Is your company taking advantage of CFO tools like automated invoicing, database management, and automatic tax-compliance updates?
If not, read on. These tools allow you to do the above and more, benefitting your company by providing affordable and scalable software solutions to common time-consuming financial operations.
Finance and Billing Tools
It’s common for companies to have digitized some of their financial processes. While this is a step in the right direction, there are gaps in many processes that companies currently use that finance and billing tools can fill.
Maxio
Maxio is the bridge between a company’s CRM and general ledger that prevents revenue from falling through the cracks. SaaSOptics automates your expense and revenue recognition, helping you keep your data clean and making audits a breeze. Its robust suite of integrations empowers your team to manage every step of your order-to-cash process seamlessly and without fear of inaccurate data. Spreadsheets quickly become unwieldy for a scaling SaaS company; SaaSOptics is the financial reporting tool you’ll never outgrow.
In addition, you can supercharge your entire billing and finance operation. Maxio is a powerful B2B SaaS subscription management software that enables you to employ complex pricing strategies (like prepaid usage or real-time multi-attribute billing), so you can bill exactly the way you want—without the time or financial investment of building out a custom solution. Maxio is the most powerful way to manage the entire order-to-cash process and financial reporting and analytics.
CRM Tools
Customer relationship management (CRM) software keeps everything related to your customer journey in one place. By keeping track of all information about potential customers as well as current customers, these CFO tools have the potential to improve your business’s relationships and catalyze growth.
These are a few of the CRM CFO tools that we at SaaSOptics recommend:
Salesforce
By far the biggest name on this list, Salesforce has become an undeniable giant in their line of work. As the world’s #1 CRM platform, Salesforce can do everything from providing more insight into customers or sales to improving inter-company communication for better customer service.
They have a whole host of CRM tools to browse. If you haven’t heard of them, or aren’t using one of their tools yet, check them out.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive allows companies to visualize their sales pipeline with an interface that has been hailed as the easiest to use in the sales industry.
This CRM tool keeps track of meetings, follow-ups, leads, communications (past, future, or present) so that you can tend to customer relationships in the most effective way possible.
Hubspot
Hubspot is another CRM tool that helps companies manage their relationships with their customers by improving inter-departmental communication and information records. Hubspot keeps all information related to the buyer’s journey in one database, meaning no double entries or outdated data, since everyone is working off of the same system of record.
General Ledger Tools
CFO tools that deal with the general ledger are not ones to mess around with. As the record-keeping system for all of a company’s financial data, an accurate and easy-to-navigate general ledger tool is essential.
Here are some of the top CFO tools we recommend to keep your ledger organized and secure, and keep your company GAAP compliant.
QuickBooks
Quickbooks is another financial software that is useful for all things accounting and finance. From payroll to freelancers to bookkeeping to automated billing, Quickbooks can handle it all (and at a very reasonable price).
Quickbooks links to your business’s bank accounts and automatically categorizes transactions, meaning just one glance provides all the cash flow information you need.
Xero
Xero is a popular all-in-one accounting software trusted by over 3 million business-owners.
Their software automates tasks like invoicing; keeps track of filing, tax returns, and cash flow; and allows companies to easily see the entire financial picture of their business. Xero is an excellent digital tool for all of your accounting needs.
Invoicing and ePay Tools
Getting paid on-time is just as important as how much money is coming in. We even wrote an entire blog about it here. Utilizing ePay tools makes sending invoices and receiving customer their payments easy.
Check out these CFO tools we recommend to manage online payments for a better customer experience.
Maxio Advanced A/R Management
Maxio has an accounts receivable management tool that is customizable to a business’s payroll and invoice calendar.
Create custom collections emails and establish escalation plans for tardy invoices, schedule automatic generations of statements, and get unique reports on metrics like Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in order to judge the effectiveness of your A/R management process, all with one software platform. Sign up for a free demo here.
Stripe
Stripe is a great configurable billing tool for SaaS companies. It allows you to collect and store payment information, send invoices to repeat customers, and offer free trials and negotiable rates to boost sales.
Stripe has flexible pricing to fit any plan for any business of any size, and even uses machine learning to gather information to reduce churn in the future. Stripe is a great tool for the CFO looking to be particularly nimble in their invoicing and ePayments game.
Stax
Stax prides itself on being more than just an invoicing platform. Besides handling transaction settling, they give SaaS businesses marketing and sales services to strategically increase future adoption and engagement.
Stax’s software allows businesses to accept virtually any payment method through one API, and gives managers the ability to control the onboarding process of customers from start to finish in less than 20 minutes.
Check out Stax if you are looking to boost your company’s on-time payments and invoice organization, as well as gain insight into your operations to boost future sales and customer satisfaction.
Sales Tax and Compliance Tools
Automating sales tax and filing saves both time and confusion for SaaS companies. Outsource the work on other software companies while adding functionality to “Big ERP” with sales tax and compliance tools.
Avalara
Avalara is one of the few state-certified providers for SST (Streamlined Sales Tax). Their software works with over 1,000 signed partner integrations and automatically updates to stay compliant with changing tax rates.
Named an IDC MarketScape Leader in Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Sales and Use Tax Automation Software for Small and Midsize Businesses, Avalara is an excellent CFO tool to automate taxes, so you don’t have to think twice about them.
Choosing Finance Tools That Work with Your GTM
Sales-led growth (SLG) and product-led growth (PLG) are the two most common GTM strategies used by SaaS companies today. However, introducing a hybrid model (SLG and PLG combined) allows SaaS businesses to expand into new markets and generate more revenue. If you plan on making changes to your existing GTM strategy, chances are that you’ll need to reevaluate the tools you’re using to manage your financial operations.
For example, a sales-led company that operates out of an ERP might need custom pricing, billing, and invoicing tools if they want to implement a product-led model and expand downmarket.
Considering making changes to your current GTM? You can learn more about the future of SaaS GTM in our ebook, How Product-Led Growth is Changing B2B SaaS.
