Increase Cash Flow By Moving Beyond Excel Accounting

Are you and your team tired of spending hours upon hours managing your cash flow and tracking profitability on Excel spreadsheets? For a myriad of reasons, spreadsheet-based accounting will keep your department from performing at its peak potential. In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of cash flow for SaaS businesses and how you can boost your department’s long term effectiveness by trading in legacy tech for AI tools.

We’ll discuss some of the inherent difficulties of cash flow management for SaaS and the risks of relying on Excel for accounting. Then we’ll show you how AI and machine learning (ML) can streamline your cash management, increasing the amount of money available for various departments and projects. Let’s get started.

Cash flow management quickly gets tricky for SaaS companies

Due to various factors, the navigation of cash flow can be particularly difficult for SaaS companies. Some of these inherent challenges include:

• Uncertainties introduced by customer churn and changes in user trends and tastes.
• Cash flow difficulties from high-risk customers and missed payments.
• Difficulty with ASC 606 and visibility issues with deferred revenue waterfalls.

These factors can make it difficult for manual accounting departments to prevent negative cash flow. To ensure financial stability and drive growth, SaaS finance and accounting leaders need the best tools to deal with these realities. 

As we’ll cover in more detail below, Excel makes everything from revenue forecasting to KPI analysis significantly more difficult, creating problems that can make it downstream and onto your cash flow statement. But first, let’s get some valuable context. How does the finance team contribute to tracking cash flow and increasing your net amount of cash?

Essential cash flow workflows in a SaaS accounting department

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any SaaS business, and the accounting department is the financial heart of every organization. The finance team engages in crucial workflows to provide data that helps every other department achieve its various goals and boost your company’s profit margins.

These include:

• Financial reporting: Detailed reporting is essential for understanding your company’s cash inflows and outflows. It helps you get your financial bearings and supplies valuable info about your SaaS metrics and KPIs. It also lays the groundwork for your forecasting efforts.
• Revenue forecasting: Forecasting is the centerpiece of SaaS FP&A. It involves using your reporting data to predict future trends impacting your subscription levels and resulting cash flow.

• Revenue recognition: By law, recurring revenue SaaS companies can only recognize revenue when they’ve performed the service obligation attached to it. This means there’s usually a sizable chunk of deferred revenue in your liability column waiting to be converted into an asset.

Accounting departments that rely on Excel for these important workflows often limit their capabilities and productivity. Let’s see why.

Further Reading: The Secret Sauce to Building a Cash Flow Positive SaaS Startup

Risks of Using Excel for Accounting

Using Excel for accounting poses several risks that can significantly impact your business. One of these is the potential for human error, which can cause downstream problems in:

• Financial statement creation and accuracy
• Cash flow calculations
• Payroll management
• Inaccuracies with crucial SaaS metrics and KPIs

Additionally, Excel’s lack of security measures makes your financial data vulnerable to unauthorized access, putting your business and sensitive information at risk. But that’s only the beginning. Why else is Excel suboptimal for SaaS cash flow management?

Limited visibility and control over cash flow and time

Effectively managing your cash flow is crucial for the success of your business. However, relying on Excel spreadsheets can pose significant challenges when it comes to gaining visibility and control over your cash. Using manual data entry and calculations in Excel can lead to errors, resulting in inaccurate financial data and a lack of visibility into your cash position. This limited visibility makes it challenging to proactively and promptly address cash flow problems or shortfalls.

Manual accounting processes–such as reconciling invoices, tracking receivables, and evaluating financial statements–can consume your valuable time and resources if you’re not careful. And with Excel’s lack of real-time updates or automated alerts for cash flow issues, you might find it challenging to maintain positive cash flow. Additionally, the lack of collaboration and accessibility features in Excel hinders effective communication and decision-making, further blocking visibility. 

Missing data from manual email back-and-forth

In today’s fast-paced business environment, relying on manual email communication for accounting processes can lead to missing data and potential errors. When stakeholders and department members share data through lengthy email chains, important details can easily be overlooked or lost, resulting in delays and difficulties in reporting, forecasting, and reconciling accounts. This can negatively impact the accuracy of financial statements and hinder your cash flow management.

SaaS organizations should adopt a more streamlined system incorporating automation to mitigate these risks. Automation goes to the source of the problem, providing teams with a single source of truth (SSOT) that allows every person in your organization to instantly access updated data.

FURTHER READING: Hidden Cyber Risks of Financial Data Silos for SaaS Companies

Higher compliance risks, limited security, and revenue leakage

When managing cash flow, using Excel for accounting poses considerable compliance risks and limits data security. Beyond the basic factor of ASC 606 compliance, you also have another important issue to consider: revenue recognition. Reliance on manual data entry dramatically raises the odds of revenue leakage arising from the combination of data silos with the complexities involved in the SaaS rev rec process.

Additionally, the easy editability of Excel spreadsheets raises concerns about the security of your financial data, making sensitive information prone to unauthorized access or modifications. Excel probably won’t do the trick as your company grows and your financial data volumes and reporting requirements become more layered. This highlights the importance of transitioning to automated accounting software as early as possible in your business lifecycle.

Lack of time and resources for FP&A

Every SaaS accounting department has two important aspects and sets of responsibilities. These include:

• Accounting: This part focuses on the past by verifying transactions and historical reporting data. It’s also the side of the finance function that oversees invoicing and collections, preparing taxes and financial statements, and similar activities.

• FP&A: In contrast to accounting, financial planning and analysis (FP&A) focuses on the future. It prioritizes the creation of positive cash flow through strategic growth forecasting and extensive use of “if-then” scenario planning.

When SaaS finance leaders use Excel, the tedious processes of manual accounting eat up so much time that very little is left for FP&A. Over time, this imbalance becomes a serious problem because it results in a loss of connection to your cash flow and a sense of strategic stagnation.

No integration with your SaaS metrics–or anything else

Using Excel for accounting can be problematic, but it’s especially so regarding your SaaS metrics. The lack of real-time integration with your important KPIs–churn, ARR, MRR, LTV, and more– means you have to manually input data from widely divergent sources, such as payroll, invoices, credit card transactions, and financial statements.

This manual data entry and reconciliation to update your metrics takes up valuable time and resources you could be spending on strategic financial analysis. Furthermore, without proper integration, it becomes difficult to gain real-time visibility into your cash flow, including inflows, outflows, and net income.

Excel’s integration issues go much further than that, though. Excel is known to be unreliable in terms of integrating with third-party applications. Many SaaS companies extensively use third-party apps, so this is certainly a factor to be mindful of.

How does accounting automation impact financial planning?

Embracing accounting automation is one of the best and fastest ways to counteract the problems we’ve just discussed. Automation improves your relationship with your cash flow by:

Streamlining financial processes: Financial process automation is one of the most beneficial aspects of AI and ML for SaaS accounting departments. It increases accuracy and boosts peace of mind, but most importantly it frees you up for strategic contributions that impact your company’s bottom line.

Enabling complex forecasts and more rapid scaling: Effective forecasting is one of the pillars of positive cash flow. Automation sets the stage for robust multi-factor forecasts, allowing you to carry out complex “if-then” scenario planning at the click of a button.

Providing real-time insights into your cash flow: Manual accounting is notorious for the delays it introduces into SaaS finance departments. Reporting delays, delays in SaaS metric and KPI updates, and numerous other inefficiencies make real-time insights from Excel impossible to obtain.

How else can automation revolutionize your relationship with your cash flow?

Budgeting automation prevents cash flow gaps

Budgeting software equipped with AI is crucial for helping SaaS finance and accounting leaders prevent cash flow gaps and ensure sustained positive cash flow. With budgeting automation, finance teams become much more effective at managing their company’s finances.

By trading in Excel for dedicated budgeting and FP&A software, you can steer your finances in the right direction regardless of external conditions. For SaaS CFOs, knowing you have enough cash to cover expenses and maintain your company’s financial stability is priceless.

AI eliminates shadow IT and streamlines spend tracking

Spend tracking is one of the biggest cash flow headaches for SaaS companies that use Excel. By contrast, automation makes spend tracking almost effortless for finance teams.

Apart from the obvious benefit of improved cash flow management, automated spend tracking has a second benefit–it helps companies avoid shadow IT. Shadow IT includes any app or software product you’re continually paying for without realizing it. The average SaaS company makes extensive use of third-party apps for various workflows, and it’s all too easy to forget some of them and keep throwing money at a tool you no longer use.

Accounting automation removes that risk entirely.

Deferred revenue accounting becomes seamless with AI

Deferred revenue accounting is immensely simplified with the implementation of AI. By automating the process of tracking and managing your deferred revenue, you can plan more effectively for expenses like product development, hiring waves, M&A activity, and more.

Especially for established SaaS companies, deferred revenue waterfalls can inject sizable amounts of capital into your asset column. If you rely on manual processes, your team might not even be aware of a large upcoming waterfall.

With AI in your department, you’ll see your deferred revenue waterfalls months in advance, allowing you to plan and strategize in detail.

RELATED: 5 Steps to Build Your Revenue Recognition Strategy

Is it time for a cash flow upgrade?

For SaaS CFOs, your relationship to your company’s cash flow is only as strong as the tech stack you use to monitor and improve it. Creating and maintaining positive cash flow is a day-by-day and decision-by-decision matter. But one decision carries particular weight: do you use Excel for cash flow management or upgrade to an automated tech stack?

Our recent ebook can help you objectively assess your organization’s level of need and suitedness for automated accounting tools. You can read it here.