How SaaS CFOs Can Be Collaborative Guides To The Enterprise

When the pandemic hit, it wasn’t uncommon for younger, digital-native businesses to be in a much better position than other organizations that had been built upon legacy systems and manual workloads. In a work-from-home environment, technological-savvy companies like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) firms often didn’t face the same pains of having to migrate to digital platforms to cope with a work-from-home environment.

That doesn’t mean that, for companies like B2B SaaS firm LogicGate, there wasn’t any disruption at all. But according to the firm’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Kevin Jacobson, the biggest impacts the coronavirus had on back-office operations were in how the company interacted with its business customers.

“We had a handful of customers across a range of industries reach out to us with an honest perspective of, ‘I’m experiencing some temporary challenges right now,'” Jacobson told PYMNTS in a recent interview.

Before the coronavirus crisis hit, he noted, LogicGate embraced the spirit of collaboration across the enterprise. But as a result of the pandemic, the need for such collaboration grew and expanded outside the walls of the organization itself.

Overcoming Accounts Receivable Pains

While LogicGate itself is a digital-first company — and pays its vendors electronically — many of its corporate customers pay for services via paper check. It’s one of the most common pain points that emerged from the pandemic as professionals are no longer able to enter their offices to receive and process those payments.

This was also one of the biggest changes that Jacobson said was made within the company, which worked with some of those check-paying customers to migrate them to ACH payments.

While igniting change in payment behavior has been an especially difficult hurdle for the B2B payments landscape to overcome, Jacobson said that simply asking was often a successful tactic.

“We actually found a lot of traction just by asking and making it easy,” he said. “We gave clear messaging and clear instructions as to how they could set ACH payments up, and articulated the benefits, so people could make their own decisions.”

He also proposed that the pandemic likely helped to drive that shift on the customers’ accounts payable end, with many businesses similarly struggling to step into workspaces to cut and mail out paper check payments.

The SaaS CFO As A Collaborative Leader

Working with clients to adjust payment behavior is just one example of the importance of collaboration to help mitigate the biggest challenges that came about from the pandemic. Working with clients one on one became an important tool, because many business customers themselves faced issues like delayed payments from their own clients, or declining revenues.

“We’re all in this together, and we have to work through it,” said Jacobson.

That collaborative spirit is a key part of LogicGate’s own internal strategy, according to Jacobson, who said the company was well-equipped to manage trends like working from home because of its position as a digital-first company without siloed back-office teams. Rather than a “finance team” and “HR team,” for example, everyone is a part of the same business operations team.

By breaking down those traditional barriers, it’s easier to not only promote cooperation between business professionals in the back office, but to identify how various functions are intertwined.

Further, noted Jacobson, by the sheer nature of the SaaS business model, finance operations are closely related to a range of other back-office workflows like customer acquisition and contract negotiations.

“Software-as-a-Service is essentially a mechanism for financing software,” he said. “The concept of business financial s and the operating nature of the business are, today, more intertwined than they ever have been.”

As such, the CFO can play the role of leader in guiding an organization not only to a resilient financial position, but to a strategic enterprise that is agile and digital-first.

“The mindset that we as CFOs should have is to want to be the change agents in this digital transformation,” Jacobson added.