SaaSOptics doesn't understand its customers and product development is off track
July 29, 2022
SaaSOptics doesn't understand its customers and product development is off track
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SaaSOptics
SaaSOptics (SO) integrates with our CRM (Salesforce) and our GL accounting software (Quickbooks Online; QBO). I inherited this software from several predecessors before me. SO mainly serves as an intermediary between our CRM and GL to keep track of our customers, send invoices and perform collections and dunning, maintains our revenue and deferred revenue schedules and ARR reporting so we don't have to use Excel. Not having to keep track of all of this in Excel is a huge benefit for us and allows us to delegate the bookings process to a lower level staff member. The automated emails when an invoice becomes past due (or any other time period you set) is helpful as well. SO can also sync sales tax settings from QBO so we properly charge sales tax to our customers.
- Integrates with CRM (Salesforce) and accounting software, and keeps our team out of Excel for revenue and deferred revenue
- Provides assistance with automating our AR collections process
- The Quickbooks Online (QBO) and SaaSOptics (SO) sales tax integration seems to work well (with the help of a sales tax consultant) and allows us to stay organized enough that we haven’t needed to implement another software like Avalara
- You can easily export a Transaction List of all transactions in the system
- You can set up a parent/child relationships to get more accurate ARR reporting at the customer account level and customer count level.
- The ability to set up and allow customers to make payments by ACH and credit card through the Stripe integration was easy to set up. It does take 2 days for credit card payments to hit your bank account though, and you can’t pass along the credit card fees to your customers (some states don’t allow passing along the fees to customers).
- I can barely use the full functionality of the software because of reporting and transaction issues that are not easy to resolve, and appear to be system limitations. For example, the cohort report doesn’t make any sense, the gross renewal and reports are completely inaccurate, and they still haven’t created an accurate, standard MRR and ARR report (order dates before the subscription period could result in overlapping transactions, which will be excluded from the ARR report, so your ARR is understated and you could make uninformed decisions)
- You cannot renew transactions between customers, which is a total pain. There is very little guidance on how to handle mergers and acquisitions and there has been a significant amount of M&A in the market lately. Their customer support says you need to move the invoices to the new customer in your GL system, but I don’t want to change any historical information that could potentially change our audited financials.
- It is too easy to make mistakes and not understand or realize where and how the issue was created and how to resolve it
- There is very limited information (MRR and ARR at End of Month, and Total AR Balance, which isn’t groundbreakingly helpful) you can send from SaaSOptics to Salesforce, and the Salesforce IDs can easily change without you knowing, which stops the information from flowing from SaaSOptics to Salesforce
- They have a Dropbox functionality to save executed contracts, but I think it would be better to store them in your CRM where the sales, AM, and CS teams can access the docs instead of trying to teach your team members how to us SaaSOptics.
- They have a Clearbit integration to get more detailed information about your customer, but I haven’t set this up, and am unsure why you would use it if your CRM already imports information from ZoomInfo
- They don’t have an integration with Bill.com, so I don’t understand how they expect customers to use their expense module
- There is no need to use their expense module for 606 commissions if you already have a commission software that can handle 606. I haven’t had to implement 606 on the revenue side, but that seems to be a more practical use case.
- You can’t natively integrate with a customer success software, like ChurnZero. You need to hire a developer or pay more.
- It is difficult to collaborate and share reports with other parties. Their reports doesn’t export cleanly either and requires additional Excel manipulation. There is no multi-year reporting without creating custom fields and additional data entry. You can’t easily create a bookings report based on the order date or signed date, which could be different than the subscription start date.
- The granularity of security settings is not great and they don’t help you organize and direct users to use the software. My preference would be to not have any report users in the system.
- There are poor notifications about invoice issues. For example, our AR invoice email keeps getting unsubscribed when we want to have a copy of the invoice saved in our email to prove it was sent. If an invoice is rejected or kicked back, then you will not know until the invoice becomes past due and you start investigating why your customer hasn’t paid you yet.
- Invoice template changes impact all previous invoices, which doesn’t make sense and distorts your audit trail. Invoice template changes should only impact the present and future invoices. You also can’t easily add invoice 1 of 8, invoice 2 of 8, etc. You have to have manually type it in the invoice description.
- The detail for revenue and deferred revenue does not sync to the GL. You have to make a manually summary journal entry once a month.
- There is no data validation on the billing and shipping state fields so when you run a report of “Sales by State”, you will have uncombined rows for “CA”, “California”, “Ca”, which isn’t helpful as we try to do an economic nexus review for sales tax.
- Reduces / eliminates the need for us to use Excel
- Integration with CRM, GL and FP&A (SO doesn't have an FP&A integration)
- Automation assistance of AR collections process
- Saves several days during month end close for ARR and customer count reporting
- Doesn't make our reporting easier for gross renewal
- Doesn't integrate well with our CRM or other software that we use
- I feel like it would be very difficult for me to switch to a new software, which I would do if I could but I don't have the time or team to handle a transition
- Helps us with AR collections
I inherited SaaSOptics from several predecessors that worked on it before me. I believe they used Chargebee or Chargify before SaaSOptics, but I haven't used them. I pray that the market comes up with a better product for subscription revenue management, SaaS metric reporting, and financial projections. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the team to be able to successfully complete the transition to new software at this time, so I feel like I'm stuck with SaaSOptics at this point.
Do you think Maxio delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Maxio's feature set?
No
Did Maxio live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Maxio go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Maxio again?
No