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HubSpot excels at collecting customer data and tracking sales pipeline activities. But when your high-growth company needs to make fast, informed decisions, the platform is not equipped to provide real-time insights.
Though a useful customer data tool, HubSpot doesn’t offer the full suite of SaaS-specific KPIs and sophisticated segmentation features. As a result, companies using HubSpot for SaaS reporting have to deal with several hurdles:
Grid eliminates complex data wrangling, providing accurate, comprehensive SaaS metrics so you can focus on strategic growth, not spreadsheets.
Your team may already use HubSpot’s built-in reports to monitor monthly leads and track email engagement metrics. If the platform is already embedded in your daily operations, it’s natural that your team would turn to it for SaaS analytics, too.
However, when it comes to building granular, investor-ready reports, HubSpot falls short in five critical ways.
HubSpot doesn’t provide key SaaS financial and operational KPIs. Want to calculate these metrics? You’ll need manual configurations that eat up valuable resources. For example, accurate ARR classification across bookings, churn, expansion, and contraction involves custom fields and complex workflows due to limited support for custom formulas.
Similarly, HubSpot does not natively support complex metrics such as LTV/CAC and cohort retention. As a result, users have to track down the data in their ERP or accounting software and then manually run the calculations in Excel. But since Excel is such a static, error-prone solution, ensuring each metric is accurate and up to date is a tall task.
In the end, marketing, sales, and finance teams have to spend hours consolidating data to gain critical visibility, and reporting to investors and board members is delayed.
HubSpot’s reporting stops at calculating the current value of your metrics no historical tracking or actionable insights. To evaluate customer retention over time or track the entire customer lifecycle, you’ll need custom tracking tables.
The platform’s dashboarding and custom reporting options are similarly limited. You’ll have to choose which dashboards and metrics to keep, and will need to make extensive upgrades to scale these functions which brings you right back to running your reporting in spreadsheets.
All those manual workarounds for comprehensive business intelligence? They take hours. By the time you’ve crunched the numbers, your source data has changed. The insights you worked so hard to uncover are already outdated.
Without real-time visibility into your data, you risk missing key revenue opportunities and postponing marketing campaigns, hiring initiatives, and expansion plans.
Reports in HubSpot are structured as flat data models with minimal granularity, significantly limiting your team’s data segmentation options.
Joining data across objects like Deals, Products, and Subscriptions often leads to data duplicates and discrepancies. This means you also can’t perform true cohort analysis to understand how customer segments expand over time, or spot when and why churn spikes.
Some users resort to building custom reports that mimic cohort analysis by grouping data based on date properties but as data accumulates, this method quickly proves unsustainable.
Using HubSpot for SaaS analytics requires substantial ongoing investment in platform capabilities, reporting capacity, and internal processes. While some advanced plans and features offer limited data joining, they’re not sufficient for comprehensive data analysis.
Beyond platform fees, you’re also diverting your engineering and operational bandwidth to manual data analysis and internal communications. This resource drain derails progress on your product roadmap, delaying your company’s long-term growth. Plus, if an error slips through the cracks, you risk basing critical business decisions on inaccurate data. This could lead to faulty forecasts that cause you to misallocate resources, and, in turn, miss your revenue targets.
Grid overcomes HubSpot reporting limitations by creating a centralized data hub that automatically provides actionable insights into critical performance KPIs.
The platform consolidates, audits, and analyzes your HubSpot, billing system, and ERP data to provide a holistic view of your business saving all the time and resources once spent on custom solutions. Here’s how.
Grid offers 150+ SaaS metrics out of the box, giving you instant visibility into your entire business performance no spreadsheets required. Industry-standard formulas ensure audit-ready reporting, with the option to customize calculations based on your analytics needs and board requirements.
By automatically tracking every complex metric and component, you can quickly respond to churn signals, growth opportunities, and product performance trends. With these insights, you can chart a faster path to growth with data-backed strategies.
Look at Branching Minds. Using Grid’s standardized ARR, NRR, and customer retention rates, the EdTech startup ensures financial reporting is always consistent and accurate, making informed decisions to fast-track growth.
Grid’s exploration tools provide both the big picture and the fine print. Want to dig deeper? You can seamlessly transition from high-level data overviews to granular performance insights. Drill into any KPI to see the exact customers and deals that make up the total. Empower team members to spin up custom data views with an intuitive UI without any dashboard or report caps.
With these capabilities, you no longer have to dedicate hours to tracking historical retention data or piecing together fragmented information to map the full customer lifecycle. You have these insights at your fingertips, so you can take early action on customers with strong expansion signals and diagnose retention risk.
As HubSpot users, Pearl used to devote hours to creating cross-object reports and standardizing metric definitions to answer investor questions about MRR or churn. With Grid, they build comprehensive, investor-friendly deliverables in minutes. The platform’s interface also makes it easy for anyone to build custom dashboards freeing up 15 hours every week on manual reporting.
Here’s what makes Grid different: it integrates directly with HubSpot, billing systems, and accounting software to create a single source of truth that's always accurate. As new data comes in, metrics and dashboards refresh automatically. Plus, the platform audits and syncs all data, flagging any discrepancies.
By eliminating reporting lag, you empower your team to act on your insights and keep everyone aligned. You also deliver quick answers to stakeholders, building trust in your business.
With Grid, the Hourly team shares customized board and investor dashboards with confidence in their metrics. Flexible permissions enable self-serve exploration directly within the platform, so they never have to worry about exporting potentially outdated reports.
With Grid, your teams can filter, group, and analyze your SaaS metrics to uncover patterns and performance at every layer of your business.
Easily segment your customers by custom and computed attributes like region and ACV, then drill into cohort trends to identify what drives growth, churn, or efficiency within specific groups. You can also group data on the fly using your own fields to analyze performance from any angle. Explore ARR by customer segment, cashflow by billing frequency, or bookings by sales rep all without any custom reports.
Take HRSoft. This high-growth company uses Grid to identify new customer groups for future expansion by filtering reports by timeframe or segment. With this flexible segmentation, they have reliable dashboards to inform all business decisions, big and small.
The best part? Grid provides comprehensive insights for just a fraction of the cost compared to HubSpot reporting. Without manual workarounds, you can save the time you used to spend calculating SaaS metrics and creating custom reporting. Plus, with secure access control, you can enable every stakeholder to explore ARR, CAC, and NDR on their own freeing your team from ad hoc reporting.
These savings compound as your business grows. As data volume increases, automated data mapping and auditing prevent errors that might impact your bottom line. With Grid, you have insights you can rely on without extra headcount or team resources.
If you’re spending hours tracking critical SaaS metrics through custom fields and reports, Grid can help. Book a demo today.
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We enhanced the Grid experience to give you more refined data segmentation capabilities, new integrations, and more hands-on support from our team.
Grid eliminates complex data wrangling, providing accurate, comprehensive SaaS metrics so you can focus on strategic growth, not spreadsheets.
