How Branching Minds achieves 100% reporting accuracy to inform leadership decisions

About

Branching Minds helps schools streamline and personalize learning through a comprehensive Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) solution that identifies and supports student needs. Since 2013, Branching Minds has worked with nearly 300,000 teachers and 545 districts across 38 states, improving outcomes for more than 2 million students.

Challenge

Branching Minds needed granular financial reports — not more spreadsheets

Over the last 10 years, Branching Minds has grown rapidly, securing a successful funding round in 2024. With this growth came increasingly complex financial reporting needs. Specifically, their Senior Vice President of Finance, Tyler Hoffman, needed deeper insights into their various revenue streams.

Branching Minds sells custom MTSS platform licenses, each tied to a unique SKU based on criteria such as student population size or bundled features. Their existing dashboard tool provided a high-level view of total revenue but couldn’t track revenue by SKU.

To report ARR and average selling price at the SKU level, the team needed to export the data and wrangle it in Excel. And the time-consuming, manual process always left room for error.

They faced similar challenges when building reports on revenue metrics like ARR, retention, and renewal rates. While their dashboard automated high-level revenue tracking, segmenting ARR by state or reporting on retention rates by SKU meant the team had to export and manually crunch the numbers.

Since Tyler regularly updated the board and executive management team with these reports, it was clear that he needed a faster, fully automated solution that left zero room for mistakes. That’s when he discovered SaaSGrid.

Solution

Customizable dashboards with real-time, granular insights

Implementation was fast — Branching Minds integrated their HubSpot CRM with SaaSGrid, validated their data, and built all their reports in just three weeks. Today, SaaSGrid powers all their data-driven business decisions through customizable dashboards that provide granular financial insights across school districts.

With SaaSGrid, Tyler’s team now has complete visibility into their financial data through:

• Customizable dashboards: 150+ standardized SaaS metrics, including ARR, NRR, and customer retention rates, ensure financial reporting is consistent and accurate
• Real-time SKU-level tracking: SaaSGrid automatically maps SKU data to revenue figures, giving the team near-instant insights
• Live HubSpot syncs: New deals automatically update in SaaSGrid, so the team always works with the latest revenue data
• Intuitive interface and filters: Reports are easily segmented with customizable attribute filters, including by state, SKU, or renewal status
• Pre-built templates: The team automatically generates custom reports instead of manually building them in Excel
• Live, shareable dashboards: With custom user roles and permissions, Tyler’s team securely shares financial reports with the board, executives, and department heads

Tyler’s team has used SaaSGrid to seamlessly spin up several custom financial reports, unlocking insights that drive revenue growth and increase demand for their MTSS platform licenses:

• Software license reports: Tracking average selling prices and revenue impact to inform pricing and product strategies
• Subscription growth reports: Segmenting ARR, retention rates, and renewal rates by state for 360-degree visibility into where they’re doing well and where there are opportunities for improvement
• Customer success and retention analysis: Monitoring workload, retention rates, and revenue-generating activities to enhance efficiency

Instead of manually compiling financial data, Branching Minds now has a single source of truth that provides real-time visibility into financial performance.