Reporting Ideas

Cash Forecast report. Report that will tell next X months charges,  certain product that are going to renew in a certain time period,  and amount that will be due for collection. Currently, our the Reporting system only covers historical data, which means the future data is not yet supported.

This is currently being reviewed by our Product Management and can be track on DE3315.

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/

Are we able to add an option to explicitly define when a week in Reporting starts and ends? Currently I believe that it is Monday to Sunday but some businesses use different definitions e.g. Sunday to Saturday

For downstream systems, we need to pull the list/base price information from data exports, while starting at the Invoice Item and IIA level.  While you can join to the product rate plan charge table, you cannot pull any pricing information.  We would need base price info, in addition to any volume or tiered price information.  This is currently a gap for performing downstream calculations in revenue recognition tools.  

Currently the reporting options only allow for Calendar Year and Calendar Quarter. Financial Year and Financial Quarter options would also be extremely useful.

We end up creating many reports by month, exporting to spreadsheets and then manually summing over the financial year and quarter periods.

Financial periods in reporting would remove a lot of this extra manual work!

Related to request for "Biannual / Half Year option for reporting - not just Year or Quarter"

https://community.zuora.com/t5/Reporting-Ideas/Biannual-Half-Year-option-for-reporting-not-just-Year...

We would like the ability to run a Notification History (both Email and Callout) report of Z-Reporting.  We need this to check to make sure all invoices have been sent for a certain period.  The only way to do this is via a REST API (http://knowledgecenter.zuora.com/BC_Developers/REST_API/B_REST_API_reference/Notification_History/Ge...

As an accountant, I have no idea how to use API's so it would be great to be able to run reports on this.

I see the Staus field in the Product Page w/in the Product Catalog. I can even sort the product catalog on this field values (active or cancelled). So, this should be added to reporting.

The start/end dates are a way, but not as straight forward

how do you manage people who are subscribed to reports? specifically - if they leave the company - how can i easily see a list of all reports that that person was subscribed to, so i can then remove them from the sceduled report.

There are multiple reporting features where you can choose to group by time period. A Biannual / Half Year option between Year and Quarter would be great.

Use cases include:

• Reports where there is too much variation at quarterly level, but an annual grouping would not give enough detail
• Sales or Customer Success targets that are measured twice a year

The MRR (As of Day) Trend report is great, except that it pulls MRR on the first day of each month (unless I pull 1 month at a time). Can this be adjusted to pull on the last day of each month for the designated range instead of the first day? This would be extremely helpful, and I can't imagine it would take a lot to make this change.