Free B2B SaaS Financial Model Template

Every B2B SaaS founder builds a financial model twice. The first one is a spreadsheet you found online, adapted at 11pm the night before an investor call. The second one is the model you build after someone senior pulls it apart in front of you.

This is an attempt to save you the first one.

Most templates you will find are built for a US company raising a US round. The growth benchmarks assume a market with ten times the density. The employer on-costs do not exist. The revenue drivers assume a self-serve motion that almost no B2B SaaS company in this region actually runs. You end up with a file that technically works and that you do not quite trust, which is the worst of both.

What a financial model actually has to answer

Four questions. Everything else is decoration.

How much money do you have left. What are you going to do with it. What do you expect back. And what happens if you are wrong.

If a tab in your model does not feed one of those four answers, delete it. A model is not a record of your business, that is what your accounts are for. A model is an argument about the future that someone else has to be able to check.

Build revenue from leads, not from a growth rate

The commonest failure in a startup model is a revenue line that grows at a fixed percentage every month. It looks confident and it is unfalsifiable, which is exactly why an investor distrusts it.

Build up instead. Start with qualified leads, apply the conversion rate you actually observe in your CRM, get new customers, add them to a customer base that also churns, and let MRR fall out of the customer count. Now every number in your revenue line is attached to something you can be held to, and something you can improve.

Run your sales motions separately. Inbound, outbound, and partner or reseller behave nothing like each other. Partner deals in the Philippines convert several times better than inbound and take three times as long to stand up. Averaging them into one blended conversion rate hides the only decision on the sheet that matters, which is where the next marketing dollar goes.

Organise costs by initiative, not by category

Your accountant needs costs grouped as Salaries, Marketing and Rent. That grouping is useless for planning, because it tells you what you spent and nothing about what you expected back.

Group by initiative instead. Not "Marketing, 18,000 a month" but "Paid search in Singapore and Malaysia, 18,000 a month, expected to produce 25 qualified leads a month". Now the line has a claim attached to it. Three months later you can check the claim, and the conversation stops being about whether marketing is too expensive and starts being about whether it worked.

This is also the only version of a cost plan you can defend in a board meeting. Every line has an owner, a number and a date.

The three numbers an investor will recalculate

Assume the person reading your model rebuilds these three themselves. They will.

CAC has to include salaries. Campaign spend plus the fully loaded cost of everyone in sales and marketing, founders included if that is where their time goes. A CAC built on ad spend alone will typically understate the real figure by a factor of three, and it is the first thing that gets recalculated.

LTV has to be capped. Lifetime as one divided by monthly churn gives a customer at 1.5 percent monthly churn a 66 month life. Nobody believes a 66 month life for a seed-stage company that has existed for 18 months. Cap it at 36 months. Your ratios will drop and they will survive contact with diligence.

LTV has to use gross profit, not revenue. Net your hosting, support and third party costs first. An LTV built on revenue inflates every ratio downstream of it, and it is obvious to anyone who has read a hundred of these.

Do these three and your LTV:CAC will look worse than the templates you downloaded. It will also be the number you can hold in a room.

The on-cost nobody models

If you are hiring in this region, salary is not the cost of a hire. Employer statutory contributions run roughly 14 percent in Malaysia once EPF, SOCSO and EIS are counted, around 17 percent in Singapore for a local employee on CPF, roughly 12 percent in the Philippines across SSS, PhilHealth and Pag-IBIG, about 11 percent in Indonesia on BPJS, and around 5 percent in Thailand.

A 12 person plan modelled on base salary alone is understating payroll by more than a month of runway. Verify the current rates against your own entity before you commit them to a board pack, because they move.

And model the ramp. An account executive starting in month 3 with a 90 day ramp costs you from month 3 and should not appear in your revenue drivers until month 6. Founders model the cost and forget the delay, then wonder why the plan slipped a quarter.

Three scenarios, or you are not modelling

A single line is a forecast. Three lines is a model.

Base case is the plan you are committing to. Conservative is what an investor will ask you to show them, so build it before they ask: 20 percent slower on revenue, 10 percent heavier on cost is a reasonable default. Optimistic is for capacity planning, and you should never lead a pitch with it.

The useful output is not the revenue line. It is the month in each scenario when you run out of cash, and the month you therefore have to start raising. A seed round in Southeast Asia takes four to six months from first meeting to money in the bank. If your conservative case has nine months of runway, you are already raising, whether you have admitted it or not.

Five ways these models go wrong

Benchmark growth rates. 15 percent month on month MRR growth is exceptional anywhere. Build on your own observed rates.

Cost without consequence. Every spend line needs an expected outcome recorded before the money goes out, or you can never tell whether it worked.

Only the good case. Experienced investors ask for the downside. Not having one reads as not having thought about it.

Revenue-based LTV and ad-spend-only CAC. Covered above. These two together can make a struggling business look efficient.

Letting it go stale. A model three months out of date is worse than no model, because it gives you false confidence. Either set a hard monthly cadence to drop actuals in, or move the model somewhere that pulls actuals from your books automatically and stops being a spreadsheet problem.

Get the template

We built the model described above and it is free. Seven linked tabs, 24 months, driver-based revenue, initiative-based costs, SEA employer on-costs, three-scenario runway, capped-lifetime unit economics with written verdicts against benchmark, and a one-page investor summary with a USD column.

It ships populated with a worked example of a seed-stage SEA B2B SaaS company, and that example runs out of money. Base case, 14 months of cash and start raising by month 5. Conservative case, 10 months and start raising now. Month 12 LTV:CAC of 2.7 against a benchmark of 3.0, and the sheet says so in words rather than leaving you to work it out. A template where the example passes every test teaches you nothing about what failing looks like.

Get the B2B SaaS financial model template

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