SaaS Reporting Roadmap with J.T. Cecchini - CEO LevelUp Finance

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by JT. Cecchini, the CEO at LevelUp Finance. Today, we'll be covering four primary topics with JT. First, the catalyst for LevelUp SaaS reporting roadmap. Second, the included five by five reporting matrix. Third, the LevelUp valuation framework. And lastly, the reporting scorecard. So JT., would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey of becoming a guest here on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast?

**J.T. Cecchini** (1:18)
Yeah, thanks Ray. Appreciate the introduction. And so I guess, yeah, my journey is, coming to this podcast was just through getting involved in the SaaS community and following the podcast and hearing all the awesome guests you've had on in the past. And, you know, where we spend our time at LevelUp is, you know, actually bringing together these metrics and the reporting that forms so much of the dialogue around SaaS, especially when it comes to the metrics related to ARR. And so the world we live in is actually helping companies to get it done and to solving their data issues and building automated reporting platforms around these metrics. And it is a challenging world. But that's, you know, how where we play in the in the space. And it's been an interesting journey. I started doing work for consulting for tech in software companies about 10, 15 years ago, as well as an investment banker. And you just saw this this common theme about, you know, metrics fragmented in Excel. There's got to be a better a better way. Right.
And flash forward to today where, you know, we're executing a better way. And that's thinking about these problems is essentially data issues. And then, you know, putting in in solutions to to address that and get the data, the right data, the correct data and the clean data.

**Ray Rike** (2:48)
OK, let's get into the details here, because I was reading the LevelUp Finance SaaS Reporting Roadmap. And I had to step back and think and say, why after 20 years plus of the recurring revenue SaaS model, over 35,000 B2B SaaS companies and almost 300 billion dollars of SaaS spend per year, per Gartner, why do we need a SaaS reporting roadmap?

**J.T. Cecchini** (3:21)
Yeah, I think that the primary reason is getting SaaS reporting automated and done in the correct way is a very difficult challenge. And it's cross-functional. It takes multi-disciplines. You have to speak GAP and ARR, and understand where the sources of truth live. What is the information represented in that source of truth, whether it's a CRM or an ERP? And because of all these complications, people don't know where to start. How do we actually do it? How do we actually get out of a fragmented Excel spreadsheet that one person has that's disconnected from any source of truth? And to get to a proper approach, right, that that sort of parallels what happens on the gap revenue side, right? And you don't have that sort of audit forcing function. And when it comes to ARM, right, that you do for traditional financial reporting. So I think that that's the reason this is still such a big issue and why we spend so much of our time at LevelUp. It's hard, it's cross-functional, and people don't know where to start. And so the primary purpose of that reporting roadmap and that entire white paper is just to give people a framework for, hey, here's how you can get started, bite-sized chunks. Here's sort of your roadmap and how to prioritize and execute. And a lot of times people don't know where to start. That's why we have this concept of evaluation framework attached to that and thinking about, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up as a company, right? And what sort of your products and valuations?
And we go from there.

**Ray Rike** (4:59)
Yeah. So let me ask two things. Number one, when does B2B SaaS company founder, CEO, or CFO, when did they really need to start worrying about this reporting infrastructure and approach and methodology? Is it right away? Is it 1 million AR, 5 million AR? When do you recommend that they start thinking about this SaaS reporting framework? Yeah.

**J.T. Cecchini** (5:28)