Plain-English definitions of AI, accounting, and SaaS-finance terms.
Percentage of new users who complete a key action that predicts long-term retention.
Average annualized revenue from a customer contract, excluding one-time fees.
The annualized value of all active recurring subscription contracts, the primary revenue metric for SaaS businesses.
Calculation of the sales volume at which total revenue equals total costs, generating zero profit.
The rate at which a company spends its cash reserves each month, critical for tracking how long funding will last.
Model describing relationship between systematic risk and expected return for assets in equilibrium.
Funds spent acquiring, upgrading, or maintaining long-term physical assets for business operations.
The percentage of customers or revenue lost within a given period due to cancellations or non-renewals.
Tracking a group of customers acquired in the same period to measure retention and revenue trends over time.
Valuing a company using trading multiples from publicly listed peer companies.
Monthly recurring revenue lost from existing customers through downgrades or seat reductions.
Recurring revenue lost from existing customers who downgrade their plan or reduce usage without fully canceling.
Revenue minus variable costs, showing how much each unit or sale contributes toward fixed costs and profit.
The total cost of acquiring a new paying customer, including all sales and marketing expenses divided by new customers acquired.
The total net revenue a business expects to earn from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship.
Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization — a proxy for operating cash generation used in valuation and financial analysis.
Contingent payment mechanism tying part of the acquisition price to the target's future financial performance.
Composite metric quantifying how actively a customer uses a product, predicting retention and expansion.
AI technique providing a small number of task examples in the prompt to guide model performance.
Building quantitative representations of a company's finances to support decision-making and valuation.
Further training a pre-trained AI model on domain-specific data to improve performance on specialized tasks.
Cash generated from operations minus capital expenditures, available for debt, dividends, or reinvestment.
AI systems capable of creating new content—text, images, code, or data—based on patterns learned from training.
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers excluding any expansion, capped at 100%.
Financial model analyzing private equity returns from a leveraged buyout at various exit scenarios.
AI system trained on vast text data to understand and generate human language across many tasks.
Percentage of customer accounts (logos) that renew over a given period.
A SaaS sales efficiency metric measuring how much new ARR is generated for every dollar spent on sales and marketing.
Financial model assessing the accretion or dilution to acquirer EPS resulting from an acquisition.
Computational technique using random sampling to model probability distributions of financial outcomes.
The number of unique users who engage with a product at least once within a 30-day period, measuring product reach and engagement.
Day-to-day expenses required to run a business, expensed immediately on the income statement.
The percentage of revenue remaining after all operating expenses including COGS and overhead, excluding interest and taxes.
Time required to recover the customer acquisition cost from a customer's gross profit contribution.
Annual or periodic cash award tied to achieving individual or company performance targets.
The use of statistical models and machine learning to forecast future financial outcomes including revenue, cash flow, churn, and credit risk.
A prospective customer who has demonstrated buying intent through meaningful engagement with a product — such as using a key feature or hitting a usage threshold.
Craft of designing and optimizing inputs to AI language models to reliably produce desired outputs.
Continuously updated financial forecast extending a fixed period ahead, replacing point-in-time annual budgets.
A SaaS benchmark stating that a company's revenue growth rate plus profit margin should sum to 40% or more.
The number of months a company can operate at its current burn rate before exhausting its cash reserves.
A metric measuring SaaS revenue growth quality by comparing new and expansion MRR gained to churned and contracted MRR lost.
A prospect that has been reviewed and confirmed by the sales team as meeting target criteria, ready for direct sales engagement.
Developing multiple coherent narratives about future business conditions to prepare strategic responses.
Testing how a financial model's outputs change when individual input assumptions are varied.
Systematic comparison of actual financial results to budgeted or prior period figures to identify and explain differences.
Average number of new users each existing user generates through referrals or organic sharing.
Budgeting approach requiring all expenses to be justified from zero each period rather than incremented from prior year.
AI capability to perform tasks on categories or domains not seen during training, using semantic knowledge.
