SaaS reporting as default reports

[Zuora-Community]

Background

We're a freemium SaaS business. Our business model offers a free version of our product with restrictions on performance, and our users can upgrade to one of four plans for more performance. We find that our customers regularly switch between higher and lower priced plans, sometimes more than once per month.

What do we need?

Basic SaaS reporting: 

• Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (or Net MRR)
• New MRR
• MRR Churn
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) (forecast)
• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) (incl. free)
• Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU)
• Delta invoiced minus paid amounts (failed payments)
• Payment fees & refunds

There are lots of canned reports in Zuora, which strangely almost all do not apply to us. Unfortunately, after being in contact with Zuora Support several times it turns out that most of this reporting is currently hard or impossible to do. Which is surprising, as we operate on a proven business model, so I'm sure we're not the only service out there using Zuora for (freemium) SaaS reporting.

Proposal

We propose to implement the following:

• Saas (freemium) reports, as listed above, out of the box
• A place in documentation for best practices from other (freemium) SaaS businesses using Zuora

Could Product Management please comment on this ASAP? We're blocked on doing decent tracking for our business until this is resolved.

Some sources:

• http://snip.ly/KoC7#https://chartmogul.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Ultimate-SaaS-Metrics-Cheat-Sh...

• http://www.bvp.com/sites/default/files/bvps_10_laws_of_cloud_saas_winter_2010_release.pdf

• http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/

• http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

• http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/

• http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-dashboard/

• http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/designing-startup-metrics-to-drive-successful-behavior/

• https://docs.google.com/a/c9.io/spreadsheets/d/1XQDzoustLJkvJ2Uk0cGpXzWJbRhPWApyxu6e3Zs7ZXg/edit#gid...

• https://opstarts.com/blog/tilting-a-smidge-understanding-the-numbers/

[ShawnG]

Any update on this? Our company's issues mirrors the above post and we are looking to implement a KPI dashboard on the followin metrics:

• Bookings 
  • Averages ACV (new contracts)
  • Average Contract Term
  • Average MRR
• ACV
  • New ACV
  • Churned ACB
  • Expansion ACV
• Churn
  • Toal # of customers
  • # of new customers
  • # of churned customers
  • Net New Churn

[rlaker]

Our organization would benefit from many of these reporting metrics. We currently do a lot of this using GoodData but it would be great to be able to report on things like:

Net New MRR overtime (New MRR less churned MRR on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis) - all of this seperately is also useful

New, churned and net new customer count over time (daily, weekly, monthly etc)

Average ARPU overall and by product overtime

This seems like fairly basic stuff for SaaS business reporting. 

[Leaf]

We too would benefit from SaaS reporting.  For a company which markets itself as a subscription billing service not having this reporting as standard seems like a glaring miss.

[mmiller]

We would really like the ARR part of this. We don't use MRR as a metric, and so we are constantly having to multiply that by 12 for amounts to mean anything.