What the Finance Function Actually Costs, Stage by Stage
Finance function cost as a percentage of revenue runs about 1.0% at the median, 0.66% at the top quartile and 1.5% at the bottom.
Those are large-company numbers, and that caveat is the whole page. Growth-stage companies between $1M and $20M in revenue sit well above that band. The gap is structural, not a discipline problem.
The published band, with the dates attached
Most pages on this topic publish APQC’s 2018 median next to APQC’s 2025 top quartile as though the two came from one dataset. They didn’t. Here’s the series instead, each row tied to the report that published it.
| Reporting date | Top performers | Median | Bottom performers | Sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 8, 2025 | 0.66% | 1.0% | 1.5% | not stated |
| January 2, 2020 | 0.56% | not stated | 1.6% | not stated |
| January 8, 2018 | 0.7% or less | 1.2% | 1.8% or more | 1,515 organizations |
| June 9, 2017 | 0.63% | not stated | 2.05% | not stated |
| May 11, 2015 | 0.6% or less | not stated | 2% or more | 543 organizations |
Every row is APQC data as reported by CFO.com, on January 8, 2025, January 2, 2020, January 8, 2018, June 9, 2017 and May 11, 2015.
The useful read isn’t the median. It’s the compression. The bottom quartile improved from 2% or worse in 2015 to 1.5% in 2025, while the top quartile drifted the wrong way, from 0.6% to 0.66%. Both ends moved toward the middle. The cheap wins at the bottom have mostly been taken already.
The size effect, which is most of the story
APQC’s 2018 cut is the cleanest published evidence that scale, not discipline, drives the variance. Among top performers only, organizations above $1 billion in revenue ran finance at 0.4% of revenue against 0.9% for those below $1 billion, in CFO.com’s January 8, 2018 report covering 1,515 organizations.
Same quartile. Same definition of excellence. More than double the ratio.
Top-quartile execution below $1 billion still lands at roughly 2.25 times the ratio of top-quartile execution above it. The curve is steep, and a $10M company sits far further down it than a $900M one. That’s why finance function benchmarks by stage are more useful to you than any cross-industry median, and why this page is the quantitative companion to our finance operations by funding stage overview.
One figure you won’t find here. A sub-$1 billion band circulates widely on aggregator blogs, and we couldn’t trace it to any primary APQC or Hackett Group publication, so it’s excluded. The verified 2018 split above does the same job honestly.
A second research house, the same answer
ScottMadden’s 2024 Financial Shared Services Benchmarking Study, presented in November 2024 across 103 shared services organizations, measures the same thing in a different unit. Total finance cost per $1,000 of revenue runs $9.13 at the median, $6.64 or less at the top quartile, and $16.66 or more at the bottom.
Convert them. $9.13 per $1,000 is 0.913%. $6.64 becomes 0.664%. $16.66 becomes 1.666%.
Now set those against APQC’s 2025 figures of 1.0%, 0.66% and 1.5%. Two research houses, two samples, two methods, one answer. That cross-validation is worth saying out loud, because it tells you the enterprise band is real rather than an artifact of one survey panel. It also tells you the band is real for enterprises.
What that leaves for a growth-stage company
No research house publishes a $1M to $20M finance-only cut. The closest available proxy is G&A as a percentage of revenue by stage, and the current best source is SaaS Capital’s 2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS Companies, published June 10, 2026 from a survey of more than 1,000 private companies fielded in March 2026. Median G&A is 15% of ARR, up from 14% the year before, and the $3M to $5M ARR band also sits at 15%.
G&A is wider than finance. Benchmarkit’s 2025 SaaS Performance Metrics defines the category as covering finance, human resources and the CEO, and notes that early on the figure runs higher because the CEO and the head of finance both sit inside it.
One caution before you use any G&A number. Benchmarkit’s 2025 operating-expense split shows sales and marketing at 37%, R&D at 34% and G&A at 24%, which sums to 95%. That’s a share of operating expense, not a share of revenue. SaaS Capital’s 15% is explicitly a percentage of ARR. Stack the two figures in one paragraph and you’ve compared different denominators, which is exactly what several pages ranking for this term currently do.
So here’s the honest derivation, offered as a derivation and not as a published band. If G&A runs 15% of ARR, and finance is a meaningful minority of that category alongside HR, legal, executive comp and facilities, then finance function cost at a growth-stage company lands in the low single digits of revenue rather than under 1%. Nobody publishes the finance share of G&A, so we aren’t going to invent one. What you can take to your board is simpler. A growth-stage company measuring itself against 1% will conclude it’s failing when it is not.
Two worked examples, line by line
Published bands are ratios. Budgets are line items. Neither example below is a survey result, and neither is a quote from any provider. Both are illustrative builds, so you can watch the ratio assemble itself.
A bootstrapped $5M services company. Single LLC, operating in two states, no audit.
| Line item | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| Outsourced accounting and monthly close | $42,000 |
| Business tax preparation and state filings | $14,000 |
| Payroll platform and processing | $9,000 |
| Accounting, AP and expense software | $11,000 |
| Internal finance coordinator, 0.5 FTE fully loaded | $45,000 |
| Allocated overhead | $4,000 |
| Total | $125,000 |
$125,000 against $5,000,000 is 2.5% of revenue. Measured against an enterprise median of 1.0%, this company looks like a bottom-quartile disaster. It isn’t. It’s a $5M company.
A Series B SaaS company at $20M ARR. Two legal entities, payroll in nine states, first financial statement audit, active R&D credit claim.
| Line item | Annual cost |
|---|---|
| VP Finance, fully loaded | $235,000 |
| Controller, fully loaded | $185,000 |
| Two accountants, fully loaded | $200,000 |
| Outsourced technical accounting and close support | $75,000 |
| Independent audit fee | $85,000 |
| Business tax and multi-state filings | $55,000 |
| R&D credit study | $20,000 |
| 409A valuation | $6,000 |
| Payroll and equity administration | $34,000 |
| Finance software stack | $70,000 |
| Allocated overhead, four FTEs | $32,000 |
| Total | $997,000 |
Just under $1M on $20M of revenue is roughly 5.0%. Five times the enterprise median, and entirely defensible for a company in that position. The audit line alone is 0.43% of revenue, which is more than a top-quartile enterprise spends on its whole finance function. For scale, FERF’s 16th Annual Audit Fee Survey, published April 14, 2026 on fiscal 2024 data, puts audit fees at 0.116% of revenue for companies between $1 billion and $5 billion and 0.057% for companies above $5 billion. A $20M company paying $85,000 sits at roughly four times the mid-cap rate. Audit cost behaves like a fixed charge, and it lands hardest on the smallest company required to carry one. If that step is in your next eighteen months, the Series B finance operations playbook covers the sequencing.
How the Benchmark Is Built, and What It Leaves Out
The formula is total finance cost divided by total business entity revenue, multiplied by 100. Nothing in it normalizes for size, industry or complexity.
CFO.com’s January 8, 2018 write-up states the calculation plainly, and the plainness is the problem. Every adjustment is yours to make. Your number is only comparable if your scope matches the scope the benchmark used, and mis-scoping is the most common reason a self-computed figure refuses to line up with the band.
What’s inside the number
APQC’s definition covers “personnel, systems, overhead, and any other costs necessary for day-to-day operation” of the finance organization. The July 20, 2015 composition breakdown, drawn from 562 large global organizations, splits that into personnel at 62%, overhead at 15%, systems at roughly 11%, and outsourced costs making up the remainder. The line worth keeping is this one: “62 cents of every dollar spent today to operate the finance group is spent on people.”
Later reporting puts personnel higher. The June 9, 2017 report says personnel costs “typically account for about two-thirds of the total cost,” while the May 11, 2015 report puts labor at roughly 60% on average. The honest statement is a range of 60% to 67% across the series, attributed to each report, rather than one averaged figure no publisher actually printed.
What belongs inside your own calculation:
- People. Salaries, bonuses and fully loaded benefits for every accounting and finance employee, including fractional and part-time.
- Outsourced scope. Bookkeeping, accounting and controller fees paid to any outside firm.
- Tax and assurance. Business tax prep, state and local filings, tax advisory, and independent audit, review or compilation fees.
- Specialist projects. R&D credit studies, 409A valuations, technical accounting memos, and ASC 606 or ASC 842 implementation work. These multiply fast after a priced round, and the Series A finance operations playbook maps which ones arrive when.
- Software. General ledger or ERP, AP automation, expense management, close management, billing and revenue recognition tools, plus the finance seats on any shared platform.
- Payroll processing fees. The cost of running payroll, not the payroll itself.
- Allocated overhead for finance headcount, including occupancy, utilities and IT support, plus recruiting and training for finance roles.
What sits outside it
This is the part competing pages skip, and it’s where self-computed figures actually go wrong. Outside the number:
- Legal fees and in-house counsel, even though they share a G&A parent account
- HR, recruiting and people operations for non-finance roles
- Facilities and rent for the whole company
- Insurance premiums, including D&O
- The CEO’s time and compensation, even when the CEO is running the forecast
- Board and investor relations costs
- The payroll itself, as distinct from the cost of processing it
- Banking, merchant processing and interest expense, which are cost of capital
- Collections write-offs and bad debt
The CEO exclusion matters more than it looks. Benchmarkit notes that at early stage the CEO’s cost is captured inside G&A, which is one reason the G&A line and the finance function line diverge so sharply at small scale. If a founder is personally running the close, the published benchmark understates that company’s true finance cost, because the most expensive person doing the work isn’t counted anywhere.
Three costs no published band captures
- Coordination across vendors. A company running a bookkeeper, a separate tax CPA, an R&D credit specialist, a 409A provider, a payroll bureau and a fractional CFO pays real money in handoffs, duplicated data gathering, and reconciling advisors who disagree with each other. It shows up on no invoice and in no benchmark.
- Rework and cleanup. Deferred accounting hygiene converts into a one-time catch-up charge at the next diligence event. That charge almost never gets booked to the finance function in the year the sloppiness happened.
- The cost of a slow close. A fifteen-day close and a forty-day close can cost exactly the same. They don’t produce the same decisions.
Finance Headcount and Revenue per Finance Employee
APQC puts finance staffing at 78.6 FTEs per $1 billion of revenue at the median, 45.5 for top performers and 102.1 at the bottom.
Finance team headcount benchmarks are easier to compute than cost ratios, because headcount is unambiguous and cost allocation isn’t. They also break more obviously when you push them down to growth-stage scale.
The enterprise ratio, and where it breaks
Those three figures come from CFO.com’s December 11, 2024 report, which describes bottom-quartile organizations as needing “more than twice as many FTEs to carry out the same work.” ScottMadden’s 2024 study of 103 shared services organizations reports a tighter shape on the same measure: 65 finance FTEs per $1 billion at the median, 33 at the top quartile and 100 at the bottom, with top performers at 25.4 against 76.7 for the comparison group.
Now run the median down to your scale. 78.6 FTEs per $1 billion implies 0.79 finance employees at a $10M company.
The ratio doesn’t extrapolate downward.
You can’t hire 0.79 of a controller, and the compliance floor doesn’t shrink with revenue. Someone still closes the month, files in every state where you run payroll, maintains the cap table and answers the auditor. The published ratio describes a world where those fixed costs spread across a very large denominator. Yours don’t.
What growth-stage companies actually staff
Aleph’s analysis of 218 Y Combinator B2B companies from Winter 2015 through Spring 2025, covering 3,597 finance FTE records across 2,075 unique titles, is the most detailed published picture of finance headcount at this scale.
| Company size | Average finance team | Finance share of company |
|---|---|---|
| 5 to 50 FTEs | 0.35 | 1.3% |
| 51 to 250 FTEs | 5.29 | 3.5% |
| 251 to 500 FTEs | 10.86 | 2.9% |
| 500+ FTEs | 49.2 | not stated |
Two findings matter more than the averages. Roughly 17% of companies in the 5 to 50 employee band have any internal finance FTE at all, and most make their first full-time finance hire late in the 30 to 50 FTE range. Watch the share column too. Finance peaks at 3.5% of headcount in the 51 to 250 band, then falls back to 2.9%. The scale curve shows up in people as well as in dollars.
By revenue, CJ Gustafson’s Mostly Metrics analysis of how finance teams scale puts companies below $10M in revenue and under 75 employees at “the outsourced equivalent of 1.5 to 2 full time employees,” rising to “minimally 3, scaling to ~15 people” between $10M and $75M. He sequences the hires as CFO, Controller and FP&A Manager first, then Accounting Manager, FP&A Analyst and Payroll Specialist.
Read together, those two datasets answer the headcount question honestly. A $10M company typically runs the equivalent of two to three finance people, and at least one of them is usually outsourced. Which seat to fill first is a separate decision, covered in our guides on outsourced bookkeeping versus an in-house bookkeeper and when to hire a CFO by stage.
Revenue per finance employee as the cross-check
Total revenue divided by finance FTE count. It’s the inverse of the ratio above, and it’s far easier to pull off a growth-stage org chart than a cost percentage is.
For the denominator question, SaaS Capital’s 2026 Revenue Per Employee Benchmarks, published July 30, 2026 from the same survey of more than 1,000 companies, reports an overall median of $141,125 per employee, up from $129,724 the previous year. At $1M to $3M ARR the median is $109,644. At $5M to $10M ARR it’s $152,295 for equity-backed companies and $177,240 for bootstrapped ones, and the report states that bootstrapped companies show higher revenue per employee at every level of ARR. Benchmarkit’s 2026 SaaS and AI-Native Metrics reports a $175K median ARR per employee, up 17% year over year, and its 2025 report shows $200,000 per FTE in the $50M to $100M ARR segment rising to $300,000 above $100M.
Cost per finance FTE is the other half of the picture. APQC’s 2017 cost-per-FTE figures put total cost per finance FTE at $82,544 or less for top performers and $158,718 or more for the bottom quartile across 623 firms, with personnel cost per $1,000 of revenue at $3.66 or less for the top quartile against $12.67 or more for the bottom across 755 firms. A 3.5 times spread on personnel cost tells you what the headline ratio is really measuring. Staffing model and compensation, mostly.
Why Your Number Sits Above or Below the Band
Structural factors explain most of the distance between your ratio and the published band, and revenue scale explains more of it than everything else combined.
These are explanations, not excuses. Work through them in order before you conclude anything about your team.
What pushes the ratio up
- Revenue scale. The dominant factor. Top performers above $1 billion ran 0.4% against 0.9% for top performers below it, in APQC’s 2018 size cut. Compliance, systems and senior finance leadership behave like fixed costs. Revenue is the only variable in the denominator.
- Multi-entity structure. Every legal entity adds a ledger, intercompany eliminations, a consolidation step and often its own tax return. Two entities isn’t twice the work of one, but it’s meaningfully more.
- Multi-state footprint. Payroll registration, state income and franchise filings, and economic nexus sales tax obligations scale with the number of states, not with revenue. Nine states at $20M is a heavier load per dollar than nine states at $200M.
- An audit requirement. The audit fee data above behaves like a fixed charge. It’s the single largest step function in a growth-stage finance budget, and it usually arrives with a debt covenant or a Series B.
- Transaction volume relative to revenue. Forty thousand small transactions at $12M carries a very different AP, AR and reconciliation load than four hundred large ones at the same revenue.
- Acquisitive growth. Purchase accounting, opening balance sheets, system migrations and integration close work are finance costs that generate no recurring revenue.
- Project and usage-based revenue. Percentage-of-completion, usage metering and complex ASC 606 arrangements cost more to account for than clean subscription billing.
- A recent ERP migration. A one-time spike that should be annotated in your plan, never averaged into the run rate.
- Weak master data. The Hackett Group reported on March 26, 2025 that organizations with leading master data management see a 45% decrease in finance costs and a 3X increase in staff productivity.
What pushes the ratio down
- A clean single-entity, single-state structure. One ledger, one state filing set, no intercompany eliminations and no consolidation step.
- Subscription revenue on a simple pricing model. Straightforward ASC 606 treatment, predictable billing, fewer revenue memos to write and defend.
- A mature, automated close. The work still happens, it just takes fewer hours and fewer people to produce the same statements.
- No audit requirement. The largest single step function in a growth-stage finance budget never arrives.
- A stable system of record. Three years without a platform change means no migration project sitting inside the run rate.
None of those are free. Each one is a structural choice somebody made, usually early, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with finance cost. A single-entity structure is a tax and liability decision. A simple pricing model is a go-to-market decision. That’s worth remembering before you treat a low ratio as a management achievement, because most of what produced it was decided somewhere other than the finance function.
Bootstrapped versus equity-backed, the split nobody publishes
This is the least-covered driver on the list, and for a lot of readers it’s the one that resolves the whole question.
SaaS Capital’s 2026 Spending Benchmarks, published June 10, 2026, reports that bootstrapped companies spend 11% of ARR on general and administrative costs against 18% for equity-backed companies. The report frames the same gap in relative terms, saying equity-backed companies spend “70% more on sales, 64% more on general and administrative costs.” Eleven multiplied by 1.64 is 18.0, so the two framings reconcile.
The explanation belongs to the publisher, not to us. In SaaS Capital’s own words: “One possible explanation for why equity-backed companies spend more is the need for a robust administrative and finance team to support reporting requirements to investors, including regular board meetings and audits.”
Read that again. The gap is a reporting obligation, not inefficiency. A board, an audit committee, quarterly investor reporting, a cap table that needs 409A maintenance, covenant compliance and a permanent readiness standard for the next round are all real finance work a bootstrapped company of identical size simply never has to do. The same report puts median total spend at 96% of ARR for bootstrapped companies against 101% for equity-backed, with 83% of bootstrapped companies profitable or within two points of breakeven against 52% of equity-backed ones, and median growth of 20% against 25%.
The planning implication is specific. Benchmark a bootstrapped company against a venture-backed peer set and it will look efficient when it may just be under-resourced on reporting. Benchmark an equity-backed company against bootstrapped peers and it will look wasteful when it’s buying board-grade reporting. Pick the comparison set before you read the gap, the same discipline that makes burn multiple by SaaS stage a usable number instead of a scary one.
How to Use the Benchmark When You Plan Next Year
Four moves turn a published band into a budget. Compute your number honestly, pick a comparison set, read the gap, then budget the steps.
Compute your own number honestly
Pull twelve months of actuals and sum the inclusion list above. The errors show up in roughly this order of frequency:
- Counting only the outsourced invoice and forgetting internal salaries, or the reverse
- Missing the finance software stack, which is scattered across five or six GL accounts and three corporate cards
- Forgetting allocated overhead on finance headcount
- Including legal, insurance or the CEO because they share a G&A parent account
- Running a trailing-twelve-month cost against a forward revenue figure
- Treating a one-time ERP implementation or audit-readiness project as run rate
Error five deserves a flag of its own. Use the same period for numerator and denominator. In a company growing 40% a year, mismatching them by two quarters can move the ratio by a third, which is a bigger swing than most of the structural drivers you’d spend a week arguing about.
Pick the comparison set, then read the gap as a diagnosis
Priority order: your revenue band, then your funding model, then your structural complexity, then your industry. Revenue band comes first because the size effect dominates everything else, and a $12M company comparing itself to a cross-industry median without translating for scale is really just measuring its own size.
A gap above the band isn’t automatically bad. Walk the structural drivers in order. If multi-entity, multi-state, audit and transaction volume explain the gap, your number is correct, and the real question becomes whether the structure is worth what it costs you.
A gap below the band isn’t automatically good either. Under-spending on finance surfaces later as a cleanup bill at diligence, a restatement, a missed credit, or a close so slow the forecast is stale before anyone reads it. The published band has no column for risk. If none of the drivers explain your gap, you have a staffing-model or systems problem, and the outsourced accounting versus in-house comparison is where that tradeoff gets priced out properly.
Set a trajectory, then budget the step functions
The right planning posture isn’t “hit 1.5% next year.” It’s “hold finance cost roughly flat in dollars while revenue grows,” which converts the ratio on its own. What happens without that discipline is documented. Finance operations costs rose for the first time in decades in 2023, with the typical global company up 7.5% while digital world-class companies cut costs by 1.3%, as CFO.com reported on July 13, 2023 from Hackett Group data.
Growth-stage finance cost doesn’t rise smoothly, either. It steps. The first audit, the first payroll registration outside your home state, the second entity, the first ERP migration and the first full-time controller each add a discrete block. Name the ones you expect in the next eighteen months and put them in the plan as separate lines, so a step function doesn’t read to your board as a cost overrun.
Then aim at the right outcome. The Hackett Group reported on June 9, 2025 that Digital World Class finance organizations “operate at 45% lower cost as a percentage of revenue,” need up to 42% fewer full-time equivalents, run close cycles 35% to 57% shorter than peers, and “spend 68% more time on forward-looking analysis and strategic insights.” That last figure is the one to plan against. The point of a lower cost ratio isn’t the saving. It’s the reallocation, from processing transactions to producing the reporting your board actually uses, which is where SaaS metrics dashboard work starts earning its keep.
How Indinero Fits the Benchmark Math
Three honest points, none of which require a price.
The benchmark is a total, and most growth-stage companies can’t see their own. The costs sit across payroll, professional fees, software subscriptions and a dozen one-off project invoices. A company running bookkeeping with one vendor, tax with a second, R&D credit with a third, 409A with a fourth and fractional CFO advisory with a fifth has no single line to look at. Consolidating scope under one engagement doesn’t only change what you pay. It makes the number computable in the first place.
The scope ladder moves with the stage, and switching firms at each rung is itself a cost. The structural drivers arrive in a predictable order. Multi-state payroll, then multi-entity, then audit readiness, then board-grade reporting. A firm that can add GAAP close and accounting, business tax, R&D credit, 409A valuation, payroll and fractional CFO advisory inside the same engagement absorbs those steps without a transition. Indinero has run that model with continuous operations since 2009, for 500+ regular customers, across bootstrapped, PE-backed, LLC, S-corp and multi-entity companies, not only VC-backed Delaware C-corps. Pricing starts at $750/mo. The team also works inside the stack you already have, including QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Bill.com, Ramp, Brex, Gusto and Stripe, which matters on this page because a forced platform migration is one of the step functions that spikes a cost ratio for a year.
The audit line stays outside, by design. indinero doesn’t perform financial statement audits, reviews or quality-of-earnings reports, because independence rules bar the firm that keeps the books from auditing them. Those fees belong in your benchmark number and they belong with an independent firm. On a page about what things cost, saying so is the point.
Your finance spend isn’t a grade. It’s a description of the structure you’ve chosen and the stage you’re standing in.
Frequently asked questions
A few questions come up every time a growth-stage team runs this calculation for the first time. The short answers below each trace back to the named, dated source they come from, and none of them need a price quote to be useful. If your own number still doesn’t fit after you’ve worked through it, reach out for a free consultation and we’ll look at it with you.
What percentage of revenue should a growth-stage company spend on finance?
Growth-stage finance function cost typically lands in the low single digits of revenue, above the 1.0% median APQC reported by CFO.com on January 8, 2025. No research house publishes a finance-only band for $1M to $20M companies, and that APQC median comes from a large-enterprise sample. Size drives the gap, not discipline. APQC’s 2018 cut, also reported by CFO.com, put top performers above $1 billion at 0.4% of revenue against 0.9% for top performers below it.
Does outsourcing change the number, or just move it between line items?
Outsourcing reclassifies the cost first and reduces it only second, because APQC’s definition counts outsourced fees inside total finance function cost alongside personnel and software. A pure invoice swap moves the dollars between line items and leaves the ratio where it was. The total moves only when the staffing model changes, software leaves the stack, or a hire is avoided. Putting bookkeeping, accounting, tax and CFO advisory in one indinero engagement usually widens coverage without moving the cost line the same way.
What counts as finance function cost, and what belongs on another line?
Finance function cost covers accounting and finance payroll, outsourced accounting fees, tax and audit fees, finance software, and allocated overhead on finance headcount. Legal, HR, facilities, insurance, the CEO’s time, the payroll itself and interest expense all sit outside it, even when they share a G&A parent account. Audit fees stay inside the number but belong with an independent firm, because independence rules bar the firm that keeps your books, indinero included, from auditing them.
How many finance people should a company at $10M in revenue have?
A company at $10M in revenue typically runs the equivalent of two to three finance people, and at least one is usually outsourced. Mostly Metrics puts companies under $10M at the outsourced equivalent of 1.5 to 2 full-time employees, rising to a minimum of 3 between $10M and $75M. The enterprise ratio doesn’t extrapolate down. APQC’s median of 78.6 finance FTEs per $1 billion, reported by CFO.com on December 11, 2024, implies 0.79 people at $10M, and you can’t hire 0.79 of a controller.
Why does the benchmark read so differently for bootstrapped and equity-backed companies?
SaaS Capital’s June 10, 2026 spending benchmarks put equity-backed companies at 18% of ARR on general and administrative costs against 11% for bootstrapped ones. SaaS Capital’s own stated explanation is the administrative and finance staffing needed to support investor reporting, including regular board meetings and audits. That’s a reporting obligation, not inefficiency. Benchmark a bootstrapped company against venture-backed peers and it looks efficient when it’s under-resourced on reporting, which is why indinero works across bootstrapped, PE-backed and multi-entity companies.
