The SaaS CFO's playbook for spend that scales with you

One of the sharpest distinctions Dan drew was between what he called “spend forensics” and actual spend control.

Budget variance analysis? That's forensics. You're looking at what already happened, figuring out where things went off track. It's valuable (nobody's saying skip it) but it's hindsight. As Dan put it, you've got a dead body and you're trying to figure out how it died.

Quick test: are you doing control or forensics?

• If you find the problem in budget vs actual, you’re doing forensics.
• If you can see commitments before the money leaves, you’re doing control.

Most teams do the first brilliantly, and still get surprised.

Real spend control means catching things before they’re spent. It means visibility into commitments as they’re being made, not reconciliation after the money’s already gone.

Ben reinforced this with a pattern he sees across the SaaS companies he advises: revenue is growing, everything looks great, and then growth slows. Suddenly expenses that felt manageable are way out ahead of the business. The budget existed. The forecast was there. But nothing in the process actually prevented the overspend from happening in real time.

This is where the conversation got really interesting. There’s a common assumption in SaaS that tighter spend controls will slow you down. Dan pushed back hard on that.

And this wasn’t just theory. When the audience was asked what they most wanted to improve over the next 12 months, 0% picked “faster approvals.” The priorities were better forecasting and earlier visibility. Finance doesn’t want speed for the sake of speed. It wants confidence.

His reasoning: without reliable numbers, the board loses trust. Management can’t make confident decisions because there’s a built-in degree of variance that nobody can quantify. People start hedging. Decisions stall. And in a competitive SaaS market where you need to be nimble, that hesitation costs more than any approval workflow ever would.

The takeaway isn’t that you need to approve every coffee subscription. It’s that the right controls, applied at the right level of spend, actually make the organisation faster because everyone trusts the data.

This was a point both speakers came back to more than once. SaaS companies obsess over revenue metadata (ARR by cohort, expansion revenue, logo retention) and rightly so. But the expense side gets a fraction of that attention.

Dan advocated for building product-level P&Ls, not as a one-off exercise but as a repeatable methodology. Strip down the P&L by product. Understand where you’re making money, where you’re losing it, where growth is faster or slower. It’s like looking at the business as several distinct businesses, and it unlocks a level of decision-making that simply isn’t possible without it.

This doesn’t replace traditional chart-of-accounts thinking. It layers a commercial lens on top of it. And most finance teams aren’t doing it, which means there’s an opportunity to get ahead.

One of the audience questions cut to the heart of a familiar challenge: every department leader believes their expenses are critical. So how do you have a productive conversation about priorities?

Dan’s approach is to tie spend back to strategic initiatives. If the company has five defined goals, every material expense should be linked to one of them. When a department leader says something is critical, the framework gives you a way to test that claim without it becoming personal.

“You’re saying this is critical. Tell me which of our strategic initiatives this supports, and how. Let’s work together to tie back the numbers.” — Dan Schonfeld

He noted that two things tend to happen: either the leader proves the case with data and everyone moves forward confidently, or they gradually realise the claim doesn't hold up and they find their own way to step back from it. Either outcome is a win.

Ben brought up the concept of "quote-to-cash," the end-to-end revenue cycle that SaaS companies have invested heavily in streamlining. Then he asked a question most of us haven't thought about: what's the equivalent on the expense side?

Dan described it as the mirror image. Every dollar leaving the business follows a common pattern: an event triggers a need to pay, that payment needs to be assessed and approved, then executed, reconciled, and reported. Whether it’s a vendor invoice, a contractor payment, or an employee expense, the underlying cycle is the same.

The AR side got attention first because, as Dan put it, money in is more interesting and more exciting than money out. Fair enough. But investor expectations have shifted. Growth still matters, but so does how you spend. The spotlight has moved to the AP side, and finance teams that mapped out their revenue processes years ago now need to do the same work on expenses.

Ben has been running an annual CFO tech stack survey for seven years, and the picture is clear: the back-office stack is getting more complex every year. Some solution categories now have 50 or more vendors competing for the same problem.

Dan sees a counter-motion building. Finance leaders are getting tired of logging into dozens of apps that don’t integrate cleanly with each other. He doesn’t think one app will rule them all, but he does expect convergence around functional areas like AP, AR, and cash flow management.

On the GL side, platforms like QBO and Xero are generalist by design. They’re built for mass adoption, which means they’re not deep in any one area. That’s exactly why both have thriving ecosystems of apps layered on top. For anything beyond basic approvals, the standard GL runs out of depth quickly.

The practical takeaway: think of your GL as the foundation, then be intentional about the point solutions you layer on top. Don’t collect tools. Build a stack that talks to each other and serves the workflows you actually need.

What finance teams said is hardest right now

• 48%: visibility before spend happens
• 22%: coding and data quality
• 19%: approvals slowing teams down

Dan closed with a single word that he said underpins everything they’d discussed: early.

Be early on approvals. Look at spend before it’s spent, not after. Be early on planning. Get into the forecasting conversation before it becomes a budget-vs-actual post-mortem. And be early on your systems and processes. Don’t build for where the business is. Build for where it’s going.

“Don’t build the process and the system and the tools for the present. Try to anticipate where it’s going in the future and build ahead to that.” — Dan Schonfeld

He also flagged a common budgeting mistake: taking last year's spend patterns and scaling them linearly. It's simple, it's easy to defend, and in his words, it's very wrong. Different types of spend contribute differently to growth. Zero-based budgeting is painful, but it's worth it, especially if you start four months before the budget needs to be approved.

Revenue will always be the headline number. But the companies that stay durable, the ones that hit their Rule of 40 targets and keep their boards confident, are the ones that treat the expense side with the same seriousness.

That doesn’t mean locking everything down. It means building the right approval flows for the right categories of spend. It means enriching your expense data so it’s actually useful for decision-making. And it means getting ahead of the growth curve instead of constantly catching up.

If your spend controls were built for the company you were a year ago, they’re already behind. The good news? You can start fixing that today.

See how ApprovalMax plugs into your GL and routes approvals by spend type, value, and context.