The SaaS CFO's FinanceTech Stack Report 2025 - Ben Murray's Top Takeaways

Kirk Kappelhoff

How are we doing?

Ben Murray

Doing well. Doing well. Looking forward to this today.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Yeah, this will be a good one — I'm always excited for these reports you put out, they're always detailed, always fun. Looks like we've got a couple people rolling in — where's everybody coming in from? This is a famous Ben question I'm gonna steal. Who do we have with me today — if you wouldn't mind posting where you're coming from in the chat, that'd be awesome. Ben, you've changed locations on us — you're in a new part of the world.

Ben Murray

Yeah, looks like Praveen said they can't post, so, well, we'll feel it out as we go. I used to say I was dialing in from Denver, Colorado — Centennial — but moved to Scottsdale, Arizona about two months ago, so now living in the desert.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Wow, that is very exciting.

Ben Murray

Yeah.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Well, we've changed a little of the climate, but nevertheless the SaaS metrics remain the same, so hopefully today we can pull some interesting takeaways from all of this. Ben, can you see my screen here?

Ben Murray

Yep, I see the subject header slide. Yep.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Oh, beautiful, that's perfect. So everyone, welcome to The SaaS CFO's Finance Tech Stack Report — this is for 2025, obviously. Ben runs these pretty frequently; we've done this before, and today's an updated version of what you've seen in the past, which allows for both trend analysis and new insights. For those who don't know Ben: he's worked in finance and accounting for twenty-five years, been The SaaS CFO for over nine, began his career in FP&A, and now offers coaching, fractional CFO services, and the SaaS finance courses he's so well known for. That's Ben — I'm Kirk, director of strategic finance here at Drivetrain, a strategic finance platform, and we're lucky to get to host this with Ben today. We'll cover a few things: on the left, we'll break down the tools SaaS companies are actually using, sliced by company size and by tool function, building toward what the ideal finance tech stack looks like for maximum impact — though this will vary company to company, so take it as a guide. Post comments, respond to the polls, and at the end, reach out to either of us if you'd like — our details are in the chat. Let's start with a poll: first, how many different tools does your finance team use today — one to three, four to six, seven to ten, or more than ten (if so, I'm impressed, I want to know who you are). Second, how important are AI features in your finance tool — does it factor into your evaluation criteria, or is it not a priority yet? We've seen people land on both sides of that. Go ahead and answer — while you do, Ben, question for you: What started this survey, and what's the research methodology behind it?

Ben Murray

Great question — and I love that poll, actually, since I now have a version two of my report to publish knowing how many tools finance teams are using. So make sure you answer it — I'd genuinely love to see how many you're each using; I typically see finance and accounting teams running twelve to sixteen tools, so I expect a lot of you to land in that ten-plus bucket. This is my sixth annual report. I started it six years ago because founders and CFOs kept reaching out to me on my blog, TheSaaSCFO.com, asking what to use for accounting, what to use for FP&A, and so on. At the time I had maybe forty thousand newsletter subscribers — now eighty thousand — so I thought, let me just poll my audience and see what's actually being used in SaaS companies. Not a market map, not my opinion — just real survey data on what people are using. I've now run it for six years, so you can see trends emerge, which helps validate the data even when any single year's survey might have some noise.

Kirk Kappelhoff

That's awesome. How many respondents do you typically get, and has that grown over the years?

Ben Murray

My first survey had a couple hundred responses; this one's over six hundred, growing by a couple hundred each year. Goal for next year is to hit a thousand — I'll launch the new survey in Q4.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Huge. And on the respondent side — how do you screen who's included? Is it based on title, company size, something else?

Ben Murray

I ask for company size — anonymously, if they prefer — since that really helps show how the tech stack evolves as a SaaS company scales. The bigger filter is: do you actually know your finance and accounting tech stack well enough to answer meaningfully? So it skews toward directors, controllers, CFOs who have that visibility. I also run quality checks, since with any survey you can get bots or attempts at ballot-stuffing — people trying to boost their own software's ranking — so I do some quality control to guard against that. Without further ado, let's jump into the first category: accounting software. Preliminary thought — it's honestly been the same story year in, year out for five years, but this year the actual slide shows some real change, with new players entering the space.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Tell us here, Ben — give us your overview, what's changed the past few years, and is this consistent with what you expected or were there surprises?

Ben Murray

I'm guessing there's a yes to both. Year in, year out, it's been QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, NetSuite — just some jockeying for position. What's changing now: QuickBooks and Xero are starting to lose some market share, and this year, big shocker, two new entrants show up on the chart — Rillet and Campfire. Rillet is SaaS-focused, built specifically to handle SaaS accounting; Campfire is a bit more industry-agnostic. I've spoken with both founders. So accounting — a space you'd think is sleepy and unsexy — is actually seeing real new entrants. Even Workday is pushing further downmarket into SaaS, beyond just Fortune 500 territory.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Super interesting — how much of that is AI driving new entrants versus just industry-specific positioning, like Rillet for SaaS specifically? Campfire doesn't seem tied to a specific vertical, just a general tool. Any thoughts on AI's role in these new entrants?

Ben Murray

I think what you're seeing is that these new entrants were built AI-native from the ground up, versus incumbents integrating AI features into an existing process after the fact. You have new companies built to be AI-first, not just adding an AI feature to an existing toolset. Let's move to this next one — same data, broken down by ARR size instead.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Any takeaways from this breakdown based on the trends you mentioned?

Ben Murray

QuickBooks dominates at the lower ARR bands. Once you hit roughly ten to eleven million ARR, the ERP players — Sage, NetSuite — come into play, and QuickBooks starts dropping off, alongside newer options like Rillet or Campfire. So ten million ARR really does seem to be the line of demarcation.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Is that five-to-ten-million window the right time to make that move, in your experience — too early, too late, or right on time?

Ben Murray

Earlier is easier. I've run transitions off Dynamics, QuickBooks, and others into a proper ERP, and the more data you have, the harder that migration gets — it's a significant data-transformation exercise and not a lot of fun. If you're at five to ten million with a clear path to fifteen, twenty, thirty million, it's time to seriously consider whether you stay on QuickBooks with point solutions bolted on, or jump to Sage or NetSuite as your ERP. It only gets harder the bigger you get.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Besides ARR size, what other factors would you weigh in deciding when to transition, or which tool to pick in the first place?

Ben Murray

Invoicing complexity is a big one, which we'll see in a later slide. If you're just sending fifty annual enterprise invoices, QuickBooks can handle that fine. But once you've got usage-based revenue, multiple revenue streams, annual and monthly mixed together, and real revenue recognition needs, things get complicated fast — and native functionality in QuickBooks, not picking on them specifically, just can't handle that complexity, especially renewal and subscription management. At some point it becomes a manual process, and you need either a point solution or a full ERP.

Kirk Kappelhoff

How many classes can we add before it's time to upgrade? Let's look at invoicing software — you touched on this briefly — any big takeaways?

Ben Murray

As expected, we see accounting solutions and ERPs handling invoicing, plus SMB tools like QuickBooks. But now Stripe shows up heavily too, since a lot of people invoice directly out of Stripe on both B2B and B2C sides. Then you've got Maxio, Chargebee, and similar subscription-management-focused platforms. So now it's a mix: either handle invoicing in your ERP, or bolt on a Maxio or Chargebee to QuickBooks or Xero and scale that way. Invoicing is a big deal — getting it right, matching how you gate your product, is genuinely a CFO product-roadmap item.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Is there a clear trigger point for moving from ERP-native invoicing to a dedicated invoicing tool — an invoice-count-per-FTE threshold, an ARR threshold, or is it something else entirely?

Ben Murray

I've seen companies hook up dedicated invoicing tools to Sage or NetSuite because that tool does one thing — say, usage-based billing — exceptionally well. So I don't think it's headcount or even ARR size specifically; it really comes down to invoicing complexity and volume. Ten enterprise invoices a month, no big deal. A hundred invoices, with renewals, expansions, and contract mods layered in, and now you need real technology rather than just adding headcount to your accounting team.

Kirk Kappelhoff

We've got our first audience question, from Melanie: We're a small startup on QuickBooks right now — do we move to Sage first and then NetSuite, or go straight to NetSuite?

Ben Murray

Great question, Melanie. I try to stay agnostic, but this comes up a lot. You'd typically hear "just go straight to NetSuite" — and you'll hear Campfire or Rillet argue that used to be the conventional wisdom, but there are better options now. Since Sage and NetSuite are both full ERPs, you wouldn't go from one to the other sequentially — you'd pick one or the other. Or, alternatively, use a point solution to extend QuickBooks' runway a bit longer first. Next: revenue recognition software. How much does ASC 606 factor in here?

Kirk Kappelhoff

Any high-level takeaways before we get into the inevitable RevRec discussion?

Ben Murray

Spreadsheets dominate again here, like a lot of categories — you typically start there, then graduate to a real tool. RevRec matters so much in recurring-revenue businesses: an ERP's RevRec module (Sage, NetSuite, Rillet) can handle it, or a subscription management platform like Maxio can too, so there's real overlap between invoicing and RevRec, both rolling up into subscription management broadly. This is a must-have, and I generally recommend companies in the three-to-five-million ARR range, as they're scaling, start thinking seriously about full accrual accounting and RevRec.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Three quick follow-ups: why is three-to-five-million ARR the key inflection point? Why are spreadsheets so dominant specifically in this category versus others? And what does the "N/A" segment represent — are they just not doing RevRec at all?

Ben Murray

On the three-to-five-million point: that's typically where I see enough data volume and scale that you need to understand true economics on an accrual basis rather than cash basis — you can't manage a business well if all your annual invoicing lands in January and nothing in February; you need that spread reflected properly to feed your SaaS metrics. On N/A: yes, some companies just aren't doing RevRec yet, often because no one's told them they need to. On spreadsheets: you'll see this across most categories in my report — we always start there. Forecasting, FP&A, RevRec, it's the same pattern: build a basic process in a spreadsheet, then eventually move it into software, especially once audit and due diligence pressure hits. Don't linger there longer than you need to.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Let's move to FP&A software. Any surprises this year at a high level?

Ben Murray

Spreadsheets again — especially for those of us who grew up in Excel climbing the FP&A ranks. I was director of finance at a billion-dollar regional airline still forecasting off a web of connected spreadsheets that took forever to update, until we moved to a real FP&A solution — night and day difference. I'd generally say above ten million ARR, sometimes earlier, this becomes a must-have — even just pulling actuals into an FP&A tool makes life dramatically easier. Especially post-PE-acquisition, when the reporting and analysis demands ramp up, doing that in spreadsheets will genuinely wear you down.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Have you seen AI meaningfully move the needle in FP&A software specifically over the last twelve months?

Ben Murray

AI is still moving pretty slowly into finance and accounting broadly — accounting especially, since there's little room for error there. FP&A is where I'm seeing more real movement: data analysis assistance, asking questions of your data, pulling reports. Forecasting and planning are where AI is genuinely showing up right now; accounting will take more time.

Kirk Kappelhoff

On that note — we've put real effort into this at Drivetrain. We've built what we call AI-generated models, as opposed to traditional templates, because templates are rigid regardless of your system or complexity level, whereas our models adapt to your actual granularity — whether you've got six chart-of-accounts classes or three levels, the model responds and preserves that structure. If anyone's interested, happy to show you more. Ben, a couple of FP&A-related audience questions came in — want to take those now?

Ben Murray

Sure, let's do it. "How do you decide on a budget for a new tool?" — great question, Wayne. Budgets range from a hundred dollars a month to fifty thousand a year or more. It depends whether the tool is built for a founder running something simple, or for a CFO who needs more complexity — that complexity drives both cost and implementation effort. If you're a CFO shopping for a real tool, expect to spend twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand or more depending on team size and seats. If you just want something self-serve and simple, that can work fine for a smaller, founder-led business. Another one, from Preeti: what's the sample size behind this FP&A pie chart, and what ARR range does it represent? Every category here draws from the same pool of over six hundred responses. If you download the full tech stack report, you'll see these breakdowns by ARR size too — spreadsheets dominate early on, and adoption shifts toward dedicated solutions as companies scale. Let's move to SaaS metrics and reporting software — gets a bit more industry-specific here.

Kirk Kappelhoff

This is your area of expertise, Ben — what are the main drivers or changes you're seeing here?

Ben Murray

This is still the Wild West of reporting — you've got spreadsheets, BI tools like Power BI, ERPs like Sage, FP&A platforms like Drivetrain, accounting software, and subscription management tools all trying to solve this simultaneously. The real question is expectations: do you want the tool to calculate your metrics, or just present them while you calculate in a spreadsheet upstream? You need all four key SaaS finance data sources to calculate a full set of metrics under a proper five-pillar SaaS metrics framework, and some tools only give you revenue-side metrics, nothing on the expense side. So it comes down to what you're actually expecting the tool to do for you.

Kirk Kappelhoff

One thing that always strikes me here is the need for flexibility — you called it the Wild West yourself. Take CAC: for a lot of companies that's simply sales-and-marketing spend in period X over new customers in period X, but plenty of our customers say that doesn't apply to them, since their real lead time is ninety days, so the relevant marketing spend is from three months earlier. There's no GAAP standard for SaaS metrics yet, so that flexibility really matters. Have you seen a reliable way to handle that — spreadsheets, a specific method, or do people just give up on precision here?

Ben Murray

I actually wrote a LinkedIn post on exactly this that got a lot of engagement: build it in spreadsheets first, then move to software. With my fractional clients, we build out in spreadsheets from raw data, calculate everything by hand to figure out the right methodology — what period of measurement, trailing six, trailing twelve, trailing three — validate the output, and only then decide what software should replicate that process going forward. A lot of tools are frankly a black box in how they calculate things — sometimes I'm still pulling raw data out and calculating manually even when using a tool that claims to produce the metric. Once you've validated your own methodology, then you decide whether to move that process into software.

Kirk Kappelhoff

One more here: someone's asking whether Power BI and Drivetrain are competitors. We're certainly not — we actually integrate with Power BI, and most of our Power BI users do exactly that. BI tools are great for housing and visualizing historical data, but that's just it — historicals. Drivetrain is FP&A software, so while you might bring historical data in, you also need BI-style analysis on your forecast, which is why we've built that reporting and forecasting layer natively. Power BI is a contributor to that stack, not a competitor — different problems entirely.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Ben, before we move to the next category — John commented that NRR is "whatever the CEO wants it to be," basically a worthless metric.

Ben Murray

I'd disagree — you can only get away with that internally for so long. Once you're in front of third parties or due diligence, that inconsistency gets caught. I had a case once where a customer wanted new customers within a three-month trial window counted as new, but didn't want departures within that same window counted as churn — you can't have it both ways; if you count the plus-one, the reversal has to be a negative-one. They didn't want to, but cash told the real story eventually and it all surfaced anyway. Wild West, but someone always catches it.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Quick voice-over on this next slide — this is the BI-equivalent view we talked about, but now with your forecast built directly in: total ARR versus plan, ARR broken out by market segment, ARR by scenario — high case, base case, low case. That's the piece a pure BI tool like Power BI would miss. In Drivetrain you bring in actuals across however many source systems, forecast on top, and get that BI-style comparison natively. We've got a quick poll running — interested in a Drivetrain demo, let us know. Moving to sales tax software — a bit more fragmented, some new entrants here too.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Any thoughts here, Ben?

Ben Murray

Years ago this was a category founders just ignored entirely — but state taxing jurisdictions have gotten a lot more sophisticated at detecting nexus, and in due diligence you'll be asked to justify why you are or aren't remitting sales/use tax, or VAT in Europe. It's coming up more, but thankfully it's also gotten much easier to solve. Avalara used to be the dominant player — I used them myself — but now you've got Anrok as a newer entrant, plus TaxJar. Interestingly, some companies still aren't remitting at all, which might genuinely be the right call depending on their nexus exposure; others are surprisingly still using spreadsheets for this, which seems hard to sustain. Xero tends to white-label someone else's tax engine, like Anrok or TaxJar, under the hood. This fits the natural progression: ERP, invoicing, RevRec, metrics, and now sales/use tax compliance — investors and diligence processes increasingly expect it. And the nightmare scenario is getting a call from a state saying —

Kirk Kappelhoff

"Hey, Ben, I see you're doing business here."

Ben Murray

And the scary follow-up is "how long have you been doing business here?" — finding out you've had five years of undisclosed nexus in a state is a genuine nightmare. So I recommend addressing this earlier rather than later; once it's integrated into your ERP or accounting software, it largely runs itself. It's the kind of thing that keeps you up at night if you ignore it, but becomes easy once handled. Similarly complex: close management software — this can be the difference between a fourteen-day close and a two-day close. What's the general trend here — lots of spreadsheets, lots of N/A, people just not formally managing close? I'm honestly surprised by how much N/A there is, since once you hit a certain size you really do need formal close management — defining the actual steps: day-minus-two, day one, day two, day three, clear roles for who does what. Even a spreadsheet-based checklist is valuable purely for quality control, making sure you don't forget to reconcile deferred revenue, for instance. Tools like FloQast and BlackLine are purpose-built for this — FloQast has raised a lot of money — and some ERPs like Sage or Campfire also offer close-management functionality natively. Start with spreadsheets if you must, but as you scale this becomes a must-have, since it gets too complex to track who's doing what otherwise.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Is there overlap between close-management software and FP&A software, given forecasting and closing are related processes? How much does that Venn diagram overlap?

Ben Murray

Think of a CFO's monthly routine holistically — it's not just accounting, it's the full FP&A cycle too. There's a monthly calendar: closing the books, with FP&A often involved in reviewing how expenses were coded by department as a quality check, then financial reporting, then the FP&A process — variance analysis, forecasting, metrics, the board deck. Ideally that whole cycle doesn't eat all thirty days; you want it done in the first twenty or so. So yes, there's real overlap flowing from accounting into FP&A. Next: since Power BI came up earlier, let's look at BI and analytics directly — a more crowded category.

Kirk Kappelhoff

What are your thoughts here — tool count, new entrants, anything notable?

Ben Murray

This one's tricky to define cleanly, since it overlaps with a lot else — Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Metabase, but also FP&A planning tools showing up here, plus ChartMogul for revenue-specific analytics. Power BI and Tableau usually top the list. Increasingly, though, FP&A platforms are becoming the analytics layer themselves, which I actually prefer — doing analytics natively within FP&A rather than maintaining a separate Power BI project.

Kirk Kappelhoff

So an integrated BI-plus-forecasting tool rather than stitching two separate tools together, on top of the ten-plus tools we mentioned earlier. Next: SaaS spend management.

Ben Murray

This category's evolving — solutions that started narrowly focused on internal software spend are broadening into managing all company spend generally. Ramp is a top player here, along with Brex and Coupa. Vendr, Spendflo, and Tropic are built specifically for SaaS spend management but are expanding beyond that niche too. I suspect this category eventually merges with a related one I also track.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Of everything we've covered today, this is the category I've seen the most advertising for — LinkedIn, everywhere. Clearly an exploding market. Next: sales compensation software — is this purely commissions, or broader?

Ben Murray

It's really commission and variable comp software — sales, sometimes marketing, anyone on revenue-driven variable comp, though not typically executive bonuses. People start in spreadsheets, but it gets complex fast with reps coming and going, plan changes year to year, and legacy plans you still need to track for people being paid out under them. This is one of those "nice to have until you realize it's a must-have" categories. Salesforce is a major player here — they acquired Spiff — and QuotaPath is another strong one that also helps with actual comp plan design. You typically hook this to your CRM, feed in bookings data, and it calculates automatically — makes life easier for both sales reps and finance.

Kirk Kappelhoff

That brings up something we've seen at Drivetrain too — our biggest users are FP&A teams, but there's a real mix with HR and RevOps/sales ops as well. How have you seen RevOps evolve as its own function over time?

Ben Murray

I had a great conversation on this at a SaaS dinner I hosted, with CFOs debating exactly where RevOps should sit — CFO or CRO, real pros and cons either way. Most commonly it sits under sales, reporting to the VP of Sales or the CRO, but that's shifting, since there's so much data and analysis involved that arguably plays to FP&A's strengths.

Kirk Kappelhoff

That's exactly the tension I've seen — who owns the metrics, who owns the numbers, especially since it's the sales team living and dying by those commission-driving KPIs day to day. I've actually seen the CFO/CRO title start to merge on LinkedIn — people listing themselves as "CRO/CFO" as those functions increasingly work in lockstep. Good time to move to Q&A — one more poll first: did you find this webinar valuable, and would you like a Drivetrain demo? Answer as you have time. In the meantime, any questions jumping out at us?

Kirk Kappelhoff

Ben, anything catching your eye in particular?

Ben Murray

Lots of questions coming in. Melanie asks: what are the must-have tools for finance? Depends — for FP&A specifically, yes, FP&A software is a must-have at some point. On accounting: you need an ERP, invoicing, subscription management, RevRec, sales comp, and sales tax coverage — those are core for me. Another, anonymous: should CFOs hire an expert or buy a software solution? For most of what we covered today, other than sales tax, these are genuinely solution-based problems — though you can get sales comp design help or a rev rec expert to help set things up correctly, you'll still need the underlying software to run it day to day. Another, anonymous, on subscription-plus-usage billing: do you need two separate tools? Usually sales comp tools handle both subscription and usage reasonably well, since comp naturally varies with usage triggers. On invoicing specifically, it depends on complexity — your ERP might handle subscription invoicing fine, but you may need a point solution for metered, usage-based billing specifically.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Personal question for you, Ben — if you had a fixed budget to allocate across these tool categories, where would the biggest share go, and what would be your second and third priorities?

Ben Murray

On the accounting side, invoicing and RevRec get real investment — whether that's ERP-native or point solutions. I've had founders balk at a twenty-to-thirty-thousand-dollar quote for subscription management, invoicing, and RevRec together, but it's necessary — if you're a recurring-revenue business, your RevRec has to be bulletproof and defensible; the ROI shows up down the road even if it's not obvious upfront. Sales and use tax compliance isn't usually a huge dollar commitment — maybe a thousand or two a month. FP&A needs a real budget too — someone asked at what point FP&A software becomes necessary, and I'd say above ten million ARR definitely, sometimes five to ten depending on use case, especially if you have PE or VC ownership with high expectations on forecasting and metrics quality — I see that pressure even in sub-ten-million companies with sophisticated boards.

Kirk Kappelhoff

On that note — tools are often sold on the premise of saving you from hiring an analyst, something like "pay thirty thousand for the tool instead of a hundred-ten for a hire." How true do you find that in practice — does implementing a tool genuinely relieve that time pressure, or is that oversold?

Ben Murray

In the back office, it's a must-have — there's simply too much data and too many transactions to scale finance and accounting without technology. It's about finding the right balance between headcount and tooling, but tooling is genuinely critical to scaling well.

Kirk Kappelhoff

At the risk of putting you on the spot — any predictions on where this report goes next? Are you changing cadence, or do you expect certain categories to consolidate or stay fragmented?

Ben Murray

Across the twenty-two categories I track, some are settled — cap table software is Carta, full stop; payment processing is Stripe, full stop — those aren't changing anytime soon. Others, like subscription management, are seeing real churn and new entrants. So you'll keep seeing some categories where incumbents are chipping away at spreadsheet dominance, and others still wide open for whoever wants to become the category leader.

Kirk Kappelhoff

A couple more before we wrap: any tools you'd recommend for managing or forecasting cloud costs — often one of the largest line items on the P&L?

Ben Murray

Good timing — I'm actually doing a spend management webinar with Tropic next week, and cloud cost increasingly falls under that spend management umbrella, since it's historically been a black hole for CFOs. I'm also working with a solution provider on cloud cost benchmarking specifically, hopefully for a future webinar. Join my newsletter for updates — I'm always running webinars on these topics.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Across all these tools, how easy is it to standardize your SaaS P&L methodology across systems — say, different charts of accounts across NetSuite, Sage, and QuickBooks entities? Is your framework portable across tools, or does it require significant rework each time?

Ben Murray

Your SaaS P&L has to live somewhere, and accounting software is generally poor at reporting — so get your chart of accounts right, then map your P&L into FP&A software for pixel-perfect board reporting; I'm literally just hitting refresh and my SaaS P&L updates. Even at a public company I worked at, the SEC reporting team — who didn't report to me — used the FP&A software to build their SEC filings. It tends to live in one central source like that.

Kirk Kappelhoff

One more: how is Drivetrain different from Vena?

Ben Murray

Vena, like Datarails, is Excel-based — built around and on top of Excel. If you live and breathe Excel, that's where those tools sit. Drivetrain runs its own calculation engine as a standalone online tool — no Excel row limits, meaningfully more processing power. Excel is an incredibly powerful, general-purpose tool, often the right starting point for transaction-based modeling or something like an IPO model that exists for a specific point in time. But for the long-term life of a company, a purpose-built tool tends to make more sense — the calculation engine and the simplified user experience (versus juggling INDEX/MATCH, VLOOKUP, OFFSET) are the big differentiators, especially once you're processing billions of transactions rather than thousands.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Any other thoughts, Ben, as we head into the last few minutes — anything from this report others might have missed?

Ben Murray

Definitely go download the full report from my website. Someone commented earlier that the tool evolution they'd just been through in a sales process matched what I laid out — so really treat this tech stack report as your internal product roadmap. As a controller, CFO, or FP&A leader, you can't just bolt on tool after tool ad hoc — you need a real plan for how everything fits together, and CFOs especially need a seat at the table on overall data architecture. Tech is moving fast, with new entrants constantly appearing in RevRec and subscription management, so "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thinking doesn't really hold anymore — you have to seriously evaluate newer players too.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Three more questions from the group, Ben:

Ben Murray

First, from Kate: what role should RevOps play in commission plan design and calculation, given RevOps sits under sales? Design — probably not, unless they have a real sales background, since RevOps is more about facilitating the sales and marketing process and data flow. But the underlying data and calculations — demo counts, meeting counts, conversion points that trigger payouts — yes, that's squarely RevOps territory. Data, yes; design, less so. Second: what's a reasonable benchmark for finance/accounting/BI software spend as a percentage of total OpEx? Honestly, I'm not aware of a solid public benchmark at that specific level — you'd want to look at spend-management players like Tropic who may have that granular data. Internally, I do track internal software spend as a percent of revenue and watch that trend, the same way I'd track commissions — it's a major line item that needs active monitoring or it creeps. Third: is there a tool that acts as an orchestration layer across your broader tech stack — ERP, CRM, HRIS? Typically, yes, and that's usually squarely FP&A software's job — pulling from HR, financial, and bookings data all in one place, since FP&A needs all of that to function.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Better to hear that from you than from me, as a more objective voice here — I'd agree. Typically I see consolidation happen specifically because you need to forecast on top of all that historical data; there's little value in centralizing historicals unless you're using them to drive a forecast, which is usually why it lands in FP&A software, though you're also seeing data warehouses like Snowflake and Azure play that consolidation role. Either way, you should be able to forecast on top of whatever you centralize. Last one: what can we learn from the proliferation of third-party point solutions given NetSuite and QuickBooks offer competing native functionality? Will Rillet and Campfire become one-stop ERPs that eliminate the need for many third-party tools?

Kirk Kappelhoff

Big question — hopefully a big answer, Ben.

Ben Murray

Make sure you download the tech stack report, since I actually ask this exact question in the survey: do you prefer best-of-breed point solutions or an all-in-one ERP? Every year, best-of-breed wins, even though it's easier said than done when you're the one making the buying decision. I think Campfire and Rillet do want to be one-stop shops — Rillet especially, building out RevRec, invoicing, integrations to Anrok and similar — but people still generally gravitate toward best-of-breed point solutions in practice.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Those were genuinely great questions. Quick recap before we wrap: if there's interest in seeing Drivetrain, you can see a few customer quotes and our G2 recognition here — we're currently the highest-rated FP&A tool on G2, happy to show you more. A couple of resources: Ben's SaaS CFO Tech Stack Report for 2025, be sure to download that, plus our own blog covering forecasting and finance topics broadly.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Ben, I'll leave it with you here — any last resources people should check out, or the best way to reach you?

Ben Murray

Thanks, everyone — I know your time is valuable, thanks for joining today. My email is ben@thesaascfo.com, feel free to reach out anytime. And make sure you download the tech stack report — you'll get onto my newsletter too, where I'm constantly sharing tools, webinars, training, templates, formulas, everything for the SaaS finance community.

Kirk Kappelhoff

Definitely — Ben, thanks so much again for coming on. We love learning from you, and love getting to host these with you. Have an awesome day, and stay cool out there in extremely hot Arizona this summer.

Ben Murray

Yeah, thanks guys, appreciate it. Take care, everyone — thanks for joining. Bye.