The SaaS Glossary

Vivian Guo | September 7, 2022

A guide to understanding and tracking key SaaS metrics

Every year, we publish our cornerstone report on what growth and efficiency looks like across enterprise SaaS companies. However, the different terms and metrics used to describe SaaS business performance are often confusing and not well-documented. We often get questions from even established founders and finance teams on the best ways to calculate a certain metric.

We are excited to share this glossary of common SaaS terms and metrics as a companion tool to our Growth & Efficiency report. This is not intended to be a definitive guide to SaaS accounting. Rather, we hope to share some best practices and common approaches we often see companies use to most cleanly define and track these metrics on an ongoing basis. We also believe this is a topic that will only benefit from increased knowledge sharing and welcome any additional considerations or best practices you may have.