Baker Tilly enables technology company to see subscription revenue metrics

Baker Tilly, the accounting and finance specialists, made a new case study available today featuring their successful implementation with Quest Analytics of automated subscription revenue metrics tracking software, Baker Tilly SaaS Intelligence. The finance leaders, executives, and department heads at Quest Analytics now have instant access to actionable insights and trends that will enable them to grow the business.

Quest Analytics strives to help people across America receive the information and care they deserve. A technology company dedicated to improving healthcare provider network management, Quest Analytics’ Provider Network Management platform brings transparency, trust and confidence in the process of monitoring, measuring and managing provider networks. Quest Analytics partners with both healthcare organizations and providers to address two significant issues facing the healthcare industry today: accurate provider directories and accessible networks.

While moving more of its products and services to the cloud, it became clear to Quest Analytics should be measuring itself against subscription business model metrics and evaluating its business as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company. The first major step in that direction was upgrading their financials from their legacy software and spreadsheets. The best solution for the organization was Sage Intacct’s contract management capabilities, subscription billing and its native integration with Salesforce.

“The company has been in business since 2003 and had historically been a desktop software provider,” Robertson says. “As we moved more of our solutions to the cloud, we knew we needed to think in terms of more complex multi-year, multi-element contracts, and that managing those contracts with spreadsheets wasn’t going to work long term.” Robertson knew they needed an ERP system, Sage Intacct, that could manage their revenue recognition requirements and increasingly complex billing, while also automating the tracking of crucial SaaS KPIs for the organization – for this, he turned to SaaS Intelligence.

The implementation of their SaaS KPI dashboard was straightforward according to Robertson. Chris Price, and the product team, helped Robertson understand exactly how the metrics were being calculated. “The Baker Tilly team was super responsive and always provided me with a lot of detail whenever I had questions,” Robertson says. “The product works exactly as it was sold to us.”

“Spreadsheets aren’t systems,” he says, explaining that it’s too easy to make mistakes, judgment calls and manual interventions when you are using spreadsheets, making it difficult to trust the data and even more difficult to surface insights about your business.

“When you keep everything in Excel and split your data by year, it can make trailing twelve-month analysis difficult and it’s less likely that you’ll discover actionable insights and trends,” says Robertson. “With Baker Tilly’s SaaS Intelligence, we can do that kind of analysis easily.”

“Baker Tilly’s SaaS Intelligence provides a powerful and accurate representation of customer subscription activity and the impact on ARR or CMRR by automatically identifying different SaaS metric scenarios. The intelligent engine of the application can tell the difference between factors driving changes in CMRR, removing the need for additional analysis of transactions or manual intervention, giving the finance teams a single source of truth,” said Chris Price.

According to Robertson, SaaS Intelligence became a check on previous policies to make sure KPIs are being calculated properly. “We found ourselves often saying ‘What does the spreadsheet say?’ and then ‘But what does SaaS Intelligence say?’ and that process has taught us a lot about our assumptions and our policies around SaaS metrics,” says Robertson. “It gives you the flexibility to look at things differently, to challenge your assumptions and to look at true KPIs. It spurs conversations we didn’t use to have around things like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV).”

SaaS Intelligence is helping Robertson communicate key SaaS metrics and have these conversations at the executive team level. “Going in front of the Executive Team to present these metrics is spurring conversations about where to focus our efforts,” says Robertson. “Having these insights that are actionable and strategic come out of the finance department is really cool,” he adds.