In this episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast - David Appel, Head of the SaaS Vertical at Sage Intacct shares his insights and lessons learned from over 1,500+ SaaS financial solution implementations. During our conversation, David and Ray discuss several key attributes and approaches that SaaS CFOs take to ensure the data, metrics and KPIs they collect can tell the story of what the "financial data" is telling. Great finance leaders make sure financial information and KPIs get out to everyone as soon as possible to enable timely, data-driven, metrics information decision making.  Great CEOs and CFOs ensure the measures that each department have in place are directly linked to the corporate objectives, and not allow functional leaders to primarily highlight those metrics that show their function in the best light, but not for the benefit of the entire company. Dave ends this episode with a quote from Steve Jobs "Building great companies is not dependant on the hierarchies that run companies, but they are built upon the ideas that run companies".