After months of hard work, your startup is finally generating revenue. Whew! Now it's time to move on to the next step: financial planning.
If you don't already have one, this is a good time to invest in financial planning software—a set of tools to manage the different moving pieces of your startup’s finances.
A financial planning software benefits SaaS startups in many ways, including:
We have tested dozens of financial planning software and filtered the top 7 you can adopt for your SaaS startup.
Time to raise the curtain.
Inkle is a SaaS stack that caters to two crucial aspects of your startup’s financial planning—taxation and compliance.
Inkle Tax offers a simplified tax calculation summary of US taxes, with CPAs available on chat support to answer your queries. The software keeps you on track with important dates, thanks to time-sensitive reminders on US State and federal taxes and compliance deadlines.
Inkle offers a centralised management system for founders managing domestic and international entities to consolidate all tax-related information. The platform allows you to securely save important tax documents, keep them organised, and retrieve them as and when required.
If your startup needs additional help regarding US taxes, accounting, and management, you can explore Inkle Books and Inkle Mailroom.
Inkle Books is a bookkeeping tool for managing multiple data sources (including bank accounts, entities, and vendors) in one place. It tracks and auto-categorises transactions and generates financial reports (balance sheet, income statement, and monthly and annual reports).
Inkle Mailroom is a virtual mailbox that receives mail on your behalf, scans and uploads it to the portal for review, and allows you to decide the following action. You can shred confidential emails that are no longer relevant, store what’s important, or forward them to an address of your choice. It’s useful for business owners who want to keep their email inbox clutter-free.
91Squarefeet is a tech startup focused on physical retail expansion. It operates on a flip structure, with the central entity based in the US and an owned subsidiary operating from India. US-IN Cross-border payments are essential to their business structure to manage payroll and other financial obligations in India.
They were dealing with two challenges in their transaction process:
This is where Inkle’s Transfer Pricing (TP) Payments came into play. It’s a streamlined process that helps US-based businesses quickly transfer funds to India against invoices with next-day settlements (T+1), transparent pricing, complete compliance, and dedicated chat support for assistance. Inkle works with global banks to facilitate these payments—it doesn’t touch or hold funds.
Here’s what 91Squarefeet gained by switching to Inkle:
Also read: Form 1120
Drivetrain is an AI-powered financial planning software SaaS startups can use for in-depth and accurate financial analysis. It helps you collaborate with your team on financial plans, build multidimensional models across segments, and reduce manual errors, resulting in shorter planning cycles.
The tool integrates your finance and business tech stack, offering a unified platform for monitoring key metrics. With detailed reports, you can quickly analyse each department's impact on the company’s bottom line.
Finmark analyzes your current data and develops financial models to predict your business's future performance. It creates both best-case and worst-case scenarios, so you can compare the two and get a rounded overview of your startup's long-term financial condition.
You can ask what-if questions to get the projected outcome. Finmark displays the forecast using visually appealing charts and graphs, making the data easy to understand irrespective of technical or financial expertise.
First-time startup founders often lack experience in financial planning. But no worries—with Modeliks, they can create a driver-based financial plan that's tailor-made for their business.
It helps design advanced financial models (a great way to impress investors), establish operational goals for team members, and track performance.
The software also comes with a subscription revenue modelling feature to help SaaS businesses calculate subscription revenue, cash collection, refunds, and churn rates based on the assumptions you input.
Instead of treating budgeting as a siloed activity for the upper management, you can opt for collaborative budgeting. A great way to bring new perspectives to the table and strategise better! Mosaic can help you implement this at your startup. This financial planning software connects financial insights to its drivers (such as department heads) to generate more accurate forecasts and improve decision-making.
Your team can set financial goals, track performance across any metric, and stay updated about the business's progress.
OneStream combines financial and operational insights, offering interactive dashboards that give users a glimpse into reports in their desired format.
The reports are easily deciphered with graphs, charts, and visual elements. Detailed analytics help you understand business trends, identify their causes, and allow you to dig into transactional data if required. The tool eliminates data latency and duplicate records, ensuring accurate analysis and trackable audit trails.
Airbase is an AI-powered financial planning tool designed to automate your expense management. Take a photo of your receipt from the Airbase mobile app, and your expense will be recorded in the system. Thanks to built-in machine learning, the system extracts all necessary information from the receipt, including date, amount, GL category, merchant/vendor, and purpose.
You can approve business expenses and reimburse your employees automatically into their bank accounts.
What is financial planning software?
Financial planning software helps develop a detailed plan for a company's short-term and long-term financial goals. It involves financial forecasting based on past and current data points, tax planning and management, budgeting, monitoring progress toward goals, and maintaining a healthy bottom line.
How do I choose financial planning software?
While choosing financial planning software, look for a tool that aligns with your organisation's capacity. For instance, if you have a startup or a small business, choose a tool that caters to these types of entities rather than enterprise software. This way, you can get tailored solutions to your problems and more individualised support.
Apart from this, here are some key features to look for in financial planning software:
What is startup financial planning?
Startup financial planning refers to designing a strategy to manage an early-stage business's financial resources. It involves multiple steps, including budgeting, forecasting revenue and expenses, analysing funding needs, managing cash flow, and setting financial goals.
Financial planning empowers startups to take off their journey on the right foot. It creates a base for future growth, attracting potential investors and ensuring sustainability in the long run.
This article was initially written by Sneha Chatterjee - Meet her on LinkedIn.
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