Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring • Hacker News Board

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#351

Post by erpNerdThrAway » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 1:05 AM UTC

npsomaratna wrote: post #335

erpNerdThrAway wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF doesn’t do ERP level financials natively, but there is an industry of apps built on top of SF. Some try to turn SF into an ERP. Examples I’ve worked with in the last year: -Rootstock -Accounting Seed -FinancialForce That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously…

Out of curiosity: which system would you recommend for "ERP grade" financials? Is it SAP?

It 100% depends on the business. The ERP market is vast, and there is at least 1 ERP for every industry. I even worked with a country club management ERP once.

That said, I’m a big believer in going with what is popular. You’ll get more features, better support, better docs, and a community to ask questions to. And most importantly, more software will integrate with it. This is crucial. The last thing you want is your finance team having to manually key data from your satellite systems into your ERP.

Never ever let someone sell you on a niche ERP.

Other than industry, the big deciding factor is how big you are. SAP targets the Enterprise market. These ERPs are absurdly complex systems, and you’d only want one if you are big enough to have dedicated ERP consultants/admins.

That said, for general small businesses I would recommend: -Quickbooks Online -Xero

When you outgrow those, you’ll have a better idea what you want. Oracle NetSuite and Sage Intacct are pretty common next steps for digital companies.

This is a big question though. I finish with this hard-earned wisdom: enterprise software is only as good as whoever is implementing and administrating it. A good VAR makes all the difference in the world.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#352

Post by erpNerdThrAway » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 1:10 AM UTC

Dwolb wrote: post #313

erpNerdThrAway wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF doesn’t do ERP level financials natively, but there is an industry of apps built on top of SF. Some try to turn SF into an ERP. Examples I’ve worked with in the last year: -Rootstock -Accounting Seed -FinancialForce That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously…

Hilarious, thanks for the chuckle. I'd like to ride along on an ERP integration some day. I've been a part of a scaling start-up and it just feels like the kludge of tools small teams buy would be better served by a more integrated system. So I'd like to see what a big implementation looks like and figure out what pieces might be usable for small teams.

Yeah, it’s a surprisingly interesting space. ERPs are basically as complex as CRUD apps get, and because they model businesses, you learn a lot about how companies work along the way.

Wish I could take people on a ride-along, but because of the financial/business data involved it’s just not possible.

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#353

Post by fatnoah » Fri, Jan 06, 2023, 3:59 AM UTC

bsk26 wrote: post #348

fatnoah wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after. My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.

You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice) Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages

Nice, glad to hear it's a good package. I had only a 60 day warn period to find a new job, which was a bit stressful. Good luck!

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#354

Post by grantsch » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 9:02 AM UTC

corry wrote: post #344

grantsch wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does real LTV have to be greater than CAC. Can you explain that to me? If you’re LTV is actually higher than LTV can’t you finance the difference?

The problem is that if LTV LTV = the expected cashflows on a gross margin basis, for the life of the customer. If you get $100 @ 80% gross margin, you have $80 gross margin profit per year. If you lose 100% of your clients after 3 years, you expect to make $80+$80+$80 = $240 of profit. Ah but you also need to discount those future cashflows (let's use a discount rate of 10%). So you really are making $80 + ($80 x 0.9…

Why would you not price "sales and marketing" into CAC

That's what causes the A in CAC

I really think that's part of what drives a lot the confusion here among companies

Re: Salesforce will lay off 10% of staff as part of restructuring

#355

Post by corry » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

grantsch wrote: post #354

corry wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that if LTV LTV = the expected cashflows on a gross margin basis, for the life of the customer. If you get $100 @ 80% gross margin, you have $80 gross margin profit per year. If you lose 100% of your clients after 3 years, you expect to make $80+$80+$80 = $240 of profit. Ah but you also need to discount those future cashflows (let's use a discount rate of 10%). So you really are making $80 + ($80 x 0.9…

Why would you not price "sales and marketing" into CAC That's what causes the A in CAC I really think that's part of what drives a lot the confusion here among companies

Sales and Marketing costs ARE the CAC. It's literally (Sales&Marketing Costs) / (Number of Clients Added) for a given period.