SaaS vertical · overview

The SaaS vertical adapts SellioCRM to a subscription business: accounts with a hierarchy and a consolidated snapshot, renewal as a pipeline of its own with GRR and NRR, explainable account health, and a revenue leak queue. It is optional and ships turned off. An administrator turns it on in Settings, under Verticals, or with the Turn on SaaS button on the screen itself.

A subscription business is measured differently. Closing the deal is not the end of anything: renewal is a sale you have to win again every year, a customer can grow or shrink without ever switching vendors, and a good share of the revenue leaks away quietly, in a discount that went past its approval limit or in usage nobody billed. The SaaS vertical exists to give those four things a name, a number and a work queue.

While the vertical is off, nothing changes in your CRM: the menu does not show the item and the SaaS screen tells you the vertical is off. Turning it on is purely additive, and it changes no pipeline, field or automation you already use.

How to turn it on

1. Open Settings and go to Verticals.
2. Turn on the SaaS vertical.
3. Open the SaaS item in the menu. If you prefer the shortcut, go straight to the SaaS screen: when the vertical is off it shows the notice and, for administrators, the Turn on SaaS button.
4. If you are not an administrator, the screen asks you to talk to one. Only people who can configure the organization are able to turn it on.

The four tabs

The SaaS screen has four tabs, and each one answers a different question a subscription business asks every day.

• Accounts: who your customers are, how they roll up into group, account and division, and the consolidated snapshot of each one with MRR, Pipeline (ARR), Health, Open tickets and Seats used / purchased.
• Renewals: what is coming up for renewal, what stage it is in, what the Baseline is, what the Outcome is and, above all, the Difference between the two. GRR and NRR for the period sit at the top.
• Health: each account's score with the Computed value from the model and the Manually adjusted value side by side, along with the Adjustment reason, the Band, the Top risk and the history.
• Revenue leak: the queue of open findings, with Kind, Amount, Severity and Detected on, plus the total amount at risk.

Why ARR and MRR are not typed-in fields

In the SaaS vertical a subscription is treated as a series of amendments: every change of plan, seat count or price is recorded with an effective date and an amount. Today's ARR is not a number somebody filled in, it is the result of applying those amendments up to today. That is what makes the number auditable: when someone asks why ARR moved, you point at the amendment that produced it instead of hunting for whoever edited the field.

Renewal is a pipeline of its own

Mixing renewals into new business ruins both numbers: the rep looks like a quota crusher on revenue that was already yours, and retention drops off the radar. That is why renewal has its own stage, likelihood and outcome. And the figure that matters is not how much the renewal was worth, it is the Difference between the Baseline, which is what was at risk, and the Outcome, which is what you kept. A positive difference is expansion, a negative one is contraction, and that is where GRR and NRR come from.

Health you can explain

The health score combines dimensions such as adoption, usage, support, engagement, finance and relationship, each with its own weight, and it records how much each one contributed, along with the Top risk, which is the weakest dimension. When someone on the team disagrees with the model and adjusts the number by hand, the adjustment does not erase the calculation: both appear together with the Adjustment reason. A score nobody can audit is a score nobody trusts.

Revenue leak is a queue, not a report

Usage above the included allowance that nobody billed, a discount past the approval limit, an active subscription with no invoice, a price step that never went up, a renewal without the uplift it was supposed to carry: every finding enters the queue with an amount, a severity and a date. A finding from March is money you can still recover; a finding that only surfaces in the annual audit is a story. That is why the tab is a work queue with a status, not a year-end report.

What the screen does and what it does not do

The four tabs are read-only: they show what is already recorded in your organization. Recording the accounts, the subscriptions and their amendments, the renewals, the health calculations and the leak findings happens outside this screen, in the work of connecting your subscription data to the CRM. When a tab looks empty, that is almost always why: the vertical is on, but there is no data loaded yet for it to show.

• No account registered: the Accounts tab has not received any accounts yet.
• No renewal recorded: there are no terms on file for the period, which is why GRR and NRR may show no value.
• No health computed: the score has not been calculated for any account yet.
• No open leak: either nothing was detected, or everything that was found has already been handled.

The customer portal

The same account has an outside view. The customer portal is a page your customer opens without a password: they type the email you authorized, receive a link that is valid for 30 minutes and land on a page showing their own account — the subscriptions on file and the open tickets. Nothing else, and nothing from any other account.

Authorizing an email is an administrative act, because it hands someone outside your company the subscription and the support history of an account. The Customer portal tab shows the list to the whole team — knowing who can see an account is part of serving it — but the Authorize and Revoke buttons appear only for people who can configure the organization, and both actions are written to the audit trail.

1. Open the SaaS screen and go to the Customer portal tab.
2. Choose the account.
3. Type the person’s email, optionally a name, and pick Viewer or Administrator. The role is recorded and shown on the panel; today it grants no extra power, because the portal is read-only for everybody.
4. Send the person the portal address shown at the top of the tab. That address carries your organization, never the account: the account is proven by the email that receives the link.
5. To cut access, use Revoke. It takes effect on the next click, because every page load revalidates the list.

What the portal does not show is as deliberate as what it shows. The health score and the risk level stay inside the CRM: they are your team’s judgment about that customer, and a customer reading Risk: high on their own page would be reading a conversation that was not addressed to them. The portal is read-only: to change a subscription or answer a ticket, the customer talks to their usual contact.

Where to go next

Each tab has an article of its own, with the step by step and the meaning of every column: Accounts and hierarchy, Subscriptions and ARR, Renewal with GRR and NRR, Account health, and Revenue leak.

Open this article inside the system →