result, it’s critical for SaaS companies to find ways to attract, and subsequently reward top performers. Developing compensation plans (salary increases, bonuses etc.) and reviewing those plans, is another critical way in which the Vena team uses the platform.
Incentive compensation planning also lies within Vena’s FP&A team’s purview. Using Vena, our team is able to pull data from both ADP and Salesforce—the systems we use for our payroll and CRM solutions, respectively—to get a full view of employee performance.
By combining the data that lives in Salesforce (such as deals and revenue tied to individual sales reps), with core workforce data that lives in ADP, our team is able to effectively set commission plans in collaboration with our revenue operations team.
This is especially helpful given the difference in metrics used to gauge role-specific performance, explains Thomas Krolak, FP&A Director at Vena. “If you’re a sales rep, that’ll be ARR, but SDRs get compensated by how many meetings they’re generating. So there are all different types of metrics that come out of [Salesforce],” he adds.
A look into how you can manage your incentive compensation planning at the employee level in Vena, with help from pre-built templates that integrate directly with Excel.
Quota planning, at Vena (and likely many other SaaS firms), is a collaborative effort—specifically, our finance team works with our revenue operations team.
While we may start with thinking about goals for sales representatives, those goals need to align with the rest of the organization—how do the goals and quotas for a single employee roll up and align with those of management? How about specific segments and markets?
Quota planning, for Vena, involves a whole lot of holistic thinking about how to drive the specific results we’re targeting. In other words, this isn’t “Glengarry Glen Ross”—quota planning is used as a tool to build up the entire organization from the ground up.
Quota planning is also much more valuable when done alongside commission planning, Thomas explains. Before incorporating both processes into our workforce planning module in Vena, “quota planning was happening separately from the commission planning, which didn’t make a lot of sense,” he says.
Because he was calculating commissions based on granular quota and people data (some of which already existed in Vena), Thomas realized that by rolling these processes into Vena, they’d be easier to manage and, even better, he’d be able to use that data across more areas of the business.
“I came to the realization that I might as well leverage what I’m doing in workforce planning—just adding on the other metrics that we needed to track,” he says. “Suddenly, I can get the benefits of Vena in the sense that we’re saving the different targets and results from our forecast into the Vena cube, which I can then pull elsewhere into our finance model.”
While our FP&A team uses Vena in many ways—which continue to evolve, we should add—the team also has some advice and tips for those both new to and familiar with the platform.
Here are some best practices to take into account when learning the ins and outs of Vena.
Vena’s finance team views the process of planning and forecasting in a broad, holistic way—they encourage others to do the same. Quotas, plans, reports, and forecasts all mesh together on some level, and thinking of these in a silo—or thinking of specific teams within the organization as similarly siloed—can hurt efficiency, and kneecap a company in the long run.
The goal of using the Vena platform is to make things faster and more efficient. That requires stakeholders across teams to collaborate, which is another area in which Vena can excel.
With Vena, stakeholders outside of your core finance team can input data themselves to support processes like budget creation, freeing up the FP&A team’s time and resources, and allowing them to focus on what they do best: developing a deeper understanding of what’s driving the company forward.
Enabling your team is also absolutely critical. A top priority for our own FP&A team was getting team members on track to start building and mapping templates and reports in Vena self-sufficiently. Once they start building, they can leverage the organization’s data to find solutions to its current problems, and its future ones, too.
As a finance team (and especially in FP&A), your primary goal is to be able to effectively tell your stakeholders the story of what the company’s data is telling you. Enabling your team to build templates, reports, forecasts, and models—the tools they’ll need to tell that story—will ultimately reflect in a clearer, more articulate message to those stakeholders. But it all starts with giving the team the right tools and ensuring they know how to use them.
Perhaps most importantly, Vena’s finance team says that Vena users should build to scale. What does that mean? Don’t necessarily only build your structures or your workflows and reporting processes within Vena, for the current market. Think about what comes next. Think about building processes in a way that facilitates future additions and use cases.
For example, one Vena customer, GB Railfreight, started with a single project: replacing its manual profit-and-loss reporting process. That allowed the company to quickly uncover value and move on to further projects and processes, such as CapEx planning.
Vena is a tool that is designed to be built upon—it’s like you’re using building blocks to create a foundation for your future company. Accordingly, think about the future. Think about the scale of your organization and its needs in the years ahead. Start building, in Vena, for that version of your company.
Finally, don’t be afraid to move fast and break things. In Vena, that is.
By nature of its flexibility and detailed audit trail, Vena allows you to try new things with minimal risk. It’s understandable to worry that a team member could irreversibly break some workflow or template, or delete sensitive data. When building Vena we kept that in mind, however, and made it easy to restore reports to a previous state and drill down into where each data point came from.
“If you break something, there are ways to fix it,” says Thomas. “If someone is trying something new in Vena or trying to learn it, and something goes off the rails, it’s easy to go back and fix it,” he says.
As a SaaS company, Vena’s finance team needs to contend with the same, or similar logjams as other SaaS firms. Learn how other SaaS companies, like Lookout, are using Vena to enhance their financial reporting and scenario modeling.
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