FP&A teams at SaaS companies have a big job to do.
They’re integral in helping the business build out its business goals, track the most relevant KPIs, project future subscription sales and budget for the resources necessary to achieve growth targets.
They also need to plan revenue based on both existing and new clients, while keeping in mind variations in contract terms from customer to customer, as well as contract expansions, renewals and potential churn.
To help you juggle these intersecting priorities and kick start your own financial reporting, we’ve put together a series of free Excel templates you can use to drive your SaaS operations.
Keep reading for insight into using these templates for:
First up: our SaaS driver-based planning template. This template is designed specifically for driver-based planning, helping you track the drivers that influence your SaaS model—namely your revenue and cost inputs.
With this template in place, you can input costs and other details associated with your products to see which financial statements they affect, tying financial projections to key drivers.
This allows you to create detailed financial plans, forecast more precisely and complete dynamic scenario analysis.
It also helps you model the impact that changes to your key drivers will have on your overall financial performance and lets you access your three main financial statements—your income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement, updated based on your inputs—to track and analyze those key drivers.
A sneak peek at our SaaS Driver-Based Planning template, which you can download here. The balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statements are detailed with formula references to the input tabs to show account movement.
Our SaaS revenue planning dashboard will help you track key metrics such as your annual recurring revenue (ARR), subscription revenue, pipeline, churn rate and more—including deferred revenue. It also helps you plan your ARR by opportunity source, customer and territory.
You’ll be able to quickly measure and monitor your booked ARR, subscriber count and ARR booking by rep for new, renewal, expansion, churn and committed opportunities.
The template can also support with reforecasting pipeline opportunities and helping you easily communicate a true picture of the business’s financial state to stakeholders with a summary of new, renewal, expansion and churned accounts by subscription sales, subscription invoicing, subscription receivables and deferred revenue.
A sneak peek at our SaaS Revenue Planning Dashboard template, which you can download here. The summary tab will populate based on the data you add to the input tab.
Useful for increasing confidence in your revenue projections across the fiscal year, our sales projection template helps you organize projected sales by customer divisions.
This SaaS sales forecast template can help you improve your forecasting accuracy by leveraging data across projects, customer divisions and projected winning probability, to gain better insights into your cost and revenue potential.
The data you input can be visualized in a dashboard, making it easy to gain insights at a glance. With this increased visibility into your forecasted sales revenue, you can also optimize scenario planning and better allocate resources to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
A sneak peek at our Sales Projection template, which you can download here. The dashboard tab allows you to visualize your data, rolling up your total revenue, total projected sales and revenue by month.
Our top-down fund budgeting template was designed to help businesses build out their budgets from the top down based on funding sources. It can empower SaaS companies to create a high-level fund management budget for resource allocation, expense planning and more.
Is your SaaS business currently seeking funding? Listen to this episode of The CFO Show on raising capital in tough markets with Peter Arrowsmith of JMI Equity.
If you want a more transparent view into your budget, this SaaS budget template can help, letting you input a spread pattern for each fund account in the budget year, break down your current budget and compare it to the previous year.
With this granular view into your fund budgeting, you can better communicate your financial and strategic goals to stakeholders and align your resources to meet them—allowing you to make more impactful data-driven decisions to meet your growth objectives.
A sneak peek at our Top Down Fund Budgeting template, which you can download here.
Plan for your forecast year’s sales volume, price and gross margin percentage for specific products with our product sales forecasting template.
Using historical data, you can make more detailed revenue projections, helping you in setting achievable goals and allocating resources effectively.
The trend graph included in the template helps you easily visualize your actual and forecasted gross margin.
A sneak peek at our Product Sales Forecasting template, which you can download here. Note that you can update headings to represent whatever unit or terminology you need.
Our top-down planning template allows you to build out your SaaS business’s financial planning using drivers to forecast goals and objectives, helping to streamline your strategic decision making.
By applying historical data to your planning and forecasts, you can better determine future budgets, allocate and prioritize your resources based on your budget and goals, set your targets and align your business around them.
A sneak peek at our Top-Down Planning template, which you can download here. Plan your growth based on set drivers and input growth limits to prevent the plan scenario from exceeding the limit.
But top-down planning is only one way to go—we’ve got you covered for your bottom-down planning needs as well.
Designed to help SaaS businesses plan at the functional level, our bottom-up planning template can be used to aggregate departmental budgets to the overall budget.
You can also perform scenario analysis and get granular in your planning, determining resource allocation down to the employee level. With this level of detail available, you can easily adapt your plans on a dime when the market shifts or if there are changes within a department.
A sneak peek at our Bottom-Up Planning template, which you can download here. The template also includes a variance report for you to compare your budget and actual + forecast scenarios.
Finally, our product dashboard template lets you visualize your key product-related KPIs and analyze the performance of a product or product line.
This is particularly useful when you’re a SaaS business with multiple offerings that support different customer bases or audiences—letting you compare sales and see how each is contributing to your overall revenue.
This template was built to help you better understand product performance—including who your top customers are, how specific products are selling and the amount of revenue being generated. That can empower your FP&A team to identify ongoing trends, as well as enhance collaboration and communication around your product’s overall performance.
A sneak peek at our Product Dashboard template, which you can download here. The dashboard will be automatically populated based on your inputs in the sales and revenue tabs. Note that you can update headings to represent whatever unit of measure or terminology you need.
Want to get even more out of these templates?
With Vena, you can directly connect these templates to a central database to pull data from all your source systems, populating that data into the template and updating information automatically when it’s changed.
What’s more, Vena offers a pre-configured budgeting, planning and reporting solution specifically for SaaS organizations.
From revenue planning and scenario modeling to board and variance reporting, Vena—the only native Excel FP&A software—can help you improve operational efficiency, gain visibility into key metrics and influence crucial growth decisions.
“When we broke down our data silos and brought everything right into Vena, it really helped us look at the business from a different perspective,” said Kristina Bittorf, Senior Manager of Finance for Sprout Social, a social media management and data analytics software platform.
“Revenue is always top-of-mind, but now we can dive even deeper into our expenses and gross margin with KPIs such as efficiency ratios, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and more.”
Manage all of your budgeting, planning and reporting processes with an Excel-based cloud solution that is purpose-built for SaaS organizations.
Nicole Diceman is Director, Product Marketing at Vena. With a proven track record of driving product strategy and direction, she is heavily involved in driving new product ideas and development efforts and is closely aligned with customer needs and requirements. With her extensive knowledge and experience in product marketing, FP&A and the Vena platform itself, Nicole is a regular contributor to the Vena blog and often speaks at virtual and in-person events to share her ideas. A powerful advocate for product marketing innovation, Nicole is always on the lookout for creative new ways to bring additional value to Vena customers.
