The Hidden Drain: How SaaS Businesses Are Losing Revenue — And What You Can Do About It

In the fast-moving world of SaaS, growth is the headline — but leakage is the quiet story underneath. While many finance teams focus on scaling ARR, too few are paying attention to what’s leaking out of the bucket. And it’s costing them — sometimes millions.

GrowCFO’s latest Q2 2025 Tech Innovation Report examined the problem in detail and highlighted that revenue leakage remains one of the most pressing yet under-addressed challenges in SaaS finance. Whether it’s billing errors, missed renewals, over-discounting, or unbilled usage, the cumulative impact is significant—and increasingly avoidable.

What Is Revenue Leakage?

Revenue leakage refers to money you’ve earned — or should have earned — but didn’t collect. In SaaS, it commonly stems from:

• Manual billing and invoicing errors
• Untracked usage on consumption-based models
• Customer churn due to poor collections or comms
• Revenue recognition mistakes or delays
• Low visibility into accounts receivable (AR)

These issues rarely happen in isolation. Instead, they’re symptoms of legacy systems, siloed data, and resource-stretched finance teams. In short: a lack of automation, integration, and insight.

The Innovation Levers That Plug the Gap

The Q2 report explores how modern finance functions are leveraging technology to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive revenue capture. We’re going to look at some of the solutions in more detail at the Tech Showcase event later in the month.

1. Usage-Based and Subscription Billing

As SaaS pricing evolves, billing complexity increases. Manual processes simply can’t keep up with hybrid models that combine flat-fee subscriptions with variable usage.

Enter Zenskar, a showcase solution featured in the report. Zenskar automates the billing of complex pricing structures — usage-based, seat-based, metered — with full RevRec workflows built in. This reduces errors, accelerates revenue recognition, and improves trust with customers.

As Apurv Bansal, Zenskar’s CFO and Co-Founder, puts it:

“When billing logic lives in spreadsheets, you’re losing revenue. We’ve built a platform to fix that.”

2. AI-Powered AR Automation

Revenue leakage isn’t just about billing. Once the invoice is out the door, the clock starts ticking — and poorly managed AR can lead to long DSOs, delayed cash, and write-offs.

Stuut, another showcase partner, uses AI to intelligently prioritize which invoices to chase, when, and how. It’s a major upgrade from the classic one-size-fits-all dunning approach. Stuut improves cash collection by 20–30% for many clients, with reduced headcount.

Ben Winter , CEO at Stuut, explains:

“AI isn’t replacing AR teams — it’s giving them superpowers. Focused, data-driven follow-up works better than brute-force reminders.”

Technology That Pays for Itself

What’s compelling about the innovations highlighted in the report is that they often generate a clear and rapid return on investment. If you’re losing 5–10% of revenue to leakage, plugging just half the gap can transform your bottom line.

Here’s how some of the showcase tech helps: