Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me take that thought process a bit further. Let’s focus on the software vertical which is the most tuned to our audience. How many companies do you cater to? What are the specific trends in that vertical? For example, people are mostly in the software industry doing SaaS companies. There are all these subscription management software companies. How do you play in that space?

Rob Reid: We have over 12,000 customers. We are now part of Sage. We don’t break out our verticals. I can’t answer your specific question there. There are about 18,000 software companies. We do target all of those. What we’ve done from a financial management perspective is look at all the needs of a software company and how we can be the best.

We have a system that is highly effective for the rollout your business processes. But more importantly, how do we report the information so that those businesses can maximize our growth and give a great return? We have a digital board book that provides the CFO and management team with what is your change in monthly recurring revenue. In that dashboard, you can go through and see that change.

You can also break it down and look at it against your budget and how you’re doing on an daily or hourly basis versus your plan. You can see what your churn rates are. What is your customer acquisition cost? What is your customer acquisition cost? What is your customer lifetime value? Every major metric that the software industry has adopted is in the dashboard out of the box. There isn’t any other software provider that has it out of the box like we do. That goes back to concentrating on these verticals and really understanding what they need to deliver differentiation.

You asked about subscription billing. Zuora was originally created to provide subscription billing mainly for consumer organizations. They have subscription services with businesses that are B2C. We’ve concentrated on B2B. We have a full subscription management capability that does allow software companies to bill other software companies and do it through a process that is absolutely assured when you’re doing it in a gap environment.

We make it very easy for you to not only adhere to the old revenue recognition rules. Now people are converting to the new revenue recognition rules. We keep the books for you in both the old and the new ways. Other organizations can’t do that type of capability. It makes it really easy for the CFO to understand how they’re marking the transition and what that would have looked like in the new way. We have an exclusive endorsement from AICPA with regard to ERP solutions.

AICPA has about 650,000 members. It’s the largest trade organization in the United States. We are constantly meeting with them to understand where the profession is going and what are the new rules and regulations coming in, so we’re always staying ahead.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Rob Reid, EVP of Sage Intacct
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