If you are looking for the best SaaS financial model template to meet your needs, you've landed in the right place. I can't tell you how many times my clients have simply said "I wish I would have found you first". When it comes to modeling out SaaS business cases in Excel, my frameworks have been heavily utilized in small and medium-sized businesses and I've even built a few for billion-dollar enterprises.
You can check out my full library of SaaS and recurring revenue financial models here.
Pure SaaS Models Built in Excel:
- B2B / B2C SaaS with 3 Tiers - This was the most comprehensive template I had ever built, and it has been the foundation / starting point for a lot of other models and client work. I like it because of the simple foundational framework. Model out new customers, retention, and contract terms for three types of customers. A few nice advancements I made here include adjustable contract terms (monthly/annual contract lengths or any number of months) and the ability to increase the total contract value by a defined percentage at each renewal. That makes it possible to credibly see what must be true for negative churn to happen.
- Based on the above framework, I have also built a Function-as-a-Service, Data-as-a-Service, and Subscription Box model. They have 6 pricing tiers and more complex revenue streams, but the way they derive existing customers at month end is the same.
- Basic 5-Tier Model - In this one, I have a simplified method for calculating churn, where the logic lets the user define a simple monthly churn rate that is adjustable over time, rather than having a retention rate at renewal determine churn (more advanced and used in the model above). This model does have some other options through, such as a free user pool, conversion of traffic to free/paid, and more pricing tiers than the one above. This only works for month-to-month pricing.
- Freemium - Here is an older and more simplified model that has a single pricing tier for month-to-month customers only. It has a free user pool option. Revenue derives from traffic, a conversion of traffic to free/paid, and a conversion from free to paid. The churn rate is based on an average monthly rate, adjustable over time, and there is an option for ad revenue via impressions per user per month and a defined CPM.
- Ratio Driven SaaS - In this model, the user can drive new customers based on the performance of Accounts Executives (AEs). The model lets the user define how many Sales Directors are added over time, how many AEs there are per Sales Director, what their new customer quotas are, and the percentage of their quota goal attained over time. There are three pricing tiers, and it is only set up for month-to-month contracts. Churn rate is defined as an average rate per month by tier.
- Beginner SaaS - This is the first SaaS template I ever built. The revenue configuration is pretty good, letting the user define up to four pricing tiers for month-to-month contracts, the start month of each tier, the starting customer count, and the monthly growth of each tier (adjustable by year). It also has one-time fee revenue options for each tier. Churn is a simply monthly rate per tier. Expenses are very simple. For cost of goods sold (COGS) there is a simple percentage defined. Then, the user defines a single input for various department costs rather than building a bottom-up style expense schedule. This is the only template out of these that has such a high-level expense data entry area.
Some things that all of these models have in common include:
- Financial Statements (integrated 3-statement models) which means Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement
- Terminal Value
- KPIs like average customer LTV, average customer acquisition costs (CaC), LTV to CaC ratio, and months to pay back the CaC
Article found in SaaS.
