Success Story: Fast-growing SaaS vendor scales with flexibility and insights

WebPT cuts monthly close by 75%, reduces revenue leakage by 74%, and saves $300,000 a year

WebPT has grown rapidly, appearing in 2019 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for the seventh consecutive year with three-year revenue growth of 157 percent. In the past few years, the Phoenix-based SaaS vendor has doubled from 4,000 to 8,000 its base of customers using its web-based electronic medical record (EMR) software, along with billing, scheduling, and practice management services. Recognizing WebPT’s market leadership and continued growth, the private equity firm Warburg Pincus bought a majority stake in the 11-year-old company in August 2019.

Sage Intacct has been a vital cog in WebPT’s growth since it was deployed in 2014 to replace Intuit QuickBooks. Before that, QuickBooks limited the company’s agility since it offered virtually no connectivity to other business software and required WebPT to use Intuit’s merchant provider for credit card payments. The company wasn’t able to keep its member information as up to date as desired even after spending 40 hours every week tediously re-entering data between Salesforce and QuickBooks.

As WebPT evaluated its options, it considered Microsoft Dynamics GP, NetSuite, and Sage Intacct. “Needing to prepare for scalability, we ultimately made the decision to go with Sage Intacct again because of its deeper financial capabilities and its unparalleled ability to integrate with other best-in-class applications like Salesforce,” said Kevin Jackson, the WebPT corporate controller. “Our developers felt that Sage Intacct’s application programming interface was more robust than NetSuite’s. That’s proven true as Sage Intacct has given us the flexibility to adapt to our evolving business needs and scale rapidly during phenomenal growth,” added Kevin.

“We love how easy it is to track and compare the metrics we need in both Sage Intacct and Salesforce — from revenue and adoption by product or customer group, to customer churn and average revenue per customer.”

Kevin Jackson, Corporate Controller, WebPT

Company Overview

With more than 85,000 members and 15,000 member clinics, WebPT is the leading electronic medical record (EMR) solution for physical therapists, occupational therapists, and speech-language pathologists. Based in Phoenix, WebPT employs more than 500.

Results with Sage Intacct

• Grew 157% over 3 years.
• Doubled the number of customers invoiced from 4,000 to 8,000.
• Reduced revenue leakage by 74%.
• With the accurate forecast, confidently invested to double TAM.
• Reduced monthly close from 20 to 5 days.

Reducing the close to 5 days, and revenue leakage by 74%

Integrating Sage Intacct and its subscription billing module with Salesforce, WebPT has streamlined its entire quote-to-cash process. When a new member signs up, a customer record is created in Salesforce and Sage Intacct, and recurring subscription invoices are automatically produced. That’s helped WebPT scale as monthly invoices grew from 4,000 to 8,000. “Using Sage Intacct has made our jobs so much easier by streamlining workflows that used to consume people’s time — from booking a new customer, to preparing the initial invoice, to managing monthly transactions,” Kevin said. “Sage Intacct takes the worry out of accounting for a subscription-based revenue model by providing granular revenue recognition schedules supporting each contract,” added Kevin.

With a finely-tuned financial management foundation, the company moved from outsourced accounting services to an in-house team that is about one-third the size the old system would have required. The streamlined team is 20 percent more productive and efficient because of Sage Intacct, while the company is avoiding more than $120,000 in salary costs from the reduced headcount. And it’s saving $180,000 a year in merchant processing fees by integrating Sage Intacct with an Authorize.net payment gateway for online transactions, bringing indirect savings realised through Sage Intacct to more than $300,000 a year.

With a highly productive finance team, WebPT has reduced its monthly close from 20 days to just five, and trimmed general and administrative expenses by 10 percent even amid rapid growth. Now, staff has more time to analyse data with Sage Intacct and optimise processes. In one instance, WebPT used Sage Intacct to identify revenue leakage in the form of credits granted to customers because of inconvenience caused by infrequent billing issues. With full visibility into those credits, WebPT could analyse why they were happening, and make changes in billing operations to prevent recurrence. That reduced the revenue leakage by 74 percent — and improved the customer experience.

Improving metrics-driven financial insights

In addition to easily producing profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow reports every month, Sage Intacct’s multi-dimensional reporting let’s WebPT slice and dice
its financial data across departments and products for greater trend analysis. Sage Intacct integrates with WebPT’s Host Analytics planning and forecasting tool to support budgeting and additional analytics. The finance team uses Sage Intacct to create custom reports that look at collections and budgets vs. actuals, as well as improve insights into various departments. Recently, WebPT has begun using location dimensions to identify opportunities, efficiencies, and weaknesses by geographic regions.

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