SaaS numbers that survive a Series A.

An Indian SaaS company sells mostly to customers in the US and Europe. The deck shows ARR in dollars. The books are in rupees. At a board meeting, an investor points out that ARR grew 30% over the year while recognised revenue grew 18%, and asks which number is true.

Both are, as it turns out. A large annual contract was counted in ARR when it was signed in February but won't go live until May. Two customers moved to annual prepaid plans, which brought cash forward without changing revenue. And the rupee moved, so the same dollar ARR is worth a different amount in the books from one quarter to the next. Every one of those is explainable. None of them was explained before the question was asked.

That's the particular finance problem of Indian software companies. The metrics investors use were mostly defined for American companies selling in one currency, and the accounting, tax and cash realities here add layers those definitions don't mention. A founder who can reconcile them calmly looks like someone in control of the business. One who can't looks like someone who might be surprised by their own numbers.

A fund's analyst will rebuild your ARR from the subscription data, then reconcile it to revenue in the books, then reconcile revenue to cash in the bank. If your definitions hold together at each step, that exercise confirms your story. If they don't, it becomes the thing diligence is about.

An illustrative quarter for a B2B software company with ₹14 crore of ARR. Every figure is invented. New customers added ₹2.1 crore of ARR. Expansion added another ₹0.3 crore, and churn and downgrades took away ₹0.8 crore. Gross margin is 72%. Net burn for the quarter was ₹3.1 crore.

Four months and fifteen months describe the same quarter. The first isn't a lie. It's just a number an investor will throw away as soon as they see how it was built, and they'll then wonder what else was built the same way.

Fifteen months isn't a disaster either. For mid-market contracts with low churn it can be perfectly healthy. The burn multiple of 1.9 is where the harder conversation sits, because it says the company is spending almost two rupees for every rupee of net new ARR, and churn is a big part of the reason. Reporting the honest numbers first puts the founder in charge of that conversation.

Most Indian SaaS companies with global customers are exporting services for GST purposes, and exports of services are zero-rated when all five conditions in the IGST Act are met: the supplier is in India, the recipient is outside India, the place of supply is outside India, payment is received in convertible foreign exchange or in rupees where the RBI permits, and the two parties aren't merely establishments of the same legal person.

Zero-rated doesn't mean you can ignore it. To export without paying IGST, a business files a Letter of Undertaking on Form GST RFD-11, and it has to be filed for each financial year. Miss the renewal in April and exports after that can attract IGST that then has to be claimed back as a refund, which ties up cash for months.

The other cash effect is input credit. A company whose sales are mostly zero-rated collects little GST on its invoices, so the GST it pays on rent, laptops and domestic software builds up as credit. That credit can be refunded, but refunds take time and paperwork. A model that assumes the credit comes back next month overstates cash.

Then currency. Revenue in dollars and costs in rupees means margin moves with the exchange rate. Pick one reporting currency for the model and the MIS, state the exchange rate you've assumed, and show exchange gains and losses separately from operating revenue so nobody mistakes a weaker rupee for better sales.

Domestic B2B SaaS has its own set of cash realities, and they're mostly about timing. GST is charged on invoices to Indian customers, commonly at 18%, and goes out on the government's schedule whether or not the customer has paid. Larger customers often insist on their own payment terms and vendor onboarding processes, which can add weeks before the first invoice is even accepted into their system.

Many Indian business customers will also deduct TDS from subscription payments. The rate depends on how the payment is classified, and customers don't always agree with each other, so it's worth settling in the contract rather than discovering it on the first remittance. The deducted amount comes back as a credit against your own tax, which only helps if someone reconciles it against what customers report.

Put together, a domestic SaaS company can show healthy ARR and still find collections running a month or two behind contract terms. Track receivable days by customer size, and don't let an enterprise logo on the slide stand in for enterprise cash in the bank.

A growing number of software products now call large language models or other paid APIs with every use. That turns a cost that used to be close to fixed, hosting, into one that scales with how much each customer uses the product.

If the pricing is per seat and the cost is per use, the heaviest users can be the least profitable customers, sometimes negative. An illustrative case: a plan priced at ₹6,000 a seat a month where the median seat costs ₹700 in model usage, but the top tenth of seats cost over ₹5,000. Blended margin looks fine. The accounts made of power users don't.

It's worth measuring usage cost by customer every month, setting usage limits or tiers before a large customer finds the gap, and showing investors gross margin with model costs included. They'll calculate it that way regardless.

Shafneed's operating record includes a $3 million ARR business, where he contributed to improving EBITDA from roughly -140% to approximately +10% through performance management and financial discipline. That's operating experience from the inside, not a client result, and it's why the work here focuses on what makes SaaS numbers hold up: definitions, reconciliation and the discipline to report the unflattering version first.

In practice that means a metric dictionary and an ARR-to-revenue-to-cash bridge, a fundraising model built from cohorts and sales capacity, monthly investor MIS, a unit economics review by plan and customer size, and a cash forecast that knows about LUT renewals, refunds and currency. Tax filings and legal structure stay with your CA and lawyers.