Best Financial Planning Software for SaaS Startups: Top 7 Picks
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After months of hard work, your startup is finally generating revenue. Whew! Now it's time to move on to the next step: financial planning.
If you don't already have one, this is a good time to invest in financial planning software—a set of tools to manage the different moving pieces of your startup’s finances.
A financial planning software benefits SaaS startups in many ways, including:
- Keeping financial information (such as income, expenses, assets, liabilities, and tax receipts) organised in a central repository
- Planning and managing taxes and staying compliant with changing rules and regulations
- Setting financial goals and monitoring progress toward them
- Creating and managing budget and improving financial resource allocation
- Projecting future revenue based on current data
- Identifying and mitigating financial risks early before they snowball into a threat (for example, paying off debt that has high interest rates)
- Offering access to certified financial planning experts
- Empowering leaders to make informed financial choices (such as optimising tax planning, creating pricing strategies, raising funds, and deciding salaries)
We have tested dozens of financial planning software and filtered the top 7 you can adopt for your SaaS startup.
Time to raise the curtain.
1. Inkle.io — Best for US tax automation & financial compliance
Inkle is a SaaS stack that caters to two crucial aspects of your startup’s financial planning—taxation and compliance.
Inkle Tax offers a simplified tax calculation summary of US taxes, with CPAs available on chat support to answer your queries. The software keeps you on track with important dates, thanks to time-sensitive reminders on US State and federal taxes and compliance deadlines.
Inkle offers a centralised management system for founders managing domestic and international entities to consolidate all tax-related information. The platform allows you to securely save important tax documents, keep them organised, and retrieve them as and when required.
If your startup needs additional help regarding US taxes, accounting, and management, you can explore Inkle Books and Inkle Mailroom.
Inkle Books is a bookkeeping tool for managing multiple data sources (including bank accounts, entities, and vendors) in one place. It tracks and auto-categorises transactions and generates financial reports (balance sheet, income statement, and monthly and annual reports).
Inkle Mailroom is a virtual mailbox that receives mail on your behalf, scans and uploads it to the portal for review, and allows you to decide the following action. You can shred confidential emails that are no longer relevant, store what’s important, or forward them to an address of your choice. It’s useful for business owners who want to keep their email inbox clutter-free.
Inkle key features
- Manage your tax filing on auto-pilot
- Access detailed document history of past filing records
- Sync tax deadlines with your calendar app to never miss a deadline
- Communicate with your team regarding taxes, delegate tasks, and keep everyone on the same page
- Save money with affordable tax filing and compliance guidance, starting at only $300/annual
What users are saying about Inkle
How Inkle is simplifying cross-border remittance: 91Squarefeet case study
91Squarefeet is a tech startup focused on physical retail expansion. It operates on a flip structure, with the central entity based in the US and an owned subsidiary operating from India. US-IN Cross-border payments are essential to their business structure to manage payroll and other financial obligations in India.
They were dealing with two challenges in their transaction process:
- Long-winded communication with bankers
- Negotiations on foreign exchange rates and purpose codes
This is where Inkle’s Transfer Pricing (TP) Payments came into play. It’s a streamlined process that helps US-based businesses quickly transfer funds to India against invoices with next-day settlements (T+1), transparent pricing, complete compliance, and dedicated chat support for assistance. Inkle works with global banks to facilitate these payments—it doesn’t touch or hold funds.
Here’s what 91Squarefeet gained by switching to Inkle:
- User-friendly dashboard to add subsidiary accountant and customise permission settings
- Fixed up-front foreign exchange rates offering clarity on the exact amount the other end will receive
- Pre-fixed purpose codes—no more to-and-fro communication with bankers for disposal instructions
- Access to Foreign Inward Remittance Advice (FIRA) within 24 hours of settlement, offering quick access to comprehensive transaction details
Also read: Form 1120
2. Drivetrain — Best for Financial Analysis
Drivetrain is an AI-powered financial planning software SaaS startups can use for in-depth and accurate financial analysis. It helps you collaborate with your team on financial plans, build multidimensional models across segments, and reduce manual errors, resulting in shorter planning cycles.
The tool integrates your finance and business tech stack, offering a unified platform for monitoring key metrics. With detailed reports, you can quickly analyse each department's impact on the company’s bottom line.
Drivetrain key features
- Simplify planning and analysis with user-friendly and easy-to-understand business formulas
- Get visibility into your business performance with actionable dashboards and make necessary adjustments to your plan on the go
- Perform variance analysis (studying how actual behaviour deviates from forecasted behaviour) by any relevant driver
- Generate custom reports instantly—no need to seek help from IT
- Backtrack the data behind reports to identify crucial drivers that bring results
3. Finmark — Best for Financial Modelling
Finmark analyzes your current data and develops financial models to predict your business's future performance. It creates both best-case and worst-case scenarios, so you can compare the two and get a rounded overview of your startup's long-term financial condition.
You can ask what-if questions to get the projected outcome. Finmark displays the forecast using visually appealing charts and graphs, making the data easy to understand irrespective of technical or financial expertise.
Finmark best features
- Collaborate with your team to create and analyse scenarios and decide the best path.
- Maintain agility by re-forecasting multiple scenarios
- No more copy-pasting—create scenarios with a few clicks
- Identify and analyse budget variances in detail
- Manage your financial plan within one platform and share it with internal and external stakeholders
4. Modeliks — Best for Guided Financial Planning
First-time startup founders often lack experience in financial planning. But no worries—with Modeliks, they can create a driver-based financial plan that's tailor-made for their business.
It helps design advanced financial models (a great way to impress investors), establish operational goals for team members, and track performance.
The software also comes with a subscription revenue modelling feature to help SaaS businesses calculate subscription revenue, cash collection, refunds, and churn rates based on the assumptions you input.
Modelikskey features
- Generate automated financial statements.
- Estimate taxes and plan ahead of time.
- Calculate depreciation of current assets and calculate profit or loss on sold assets
- Understand business performance with automated reports
- Perform variance analysis to check whether your business over performed or underperformed
5. Mosaic — Best for Collaborative Budgeting
Instead of treating budgeting as a siloed activity for the upper management, you can opt for collaborative budgeting. A great way to bring new perspectives to the table and strategise better! Mosaic can help you implement this at your startup. This financial planning software connects financial insights to its drivers (such as department heads) to generate more accurate forecasts and improve decision-making.
Your team can set financial goals, track performance across any metric, and stay updated about the business's progress.
Mosaic key features
- Bring cross-functional teams together with a unified vision
- Encourage collaboration among teams with in-app notes and messages
- Generate flexible forecasts with a top-down or bottom-up approach
- Create unlimited what-if scenarios
- Plan expenses accurately with driver-based planning'
6. OneStream — Best for Reporting
OneStream combines financial and operational insights, offering interactive dashboards that give users a glimpse into reports in their desired format.
The reports are easily deciphered with graphs, charts, and visual elements. Detailed analytics help you understand business trends, identify their causes, and allow you to dig into transactional data if required. The tool eliminates data latency and duplicate records, ensuring accurate analysis and trackable audit trails.
OneStream key features
- Generate detailed financial reports fast and at scale, and make the most of market opportunities
- Improve decision-making with self-service reporting
- Choose from 100+ pre-built report templates
- Mix and match row and column templates with Guided Reporting
- Export reports to Microsoft Excel, PDF, or any other format
7. Airbase — Best for expense management
Airbase is an AI-powered financial planning tool designed to automate your expense management. Take a photo of your receipt from the Airbase mobile app, and your expense will be recorded in the system. Thanks to built-in machine learning, the system extracts all necessary information from the receipt, including date, amount, GL category, merchant/vendor, and purpose.
You can approve business expenses and reimburse your employees automatically into their bank accounts.
Airbase best features
- Maintain an audit trail of all business expenses
- Reimburse employees from US-based or international subsidiaries
- Get visibility into employee expenses in real time
- Ensure expenses are compliant with company policies
- Control employees’ business travel expenses by setting booking cost limits
Frequently asked questions
What is financial planning software?
Financial planning software helps develop a detailed plan for a company's short-term and long-term financial goals. It involves financial forecasting based on past and current data points, tax planning and management, budgeting, monitoring progress toward goals, and maintaining a healthy bottom line.
How do I choose financial planning software?
While choosing financial planning software, look for a tool that aligns with your organisation's capacity. For instance, if you have a startup or a small business, choose a tool that caters to these types of entities rather than enterprise software. This way, you can get tailored solutions to your problems and more individualised support.
Apart from this, here are some key features to look for in financial planning software:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Collaboration features for company-wide visibility
- Real-time reporting to stay updated with your financial standing at all times
- Budget-friendly pricing
What is startup financial planning?
Startup financial planning refers to designing a strategy to manage an early-stage business's financial resources. It involves multiple steps, including budgeting, forecasting revenue and expenses, analysing funding needs, managing cash flow, and setting financial goals.
Financial planning empowers startups to take off their journey on the right foot. It creates a base for future growth, attracting potential investors and ensuring sustainability in the long run.
This article was initially written by Sneha Chatterjee - Meet her on LinkedIn.
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