Elevating Financial Planning & Governance at a Healthcare SaaS Startup

Challenge

This venture-backed SaaS company in the healthcare space having raised more than $10MM needed to elevate their financial planning and governance. They have a platform that helps hospital systems plan their CapEx and maximize or optimize their use of capital equipment. The company was at a turning point. They had developed the product, built a solid team, and started to gain market traction. They needed to raise more capital to fund the next stage of growth. Alongside the fundraising effort, they were looking to increase the corporate rigor and cadence around accounting, governance, board reporting, and financial planning.

Solution

We helped the technical founders systematize their financial planning and governance from basic financial closes to cap table management and investor relations. One of the first steps was to institutionalize the financial planning process; building their Annual Operating Plan (AOP) and Long-range Plan (LRP). This was critical for developing a pay for performance structure for the team and for kick starting the fundraising effort. As part of the financial planning process, we met with all department heads to gather their roadmaps which ensured that each P&L manager is part of the budgeting and goal-setting process which is key to success.

In addition, the company needed to be able to update their cap table and develop the ability to run multiple cap table scenarios involving new capital, options, RSUs, and warrants. This was critical to ensure that existing shareholders and the management team had full visibility into ownership and potential dilution with any new raise. This effort, over the course of several months, included discussions with the Board and individual investors focusing on getting all players on the same page.

Once these pieces were in place, our focus turned to establishing a regular cadence of investor and Board reporting to provide respective parties with timely and accurate financials as well as management discussion about historical and forward-looking business performance. Our accounting team and FP&A team did a full review and update of the chart of accounts with an eye toward their anticipated revenue model and expenses. This effort both simplified their accounting processes and yielded better insight for the management team.

Results

In partnering with this company, we elevated the financial planning and governance by improving corporate rigor and cadence for accounting, financial reporting, and Board management. The management team spent less time working in the business (doing work) and more time working on the business (driving growth), which is one of our core goals with all customers. This was driven by systematizing accounting and reporting which drove better and faster decision-making. 

This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice.