Every board and CEO that hires a finance leader asks the same question. What is the market rate? This year we can answer that question with fresh data. The SaaS CFO partnered with Benchmarkit, DualEntry, and the FIF Collective on the 2026 Technology Finance Executive Compensation survey. It was fielded in March and April 2026. […]
What Cisco’s AI Finance Playbook Means for SaaS CFOs
Cisco’s CFO told Fortune that AI now produces 80% to 90% of the first draft of the company’s MD&A, the mandatory narrative section in every public company’s SEC filing. That is a striking number from a Fortune 500 company with a revenue base above $60 billion. It is also easy to misread. The AI writes […]
Your 88% GRR Benchmark Is Gone. The New Median Is 84%.
Something important happened to SaaS retention in 2025. The data is in, and every SaaS CFO and founder needs to see it. The 2026 Benchmarkit B2B SaaS & AI-Native Metrics report, one of the most comprehensive benchmark studies of private B2B SaaS and AI-native software companies, delivered a finding that should be in every operator’s […]
The AI Budget Reallocation Is Coming
Many SaaS CFO’s I talk to are dealing with the same problem whether they have named it yet or not. Their nascent 2026 AI budgets, most of which were set last October, are already blown. And they have not started planning for 2027. When budget season opens this fall, finance leaders will walk into something […]
How to Calculate Compute-adjusted LTV
The SaaS world already has a lot of metrics, and most companies are still working hard just to calculate the core metrics correctly. But AI is changing the cost structure underneath SaaS unit economics. Traditional software LTV assumes that gross margin is reasonably stable across your ENTIRE customer base. That assumption breaks when customers pay […]
How to Build an Outcome-Based Pricing Plan
Outcome-based pricing is easy to describe and hard to operationalize. The headline is simple: customers pay when your product delivers a defined result. The mechanics are a bit harder to define. You must define the outcome, prove it happened, decide what does not count, choose dollars or credits, handle the onboarding period before outcomes flow, […]
The Death of Per-Seat Pricing: What It Means for Your SaaS P&L
Per-seat pricing isn’t dying quietly. It’s being replaced in real time, and the financial implications for legacy SaaS companies are significant. Don’t ignore these market shifts if your product is a candidate for hybrid or outcome-based pricing. Bloomberg is forecasting that subscription-based pricing drops from 60% to 30% of SaaS models over the next decade, […]
What Your MRR Schedule Isn’t Telling You
Most SaaS companies already have the data they need to understand their revenue base. It’s sitting in their billing system, invoice exports, MRR schedules, CRM, and financial statements. The problem is not always more data. The problem is structure and data coordination. For years, we have used customer revenue data to build MRR schedules, ARR […]
How to Calculate the Inference Efficiency Ratio
If you built your SaaS finance metrics stack before 2025, your SaaS P&L is missing a line item that is quietly destroying gross margin for hundreds of companies right now. I’m talking about inference cost (aka AI token costs). The per-token, per-call expense of running LLM-powered features inside your software product. It’s not hosting. It’s […]
What Should Be Included in AI COGS
If you’ve added AI features to your SaaS product in the last 18 months, your gross margin probably looks different than it used to. Maybe you haven’t noticed because you haven’t mapped AI costs to COGS. Or maybe you have, and you’re trying to figure out what’s normal. Either way, you need a framework. My […]