Faster Cash Flow and Expense Analysis
Carefully managing cash flow can make or break a company. Learn how Sourcegraph used Mosaic to gain real-time revenue and expense insights to strategically manage hypergrowth.
About Sourcegraph
San Francisco-based startup Sourcegraph builds universal code search for every developer and company so they can innovate faster. They help developers and companies with billions of lines of code create the software you use every day. Their mission, democratize code.
Sourcegraph’s customers include many of the world’s leading companies, such as Amazon, PayPal, Uber, Lyft, Yelp, Atlassian, and Indeed.
Much like their long-term company goals, the team at Sourcegraph aimed to democratize financial information to help guide future growth.
The Challenge
Faster Revenue Insights
After raising $50M at their Series C, Sourcegraph was looking for a faster way to analyze cash flow and expenses to strategically manage investments aligned to the company’s long-term growth goals.
As the company was growing quickly, the finance team needed visibility into spend by department and category as well as an understanding of the inflows and outflows of cash that impacted their burn.
The company typically only looked at those metrics on a quarterly basis. But after completing their Series B and Series C, they had multiple new investors and stakeholders on board and needed the information to be visible in real-time.
Sourcegraph is a fully remote company, and their accounting function is outsourced—both of which made it difficult to get real-time data in a meaningful format within stakeholder deadlines. With revenue, expense, and headcount data all in different systems, the finance team struggled to get accurate, consolidated, real-time insight into the financial indicators that mattered most.
Tasked with creating a long-term growth plan while maintaining a firm grasp on current performance, Sourcegraph’s finance team wanted a faster way to analyze expense trends and predict the burn rate based on aggressive hiring plans and R&D investment.
“We had a system, but that system would not scale with our ambitions. Everything related to finance strategy needed to be done manually. We needed a better way to crunch the numbers and offer insightful guidance to stakeholders."
The Solution
On-demand Cash Flow and Expense Reports
Shifting from manual data analysis to insightful discussions around asset investment and liquidity management would require a more forward-looking approach. The Sourcegraph team turned to Mosaic, a Strategic Finance Platform that connects teams and tools to automate financial insights.
Within days of integrating Mosaic, the Sourcegraph finance team reduced the time it took to pull ERP data from three days to minutes. Instead of routing key questions through the outsourced accounting firm, they could now gain insight from Xero and Salesforce data in real-time, from one centralized platform.
Mosaic’s powerful analysis canvas allows them to access consolidated revenue metrics in a single, easily accessible dashboard tailored to how they want to see their business. They can automatically calculate critical SaaS metrics such as ARR, ARR changes, and net burn and load them onto interactive reports to create a shareable view of their cash position at any time.
Analyzing expenses is also much simpler. With transaction-level data automatically pulled into pre-populated reports, the Sourcegraph team can easily view a consolidated list of department and account level expenses and quickly drill down to analyze variances. One-click and they can seamlessly triangulate the long-term impact of high-variance expenses like hiring 10 new engineers.
Benefits Experienced
The Impact
Cash Position Snapshot in Minutes
Before Mosaic, data was manually moved around between multiple teams and tools only to end up in tedious spreadsheets. Today, Sourcegraph’s finance team can quickly consolidate all data while automating cash flow and expense reporting, saving hundreds of hours on manual workflows. The time savings and powerful insights opened the path to more strategic initiatives like creating more aggressive hiring plans and planning investments into research on coding technology.
Sourcegraph believes in democratizing source code for developers to help everyone become more literate in technology. They now apply the same philosophy to their finances as they do their business—moving beyond manual work into a world where finance tools help accelerate scale.
"Mosaic is now my go-to tool to understand what's happening across our entire business. It allows me to confidently tell the story of our financial investments and cost from the P&L perspective by looking directly at real-time interactive dashboards and reports."
As Sourcegraph continues to focus on best-in-class code search tools, Mosaic can help them search for their most impactful business metrics.
Sourcegraph is now able to...
- Inefficient data handoffs
- Manual cash flow and expense analysis
- Strategic guidance on future investments
