What’s on the horizon for the finance function in 2025? As we’re about to step into this new year, SaaS companies are facing a dynamic landscape where companies have to do more with less. We gathered 8 finance leaders that are ready to spill the beans on their must-have metrics -the KPIs that can supercharge customer satisfaction, streamline operations, and ultimately lead to sustainable success.
So, what are the three main KPIs they’re focusing on to ensure their SaaS company thrives in 2025, and why? Let’s dive in.
Filip Tottie, CFO, Scrive AB
1. Sales activity/pipeline generation/conversion is a vital focus. This metric offers insights into how effectively the company captures deals within its ICP through various sales strategies, including inbound, account-based marketing, outbound efforts, and partnerships.
2. Cash and EBITDA, to ensure we deliver on our ambition to drive a profitable and scalable company.
3. Execution on our European expansion is another priority, highlighting the importance of hitting strategic growth milestones.
Bård Bognoy, CFO, Ardoq AS
1. Net revenue retention and gross revenue retention: NRR is essential for measuring our customer success and our ability to grow customer value over time. As part of the NRR metric, we also focus on GRR to gain a clear understanding of both churn and upsell performance. While NRR reflects net growth, GRR gives insight into how well we retain customers before factoring in expansions.
2. We track magic ratio closely (ARR growth / total sales & marketing spend). This KPI helps us evaluate the efficiency of our sales and marketing efforts. It’s key to understanding how well we are turning investments into growth and ensuring that we are scaling in a cost-effective manner.
3. Pipeline Growth is a critical leading indicator of future growth. Tracking pipeline development and conversion rates helps us track performance and improve precision in revenue forecasting.
Nora Tandberg, CFO, Papirfly
1. Win rate: win rate captures not just sales team execution but also relevance (i.e. ICP fit) of deals entering our pipeline, and indirectly measures marketing success. Even a small improvement in win rate can really move the needle.
2. Time to value: once a customer signs, it’s crucial that we seize the momentum and get them up and running as fast as possible so our customer can benefit from our product and our onboarding team can move to other projects. A double efficiency benefit: internally, our services margin improves and externally, gross retention goes up.
3. Net revenue retention: the king of SaaS metrics, net revenue retention measures the stickiness of our customer base. In 2025 we will continue to put our customers first, ensure they benefit from our product, increase their usage and renew their Papirfly contracts.
Olli Saksa, CFO, Sievo
1. Growth. Growth is the fuel of everything and we aim to engage in activities that boost our growth. Especially for a SaaS company, growth is a key contributor for the future success and viability of the business. Growth as such is a lagging indicator, thus it’s important to understand all the underlying GTM metrics that contribute to it and how to influence them.
2. Gross retention. Another key ingredient to our success is keeping our customers happy so that they stay with us for long-term. With high churn, it’s significantly more difficult to grow at the de-sired rates.
3. Gross margin. Ultimately, it’s the free cash flow that defines the value of the company. For a growth company, we need to also understand other profitability metrics to understand we are going to the right direction. Gross margin is a good proxy of the scalability of the business and future profitability potential. With good gross margin, I can be confident that we are also able to achieve a good profitability level in the future.
Fredrik Eeg, CFO, CatalystOne Solutions AS
1. The new CARR is critical for measuring the company’s ability to scale and drive growth. In a competitive SaaS market, expanding our revenue base through new customers and upselling to existing customers is essential for long-term sustainability. It provides a clear picture of how effective our sales and marketing strategies are, as well as how well our product resonates with the market. CARR also serves as a predictor of future cash flows, which is crucial for strategic planning and investment decisions.
2. NRR is a vital metric for understanding customer satisfaction and the value our product delivers over time. It measures how much revenue we retain and expand with existing customers, providing insight into customer loyalty, product usage, and the effectiveness of our customer success initiatives. High NRR indicates strong product-market fit and helps mitigate the cost of acquiring new customers by ensuring that current customers continue to grow their relationship with us. This makes NRR a key driver of sustainable and profitable growth.
3. In a high-growth SaaS environment, employee satisfaction is directly linked to productivity, innovation, and customer success. Engaged employees are more likely to contribute to the company’s growth, offer creative solutions, and enhance customer experience. As the competition for top talent intensifies, maintaining high employee satisfaction helps us attract and retain skilled individuals who are essential for driving the company’s goals forward. It also reduces turnover costs and fosters a strong organizational culture, which is critical in a dynamic and fast-paced industry like SaaS.
Joost Vanhecke, CFO, Teamleader
1. CAC payback time – my favourite one as it can be easily calculated, communicated and understood in the organisation. Furthermore, this can be used independently on how long you’ve been in business with your product without distortion for unrealistic low churn which typically occurs in the first years
2. NRR per customer lifetime cohort – it’s clear that NRR is currently under pressure across many SaaS companies, but plotting this on a customer lifetime cohort allows to see where the biggest impact can be gained being it with new customers or those with a longer lifetime
3. Rule of 40 – helps to bring the story to the company on how a company should aim to grow in a healthy manner by balancing growth and profitability, but always state that when possible, the priority will always be given to growth over profitability
Tomas Smogner, VP Finance, Funnel
1. Net New MRR: By tracking net new MRR, we can break down the effectiveness of our new business activities, expansion efforts and churn. We set both individual and team targets for each of these areas. Connected to this, we keep a close eye on our sales pipeline, to ensure our marketing efforts are effective and conversion rates are good.
2. Burn multiple: Helps us ensure that we are gradually lowering our burn rate while maintaining growth. Last year we continued the transition from “growth at high cost” to “sustainable growth”. This shift combined two things: continue to grow while reducing costs. We aim to carry this transition forward in 2025,
3. ARR per employee: Key indicator of our operational efficiency. We also consider headcount an important KPI and hiring plans to ensure we are scaling appropriately
Remco Verheij, CFO, Newzoo
1. Client Growth by Tier – A key success parameter for our business is that we continue to grow both net dollar retention and total growth (including new business) in our top-tier segment. These are clients that have a natural inclination to work with us due to the product-market fit of their use-cases. They are the 80:20 of our revenue and give us confirmation and confidence that we are on the right track.
2. Profitability (cost increase vs revenue growth) – Post scale-up we are in a phase to improve our profitability. The easiest way to think about this is that our costs increases should be less than our Revenue growth. So, tracking our cost increases in specific areas and departments vs last year and comparing this to our revenue growth is an indication of our improvement in profitability.
3. R&D investment % of Revenue – This indicates how much of our time we have spent on new products and features for future revenues and improved retention. If this number falls behind, it indicates we are too busy with maintenance and bug fixing and not spending enough time on the future.
