Interactive data cube supports the sale of large SaaS business

Profile

PE-backed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business with recurring revenue.

Situation

A PE-backed SaaS business needed a robust analysis of revenue and churn (including upsell, cross-sell, downsell) in order to support its Vendor Due Diligence process. We were engaged to build repeatable data engineering process to clean and transform their raw Sales data into forensic financial performance insight to support the Commercial Due Diligence process. In support of the overall vendor-side sales process, our forensic analytics withstood scrutiny in the investor ‘Data War Room’ and formed an important part of logically reinforcing an attractive valuation for the business.

Action

We developed data engineering workflows to automate the cleaning of business’ customer and transactional data. We developed a logic framework for identifying behavioural metrics like churn, up- and cross-sell, and then automated the calculation of these metrics. Using PowerBI, we visualised business performance and customer behaviour in a suite of interactive dashboards

Tools and techniques used in this work

• Advanced SQL

• Automated Microsoft PowerBI dashboards

Impact

Developing robust and repeatable data engineering workflows meant that the dashboards became a critical component of the Information Memorandum that supported the Vendor Due Diligence process when the business was sold. The interactive dashboards are now used on a day-to-day basis to monitor the business’ health and inform decision making

So what?

Often with SaaS businesses it can be extraordinarily difficult to understand complex customer behaviours such as churn, up-sell, and cross-sell however these metrics are the fundamental drivers of valuation for SaaS businesses.

By supporting our client in agreeing definitions of customer behaviour, building complex logic, and then simplifying using a customised PowerBI dashboard, we delivered a cost-effective solution that not only supported the immediate needs of the deal process in helped increase the valuation of the business but now continues to support improvement management decisions on a day-to-day basis. This is a good example of QuantSpark developing a tool to support a specific requirement and leaving our client with a valuable tool for ongoing business improvement.