Categories Earnings Call Transcripts

Coupa Software Inc. (COUP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

COUP Earnings Call - Final Transcript

Coupa Software Inc. (NASDAQ: COUP) Q4 2022 earnings call dated Mar. 14, 2022

Corporate Participants:

Steven Horwitz — Vice President, Investor Relations

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Anallysts:

Gabriela Borges — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays Capital Inc. — Analyst

Brian Peterson — Raymond James & Associates, Inc. — Analyst

Alex Zukin — Wolfe Research, LLC — Analyst

Brad Sills — BofA Securities, Inc. — Analyst

Michael Turrin — Wells Fargo Securities LLC — Analyst

Robert Napoli — William Blair & Company, LLC — Analyst

Terry Tillman — Truist Securities, Inc. — Analyst

Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Co. LLC — Analyst

Steve Koenig — SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc. — Analyst

Brent Bracelin — Piper Sandler & Co. — Analyst

Peter Levine — Evercore Group LLC — Analyst

Siti Panigrahi — Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Coupa Software Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2022 Earnings Release Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to introduce your host for today’s conference call, Mr. Steven Horwitz, VP of Investor Relations. Mr. Horwitz, you may begin the conference.

Steven Horwitz — Vice President, Investor Relations

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, and welcome to Coupa Software’s fourth quarter and year-end conference call. Joining me today are Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa CEO; and Tony Tiscornia, CFO.

Our remarks today include forward-looking statements about guidance and future results of operation, strategies, market size, products’ competitive position, and potential growth opportunities. Our actual results may be materially different. Forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties and assumptions that are described in our most recently filed 10-Q. These forward-looking statements are based on our beliefs and assumptions today, and we disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements. If this call is replayed after today, the information presented may not contain current or accurate information.

We also present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of certain of these measures is included in today’s earnings release, which you can find on our Investor Relations website. A replay of this call will also be available. Unless otherwise stated, growth comparisons are against the same period of the prior year.

With that I will now turn the call over to Rob.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Steven. Welcome, everyone. Before I share our business results for the quarter, let me first convey how saddened we all are by what’s happening in Ukraine and throughout the region. Our hearts are with everyone impacted by this crisis, and we hope for a speedy resolution and certainly for peace. Our business has very limited direct exposure in the region. Nonetheless, we are first and foremost focused on supporting the safety and well-being of a small team of contractors we do have there. We’re also working with our customers that have suppliers in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus to reroute supply bases and keep business moving forward as best as possible.

Obviously, none of us know how long this conflict will last, but we all know the humanitarian crisis that will be with us for a long time to come. Because of this, we’re matching employee contributions to appropriate global humanitarian organizations, and we’re making a sizeable donation to the International Committee of the Red Cross. We continue to look for ways to do more, both in terms of financial support and through various avenues across our global Coupa community.

Now, as we look to the results of our business, let me start by sharing a few financial highlights from the fourth quarter, our 52nd quarter of execution as a company. In Q4, we delivered record results in multiple areas, including USD193 million of total revenue and USD318 million of calculated billings. We also achieved record adjusted free cash flows of USD61 million for Q4 and USD156 million for fiscal 2022.

Looking back at fiscal ’22, our core business is healthy and strong, and our new business grew more than 60% compared to fiscal ’21. By new business, I’m referring to recurring revenue from new logos and add-ons and new add-ons from existing customers. Digital and back-office transformation continues to be at the forefront as companies strive to build agility and resiliency in their businesses amid current and future uncertainty. As a result, business spend management is squarely in the spotlight.

Amid these market dynamics, we’ve grown our community to include well over 2,500 customers, more than 3,000 employees, and over 7,000 trained consultants, all working together to unlock vast amounts of business efficiency. Our fully-cloud, highly-scalable, core transactional platform is unmatched in the market. We continue to capitalize upon our market leadership position to create a platform the likes of which has never existed in our industry. This is exactly how it is now, not how it might be.

Before I dive further into our business updates, let me take a moment to expand on the opportunity we believe lies ahead. We have a massive total addressable market. We have a clear vision and strategy. We have a history of successful execution. And finally, we have a rich portfolio of untapped growth vectors that we are maniacally focused on addressing.

Let me lay them out for you. First is our enterprise business. Many of the largest companies in the world have partnered with Coupa and are seeing incredible success. We have strong retention rates. We have an incredibly rich library of customer advocacy, and we frequently see business leaders who have used Coupa and then bring Coupa to their new employers when they change companies. Even with incredible organizations such as Amazon, BMW, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Walmart already among our community of customers, our core penetration into the Global 2000 is still below 20%.

Next we have our mid-market segment. Tens of thousands of mid-market companies around the globe are in the process of taking their first steps into the world of digital transformation. We’re seeing meaningful growth in our mid-market business over the last two years, and with less than 2,000 mid-market customers in our community thus far, we’re in the very early stages of penetration in this segment.

Another exciting growth area is geographic and sector expansion. We already have strong presence in the U.S. and in Europe. To build on our presence, we have been meaningfully investing in Latin America and Asia Pacific and are starting to see some early success and momentum in these regions. We’ve also been investing in the public sector, which we estimate has tremendous upside and is also in its early stages.

And there are many other expansion opportunities across our broad business spend management platform. As we highlighted in our Analyst Day, our current customers are subscribing to less than a fifth of our total platform, and new customers are landing with increasingly more modules. Some of the growth areas I’ll highlight here are supply chain, Coupa Pay, treasury, as well as travel and expense, all of which are in the very early stages in their respective journeys.

We anticipate all these sectors to be accelerators for our long-term growth rate. Now while we can’t predict the future, we have deep conviction in our value proposition and this growing need in the marketplace. Therefore, coming off fiscal ’22 where we saw greater than 60% new business growth, we plan to invest assertively this year to capitalize on our opportunity to win and own the market. We intended for our fiscal ’23 investments to result in accelerated growth in fiscal ’24 and beyond.

Now, never hesitant, we continue executing on our path to becoming one of the world’s best enterprise cloud software companies by remaining focused on our vision areas as exemplified by the letters in the name Coupa, C-O-U-P-A stands for comprehensive, open, user-centric, prescriptive, and accelerated in all aspects. And it’s through the consistent execution of our three-wave strategy of: one, capturing all spend; two, optimizing every dollar spent; and three, amplifying community value that we will continue to drive into this market.

Let me share an example from each of our three waves. For the first wave, capturing all spend, let me highlight Coupa Pay. With Coupa Pay, we are transforming the world of payments by delivering a fully-unified solution that leverages the Coupa business spend management platform to centralize and streamline payments for organizations. We continue to see strong customer growth momentum. Q4 was yet another quarter where the attach rate on new customer deals was meaningfully above 30%. For mid-market, specifically, the Q4 attach rate was well over 50%. Though we are still in the early stages of the Coupa Pay trajectory, we laid out — that we laid out our Analyst Day, we’re starting to see noticeable increases in our total payment volume or TPV being processed through our payments hub as more and more customers go live, we expect our cumulative TPV, which includes ACHs, wires, and virtual card usage to eclipse USD10 billion in the first quarter. In fiscal ’22, TPV grew more than 4 times compared to fiscal ’21. Relative to our spend on the management levels — numbers, these TPV figures are still very modest, and the fiscal ’22 growth is on a small basis. But this early traction is very encouraging. We believe it shows the demand for our payment solutions and the need for organizations to make payments from the same single cloud instance that houses their supplier master record, all their Pos, and all their invoices and expense reports.

The second wave of our strategy is to optimize every dollar spent through suite synergy. Let me highlight this with a supply chain design and planning customer example where the integrated experience between our supply chain solution and our strategic sourcing solution is yielding differentiated knowledge and savings. We have a large South American company in the gas station and convenience store business who is using our supply chain offering to design their delivery network and to identify their transportation needs. These insights are then being used to execute sourcing events using the Coupa sourcing optimization solution. This customer has a distribution-centric business. The margins are thin and every bit of savings counts. By using our supply chain and sourcing solutions in tandem, they’re seeing clear optimization of their supply chain related to quality as well as spend.

Another supply chain example is that of onsemi, a USD6 billion semiconductor manufacturing company, who is using our supply chain solution to improve efficiency. Onsemi reduced their supply chain decisions from about 2.5 weeks to just a few days while also generating 10% to 15% improvements in capital efficiency and savings. This reminds me of the story IKEA told at our Accenture event last summer about using Coupa’s platform to unsilo their supply chain and sourcing teams to shorten the time it takes to make actionable decisions. IKEA was able to reduce their average decision-making time from five days all the way down to five minutes. These are great examples of how having access to the right data to drive business decisions increases efficiency and reduces costs. Spend optimization, our second wave in action.

Our third wave is all about amplifying community value. Community.ai combines the power of AI with human connections, the key to unlocking business value. With our cumulative spend under management now at more than USD3.3 trillion, real-time spend data is being analyzed to prescribe ways for our customers to be more efficient, profitable, and sustainable.

Let me share some examples. Saint-Gobain, a global multi-billion-dollar manufacturing company is leveraging community data to reach its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. They have reduced transport emissions by an average of 13% and in some cases by as much as 60%. CHEP, a pallet and container pooling company, has used Coupa to help improve the efficiency of their supply chain, reducing CO2 emissions per unit of delivery by 33%. The American Red Cross is using context-aware prescriptions to increase spend with diverse suppliers, thus far by 37%. Community.ai represents the third wave or our company strategy and is unlike anything ever contemplated at scale within the enterprise software industry. It truly unites businesses like never before to better discover, decide, and deliver success, making all of our customers smarter together.

To tie it all together, let me finally share a great example that elegantly incorporates all three waves of our strategy simultaneously. Let’s look at Coupa Travel and Expense. Historically, companies have relied on cumbersome silo travel tools that don’t provide any real insight into their travel spend. With our new Travel and Expense release last month, we have given our customers a user-centric solution designed to maximize program adoption. In line with our first wave of capturing all spend, this solution scales for companies with high volumes of expense report transactions, while giving finance significantly increased visibility into the control of their travel spend. Our T&E offering also incorporates our second wave of maximizing every dollar spent by delivering a unified program to a single BSM platform. This solution can be used to search for travel, book the travel, and provide a seamless transactional experience with one click expense reports and credit card transaction matching. Customers can also ensure they have best pricing through Travel Saver, or by leveraging pre-negotiated prices from Coupa Advantage.

All these capabilities are further enhanced through our third wave of amplifying through community.ai where our customers can make smarter decisions with community-powered insights. Using Spend Coach, customers are able to influence behavior by providing employees that book travel outside of Coupa insights into how much they could have saved by using the Travel solution. We’re also changing the way employees think about travel with context-aware suggestions. Rather than searching for travel to JFK Airport, employees can input their final destination. For example, Coupa’s New York office and Coupa will help prescriptively guide them to the optimal means of transportation to get there, in line with their company policies. With the power of insights driven by our global community, Coupa delivers a radically different solution that transforms corporate travel to be simpler, smarter, and more sustainable.

To summarize, our three-wave strategy when working together, solutions across all the waves yield exponential value for our customers as each wave builds upon the other. The values of service we are delivering for our customers is totally different than anything that’s ever been offered before in our industry.

Let me now share some updates on our federal business. I’m pleased to announce that we recently became FedRAMP authorized. It is no easy task to complete the authorization process. We are appreciative of the partnership we’ve had with our agency, sponsor, and customer, the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors. We believe this, along with some of the key partnerships we’ve announced and our continued investment in driving new business in the sector, will increase the pace of deals in this marketplace in the coming quarters and years.

To share a few more highlights, new customers in the federal and more broadly the public sector include the Department of Energy’s Supply Chain Management Center and the Suffolk County in New York. We’re also proud to have the House of Representatives Live on the Coupa BSM platform with the members of the house and their staff now using Coupa. All these highlights I’ve shared today help illustrate that Coupa is creating an opportunity for finance, procurement, and IT leaders to be incrementally strategic and elevate their standing within their own organizations. On that note, we couldn’t be more excited about welcoming them and many others to our upcoming Inspire Conference which will be in Las Vegas from April 3rd through April 7th. There the business spend management community will have the opportunity to share best — share case studies, interact, brainstorm, strategize, and partner on driving valuable transformational change.

Due to the COVID pandemic, this will be our first Inspire Conference in three years and our eighth overall. It will also be the first time that Coupa Pay [Phonetic], supply chain, treasury, and payments, all part of the Coupa platform, will be unified at the same conference. We’re excited to be welcoming three fantastic keynote speakers to the event in Las Vegas: Barbara Corcoran to speak about innovation; Jon Taffer to discuss teamwork; and then Sylvester Stallone to inspire us. We look forward to welcoming you.

Before I share our MVP awards, let me provide you with an update on our supply chain design and planning integration. We continue to be excited by the significant value that we are bringing to our customers through this offering. As I mentioned before, oftentimes deals that don’t currently include supply chain now are still being influenced by the fact that we have supply chain as part of our portfolio, especially for large enterprise deals. It’s been just over a year since we closed this acquisition, and during this time we’ve been largely focused on customer alignment and strategy, converting existing on-premise customers to SaaS, arming partners with the expertise to deploy the solution, connecting the supply chain solution with our strategic sourcing solution and, of course, integrating our people and processes. As we look ahead, we plan to focus on integrating supply chain with our risk solutions and our community.ai capabilities. We’re also working with our customers to unlock the value that our core P2P and our supply chain customers can achieve through suite synergy. As we continue on pace along this timeline of integration for supply chain that we originally shared at the time of the acquisition, we are excited about our progress to date and, most importantly, the clear growth opportunity we see in the coming quarters and years.

Now let’s move on to this quarter’s MVP award winners who best exemplify our values as voted by our colleagues across the world. I’ll begin with Matthias Hund [Phonetic] who personifies our first core value of ensuring customer success. Matthias leads by example, taking on issues outside of his direct responsibility but necessary for our customers’ success. He exhibits outstanding leadership through the transition to Coupa Treasury, enabling his team to grow and drive incremental success for our customers. Next, Anton Wall [Phonetic] was recognized for epitomizing our second core value, focusing on results. Anton is an absolute expert in finding and delivering the best solution. He has been an incredible asset to our customers and bringing together different departments and teams by applying his knowledge to improve processes and ensure customers get optimal results from the changes applied. And finally, Angie Evangelista [Phonetic] exemplifies our third core value, striving for excellence. Angie goes above and beyond to deliver excellence, both internally and with customers. She’s eager to dive head-first into complex tasks and find solutions. She has successfully taken on some of our larger implementations, leading the UnitedHealthcare, BMO [Phonetic], and United Airlines projects. Congratulations and thank you, Matthias, Anton, and Angie.

These MVPs are obviously just a few of the people that represent the immense talent throughout our organization. To further cultivate this talent, we have started a new program called Coupa Rising Stars. This program is focused on elevating employees who model our core values, have already demonstrated stellar execution in their current role, and are clearly capable of broader impact. By providing an additional level of mentorship for these colleagues, we are both improving their careers and the value that they deliver for Coupa and all stakeholders. I’m very excited to begin this program and see it kicked off.

Before we close, let me share some interesting observations that we’re seeing from our Coupa spend institute data. We analyze data across our Coupa community to give us insights as to what’s happening in the global economy, specifically around what’s happening with Ukraine and the global community. While it’s still early, here are some of the indications we’re seeing. Our data is on-the-ground proof of international economic support for Ukraine. Businesses outside of Russia and Belarus are accelerating their shipments to Ukraine, especially in key supporting sectors. In just one month, within our Coupa community, warehouse and distribution services jumped 300%, healthcare services climbed 189%, manufacturing and industrial processing shipments increased 44%. Again, these are early data points, but they show a singular truth, business spend is powerful. And when we are united by the power of spend, we can drive tremendous change. We’ll, of course, continue to look at these numbers and share them as we go forward.

In summary, we have what it takes to win this massive business spend management market. We have a wide portfolio of rich growth vectors, many of which are very early in their journey. We have a winning three-wave strategy. Our vision is comprehensive, open, user-centric, prescriptive, and accelerated in a way that has never been attempted, let alone achieved in our industry, and we’re proud to have some of the most talented, thoughtful professionals in the world as colleagues and partners. With these pieces in place, it’s all about continuing our proven track record of execution and reaching new heights.

With that let me hand the call over to our CFO, Tony Tiscornia.

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. As Rob highlighted, we delivered strong top and bottom line financial results for the quarter and year. Our core business across enterprise and mid-market is healthy, strong, and growing rapidly. During the fiscal year we grew new business in excess of 60%, which we define as new recurring revenue from new customer logos and add-on transactions.

We also can continued to deliver strong margins and cash flows. Our free cash flow margin for both fiscal ’22 and fiscal ’21 was 21%. We also delivered 12% non-GAAP operating margins for the year. As we look ahead to fiscal ’23 and beyond, we have a large total addressable market, the market-leading solution, and a broad portfolio of levers to drive rapid growth. With the year well underway, we are excited about our business and our future.

With that let’s discuss our Q4 and fiscal ’22 results. Calculated billings for Q4 were USD318 million a year-over-year increase — organic increase of 25% after backing out the USD15 million of one-time opening deferred revenue from the LLamasoft acquisition. Total revenue for the quarter was USD193 million and subscription revenue was USD173 million, up 28% year-over-year.

Non-GAAP gross margin was 75% in the range of our midterm target of 74% to 75%. Q4 non-GAAP operating income was USD28 million or 14% of total revenue, and non-GAAP net income was USD14 million, or USD0.19 per share, on approximately 70.7 million diluted shares. Q4 operating cash flows were USD64 million and adjusted free cash flows were USD61 million. Cash at quarter end was USD729 million, an increase of USD62 million from last quarter. For fiscal ’22, calculated billings were USD855 million, an increase of 33% versus the prior year. Total revenue was USD725 million, an increase of 34% versus last year. And subscription revenue was USD634 million, up 35% from last year.

Non-GAAP gross margin was 72% for the year. Non-GAAP operating income was USD89 million or 12% of total revenue and non-GAAP net income was USD63 million or USD0.83 per share on approximately 76 million diluted shares. Fiscal ’22 operating cash flows were USD168 million compared to USD78 million last year and adjusted free cash flows were USD156 million compared to USD114 million last year. In fiscal ’22 we delivered Rule of 40 results of 55%. We continue to demonstrate our ability to drive rapid growth with strong cash flows. As a reminder, we define Rule of 40 as the trailing 12-month revenue growth rate plus the trailing 12-month adjusted free cash flow margin.

Growth in our core business is healthy and strong. Let me share a few key data points. For fiscal ’22, as we noted, new business grew more than 60% compared to fiscal ’21. The number of customers with annualized subscription revenue greater than USD100,000 was 1,370 at the end of the year compared to 1,082 a year ago, an increase of 27%. Also, we ended the year with 1.3 billion in total RPO, a 35% increase over last year. Of that, current RPO growth was approximately 33% compared to a year ago. Our robust RPO growth metrics are illustrative of the strength in our core business and new business growth. We continue to see robust engagement and partnership with enterprise-size customers and prospects coming out of COVID and our deal sizes continued to increase. We also continue to be increasingly excited about our mid-market business which represents about 40% of our total addressable market and has been growing rapidly the last two years.

With that, let’s now turn to guidance. Let me start by showing a few key items of note that should be considered with our guidance. First, as we head into fiscal ’23 with strong new business momentum and our largest pipeline ever, we plan to continue investing across our business to drive increased top line growth in fiscal ’24 and beyond. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue was 32% for Q4 and 31% for fiscal ’22, compared to our midterm target range of 36% to 38%. Our strong sales efficiency metrics and the overall leverage and scale in our agile financial model give us degrees of freedom to invest for growth while continuing to deliver strong margins and cash flows.

Next, we believe the revenue metric that investors should focus on is subscription revenue. When we acquired LLamasoft five quarters ago, professional services and other revenues spiked. LLamasoft historically performed their own customer deployments and generated a significant amount of license revenue associated with their legacy products. We are primarily focused on the subscription aspect of the business, and we are also continuing to enable our GSI partners to perform supply chain deployments, in alignment with our partner-led model which is a key element of our strategy. Therefore, by design, and in keeping with our stated intent, professional services and other revenue will continue to decrease as a percentage of total revenue.

With that, I’ll now share guidance for Q1 and fiscal ’23. For Q1 we expect subscription revenues of between USD171 million and USD173 million and professional services and other revenue of approximately USD18 million, yielding a total revenue expectation of between USD189 million and USD191 million for Q1. Note that we recognize subscription revenue using the daily method. Q1 has three fewer days than Q4, which represents approximately USD6 million in impact for Q1. This impact is incorporated in our Q1 guidance. We expect Q1 calculated billings of USD175 million.

Moving down the income statement, we expect non-GAAP gross margin of approximately 71%, lower than Q4, in part due to the USD6 million impact of having three fewer days in the quarter. We expect non-GAAP operating income of USD6 million to USD8 million and non-GAAP net income of USD3 million to USD5 million resulting in non-GAAP net income per share of USD0.03 to USD0.06 on approximately 86.5 million diluted shares in the quarter.

Now with regards to the share count, please note that compared to Q4, the significant increase in the number of diluted shares used to calculate non-GAAP EPS is driven by the adoption of a new accounting standard, which requires a new methodology for calculating dilution associated with our convertible notes. Until now we were previously using the treasury stock method. Pursuant to the new pronouncement, we’ll be using the if-converted method. This is purely a go-forward accounting change. We expect Q1 adjusted free cash flows of approximately USD15 million, coming off the strong collections finish we had in Q4. From a cost perspective for Q1, keep in mind that we will be hosting our in-person Inspire Conference in April in Las Vegas, our first in three years. This will increase opex on a year-over-year basis for Q1 and also for the year as we return to hosting customers, prospects, and partners in our offices, and our colleagues begin to travel more frequently for business.

Now let’s move on to the full year fiscal ’23 guidance. We expect subscription revenue of between USD756 million to USD760 million. This guidance represents a 20% increase in subscription revenue for fiscal ’23. We also expect professional services and other revenue of approximately USD80 million or 10% of total revenue. This yields expected total revenue of between USD836 million and USD840 million for fiscal ’23. As we continue to invest in our business to drive growth, we expect a non-GAAP gross margin for the year of approximately 71% and non-GAAP operating income for the year of USD25 million to USD29 million, resulting in non-GAAP net income per share of USD0.15 to USD0.19 on approximately 88 million weighted average diluted shares.

That concludes our prepared remarks. We’d now be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] First question comes from the line of Gabriela Borges from Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Gabriela Borges — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Either for yourself, Rob, or for Tony, help us understand the disconnect that we’re seeing in terms of the strong pipeline and the commentary that you gave on the core business being healthy versus what looks to be a deceleration in organic growth for fiscal year ’23. So maybe just a little bit of color on what you’re seeing on the ground in terms of digital transformation and competition. Thank you.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure, Gabriela. Thanks for the question. So when we look at new business that’s in, let’s say, the COVID year, from the COVID year to last year grew in excess of 60%. So we feel like we have a really strong core business, particularly as it pertains to subscriptions themselves. We see more and more customers adding on subscriptions at higher price points around the world. So we feel really good about that. When we look at pipeline, we have the largest pipeline we’ve ever had as we go into the year. Having said that, there’s obviously plenty of uncertainty out there, and we really pride ourselves on saying something and delivering on it, and we’re not going to change that approach. But generally, we feel really good about the health of the business and all the vectors that I shared.

Gabriela Borges — Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC — Analyst

Thank you for the color.

Operator

Next one on the queue is Raimo Lenschow from Barclays. Your line is now open.

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays Capital Inc. — Analyst

Hey, thank you. Question for you, Tony. If you think about the strong growth you saw in CRPO, RPO etc. and then also think a little bit about your guidance philosophy and changing because you’re becoming a more mature company now. Is there something maybe that we should be aware of in terms of how we should think about your approach to guidance going forward. And then I have a follow-up for Rob.

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Sure. Thanks, Raimo. So as Rob noted, we’re certainly bullish about accelerating overall revenue and calculated billings growth in fiscal ’24 and beyond. Subscription revenue guidance for this year is a few points lower than our pre-COVID guides, and we’d reiterate confidence in mid-20s organic billings growth near-term. COVID had an impact on our enterprise business, but as we mentioned earlier, new business last year grew very strong and the mid-market business is growing rapidly, even through COVID. We have many vectors for growth.

This is why we’re continuing to make investments in sales and marketing and really across the business to capitalize on our opportunity that we’re seeing. But also we’ll continue to be responsible with our investments. We’re profitable, we have a strong balance sheet, we have a strong margin profile, and we’re in line for our midterm targets. With regards to guidance philosophy, naturally, as we grow, we have more data to sharpen our forecasts and consistently fine-tune our guidance based on the data that we have. But there’s really no overall major change in our philosophy.

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays Capital Inc. — Analyst

Okay, thank you. And then, Rob, can you talk — in the past you talked a lot about Coupa Pay like it’s — what I hear from the field it’s still — there’s a lot of momentum there. Can you just speak to that a little bit and explain it for me?

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Sure, Raimo. The encouraging data points we thought would be worthwhile to share with the group is just the total payment volume that we’re seeing. It’s one thing to sell an offering. It’s another thing to get it implemented and see it really start to take off. And the attach rates continue to be incredibly strong as we mentioned. Greater than 30% overall and mid-market well over 50%, as you know, we began Pay in the mid-market rolling out. And the total payment volume exceeding USD10 billion, and largely through ACH digital payments, but that’s just fine for us, right? we’re seeing customers using it across a whole host of different methods. And the other thing I think worth mentioning is just the ecosystem continues to grow. We added HSBC, Brex, AirPlus, Billtrust as partners. So we’re seeing this footprint really start to take off, and it’s measured, thoughtful growth, but it’s still very early in the trajectory of Coupa Pay, no doubt.

Raimo Lenschow — Barclays Capital Inc. — Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Next one on the line is Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Brian Peterson — Raymond James & Associates, Inc. — Analyst

Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the questions. So first off, we saw the margins come in nicely above expectations this quarter, last quarter, but it looks like the guidance is maybe a little bit lower than we had modeled. I’d be curious how did the hiring trends compare last year versus what you’re expecting in fiscal year ’23? Any way to stack-order rank some of the investment priorities for next year?

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Well, it seems like there’s two components to that question, Brian. So in terms of hiring, continues to be measured, thoughtful, there’s obviously a major game of, let’s call it, musical chairs that’s happening in the world at the moment. And we’re using that as an opportunity to attract the very best talent that’s going to be with us for the longer term as we build up our team. And that goes across all departments, from sales, marketing, services, operations alike. But I’ll let Tony comment on the margin point.

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Brian. So with regards to gross margins, first, as I noted in my prepared remarks, for Q1 we have the impact of three fewer days, which reduces the steady-state subscription revenue by USD6 million. We have this every year. When you look at the full year, we delivered 72% gross margins for fiscal ’22. Given the agility and resiliency of our P&L, we’re giving ourselves degrees of freedom to invest for accelerated growth in fiscal ’24 and beyond. Of course, we update our models each quarter, and we have levers that we can push and pull on depending on the progress we’re seeing from our investments, but that’s really the logic there.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Next one on the queue is Alex Zukin from Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Alex Zukin — Wolfe Research, LLC — Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. So I think the disconnect here is that we’re hearing some really positive momentum around new business growth, we’re seeing some solid billings numbers in the quarter, and I think everybody is trying to figure out is there something in the retention dynamics of the core business that we just didn’t account for that’s getting level set? Is there a higher degree of conservatism that we need to account for? Because there’s some aspect of we’re all trying to figure out the guide and I think for the margins you talked about clearly this is an investment year. Clearly, there’s a reopening impact to the expense profile. And you talked about accelerating growth in fiscal ’24 and beyond. There’s the potential to come from this investment, but is there also a commitment that where this is trough from a margin perspective, and we’ll start to meaningfully go up from here?

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Thanks for the question, Alex. This is Tony. So, yeah, you’re right. If you look at our CRPO numbers or total RPO numbers, new business growth, really what that illustrates I think is core Coupa new business subscription deals have performed very strongly in this last year. On top of that, Rob laid out all the different vectors for growth that we’re focused on as we go into next year. There certainly is not any issue with retention rates. Our gross renewal rate was still in that range of 94% to 96% and our dollar base expansion was a little bit north of the 110% to 112% [Phonetic] range. I think really there’s a dynamic here where in the year of COVID in calendar ’20 and fiscal ’21, especially in the enterprise, it was a difficult year, right? And when you’re going along with the totality of the installed base and the run rate of calculated billings and revenue of a larger and larger size, when you have a year like that, that’s a bit depressed because of the circumstances, it takes multiple years of outsized new business growth in order to recover and get back onto the original track, right. In fact, earlier today we did a little bit of a math proof on the whole thing, and I think it makes a lot of sense. So we also saw that with some other companies looking back historically as we were doing our homework like around the 2008 financial crisis. So certainly, we’re focused on investing in our business, and our margin profile and capital profile is very, very durable and strong. It just takes a couple years to come out of that dip year that we had. And I think ultimately that’s the story.

Operator

Next one on the queue is Brad Sills from BofA Securities. Your line is now open.

Brad Sills — BofA Securities, Inc. — Analyst

Oh great. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask, Rob, your thoughts on reopening and what impact that might have on the business. Is that something that you feel could be a positive tailwind for the BSM category as employees get back to the office? A key use case for procurement is to purchase supplies, computer equipment, furniture, etc., for employees that are in the office potentially. Just curious to get your thoughts on as we get into reopening, what impact that might have on the business. Thank you.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Thanks, Brad. I think the answer is yes. I don’t think it’s as much about office supplies in those categories and that USD3.3 trillion in spend volume office supplies and whatnot represent the relatively small portion. But overall control of spend in office from a demand perspective is something we are looking forward to. I would also say on feet on the street perspective, so being able to close some of our larger transformational deals in the enterprise does, in fact, call for shaking real hands and arriving in real locations and having communications around how to set up centers of excellence and how to deploy best practices solutions.

We think it’s also going to help us continue to scale our mid-market business. We’re putting the right — we believe the right sales capacity in place against this post-COVID re-platforming that we’re anticipating. And we’re also pushing for a tipping point in the overall category awareness of business spend management. To the earlier question of people that we’re hiring just this last quarter, a significant amount of people came to us because they’ve heard of the category and us being a leader in the category. So we’re working toward that tipping point as well. And that’s, of course, [Indecipherable] mentioned the armies of systems integrators that we want to continue working with on the ground to get larger-scale deployments and our overall assessments or evaluations of such deployments back on the ground. So both push and pull, we anticipate some positive things happening from the reopening.

Operator

Next one on the line is Michael Turrin from Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Michael Turrin — Wells Fargo Securities LLC — Analyst

Hey, there. Thanks. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. You pressed pause on M&A given the size and scale of LLamasoft. But having now lapped that transaction with valuations more broadly coming hack across technology, can you maybe refresh for us what your overall approach to M&A looks like and maybe some of the things you look for in evaluating areas to expand into? Thank you.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, sure. And I’ll thank you for that question. Our acquisition, M&A strategy really remains very much the same. We’re always looking at options for power applications or components of functionality that’ll broaden or deepen the platform and get more about — help our customers get more value out of their trillions of dollars in spend. And we’ll always consider the right opportunities that meet our filter of culture, technology, domain expertise criteria. The straightest [Phonetic] strategy has always been to increase this share of the CFO’s wallet, an individual that just doesn’t have a primary platform to manage all of their business spending, designing and planning solutions around that. So it’s very much the same strategy, and we continue to monitor the marketplace for the right types of things we can consider as we build out the business.

Operator

Next one on the line is Bob Napoli from William Blair. Your line is now open.

Robert Napoli — William Blair & Company, LLC — Analyst

Thank you and good afternoon. Now follow-up question on Coupa Pay. Seems like you’re having a lot of success in the mid-market with Coupa Pay, over 50% of tax rate. I wonder if you could give a little color on the growth of Coupa Pay maybe as it relates to the mid-market. It seems that is a — mid-market could be a lot more profitable than enterprise for Coupa and selling Coupa Pay directly — I’m not sure how often you’re selling it with a number of other products, but is there an opportunity to accelerate the growth of Coupa Pay in the mid-market by going more direct and more focused on distribution in that channel?

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. And thank you for the question. I think there’s an opportunity in both, both accelerating the adoption of Coupa Pay in mid-market while simultaneously continuing to go up market with the solution along with offering more capabilities around Coupa Pay. We have a pretty robust roadmap with Coupa Pay to really be the payments hub for organizations for all key categories of their expenditures that they need to pay for. So very similarly to many of the modules we’ve built over the last decade plus, we begin in mid-market, and we continue to stretch and pull the application based on customer requirements, building 80:20, highly user-centric capabilities, leveraging all three waves of our strategy to have them integrate the other apps as well as unlock community value. And we think we have plenty of different vectors of growth around Pay with that spirit and approach.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. Your line is now open.

Terry Tillman — Truist Securities, Inc. — Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. In terms of the software 2000 — or FY ’23 sub revenue growth, you’re talking about growth maybe accelerating into FY ’24. Can you frame what step-up and growth there would be potentially or just any guidepost? And if you think about the second part of that question is what are some of the areas where you could see more livelier growth upside as we move out into the next year? Is it international, mid-market, Coupa Pay, emerging products, etc. just if you could help frame that? Thank you.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Let me answer it this way. What we’ve tried to do in building this business is create a wide, wide portfolio of growth vectors. So it’s very difficult to predict whether it’ll be geographic, whether it’ll be a category, whether it’ll be a product, whether it’ll be new customers or add-on within existing customers. But with this portfolio effect, we are significantly shoring up the opportunity set to maximize the result, right. And then looking at whatever the time interval it is, whether it’s fiscal ’24 or ’25 or any given quarter, any one of those vectors could be the contributor to help us in the continued reacceleration as we move our way past COVID and into the growth years that we’re anticipating.

Tony Tiscornia — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. And let me add, Terry, to the first part of your question. So nothing’s really changed for us from our commentary from last quarter. Last quarter we stated that we’re confident in mid-20s organic calculated billings growth in the near term, and we’d reiterate that. As for guidance, we strive to execute and achieve a beat and raise each quarter. It’s a little bit tough to know with all the things going on in the world that is quite in turmoil at this time. But we’re bullish about accelerating our growth with the investments we’re making.

Subscription revenue guidance, we talked about services and other guidance and why that is trending downward if you look at the total. But the core of this business is subscription. And subscription revenue guidance for fiscal ’23 is a few points lower than our typical pre-COVID guidance. So if you take all those things into consideration — and then on shaping up the year, we’d expect for the most part typical seasonality for the year Q1, Q3 a little bit lighter, Q2 larger and Q4 is really the biggest quarter for all enterprise software companies. The notion of “getting back to work,” increased business travel, as the year progresses, could become an incremental tailwind for the back-half of the year, and we’ll keep you updated on that on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Ryan MacDonald from Needham. Your line is now open.

Ryan MacDonald — Needham & Co. LLC — Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. Rob, wanted to dig deeper into the largest pipeline ever commentary and maybe you can parse out what you’re seeing in terms of mix between late-stage and early-stage pipeline. And then how do you think the return of Inspire being in person can help unlock more pipeline or help maybe accelerate the conversion of that large pipeline into billing. Thanks.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Ryan. It’s a really thoughtful question. It certainly is the largest overall pipeline that we’ve ever had, and particularly interesting when you look at the Q4 pull and the tens and tens of millions of dollars in subscription revenue we closed just in Q4. We’re seeing stronger increased customer-prospect engagement on our calls and interactions online, and we’re seeing what we believe is a certain release and gravitational pull as it pertains to us and a category winner in business spend management. And without making a direct prediction, I would certainly like to see our Inspire conference where we anticipate a reasonable amount of folks coming out of COVID and wanting to be together across all areas from procurement to treasury to supply chain to all the other areas that we support coming together to help move that pipeline from early-stage all the way through to pre-close and close. So I think it bodes well for us. And I’ll tell you, Ryan, I can’t wait for the conference, and again, welcome everyone online to join us in Las Vegas.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Steve Koenig from SMBC. Your line is now open.

Steve Koenig — SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc. — Analyst

Hi, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my questions. Rob, I’m wondering how you might think about in terms of what you’re seeing, how inflation is affecting the customer imperatives for back-office investments and particularly procure-to-pay investments, either positive or negative. What are the puts and takes here as you talk to customers? Thanks very much.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Thank you for that question. I honestly can’t point to anything, as I often say statistically significant, as it pertains to that. When I think back to the fourth quarter and the momentum, interactions we had in our deal closes, they were all oriented toward helping companies get back to controlling their spend, maximizing every dollar of spend, resiliency, sustainability, all their key initiatives and how we map to that. Inflation is obviously a factor for all of us, but I can’t say that there was anything significant that came up in the dozens of interactions I had that would be worth calling out here.

Steve Koenig — SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc. — Analyst

Okay. Thanks, Rob.

Operator

Next one on the queue is Brent Bracelin from Piper Sandler. Your line is now open.

Brent Bracelin — Piper Sandler & Co. — Analyst

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question here I wanted to zoom out a little bit on the subscription growth outlook. I think the five-year average is 40%, two-year average is 35%, you’re guiding to 23% in Q1, and a full-year guide that implies further moderation to 20%. What’s changed relative to the growth outlook this year? Are the acquisitions not contributing to growth as much as expected? Is this just all large enterprises stalling and not seeing it come back? Has the closed environment shifted in the last two weeks post Ukraine? I ask this because Gartner is actually forecasting the supply chain management software industry to actually accelerate this year versus your guidance of a further slowdown. So just trying to understand what’s changed and how we should think about those levers to driving acceleration.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Thanks for the question, Brent. So, first of all, I’d say nothing has changed. If you look at our subscription revenue guidance for Q1, it’s actually in the 19% to 20% range, right. And that’s consistent with 20% for the year. On top of that you layer on the fact that it’s tough for us to predict the future especially in a tumultuous environment in the world that we’re in, but we’ve historically modeled to try to achieve a beat and raise. We were talking last quarter about mid-20s organic calculated billings growth and obviously calculated billings comes in advance of revenue. So consistent for Q1 and the year, our model hasn’t changed, our approach hasn’t changed. And I think with supply chain, we’re well along the path of our stated integration timelines that we discussed. Certainly, in the near term, when you consider for total revenue, professional services going down for going to [Phonetic] partners, right, our GSI partner is a key part of our strategy. We’re being very successful in converting license contracts to SaaS contracts. So that’s certainly a part of the near-term impact on revenue and billings that we’re building into our model. And on top of that, as I called out earlier, it takes several years of outsized new business performance to get the overall calculated billings and revenue growth back on track because of the dip year in COVID. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that at the tip of the spear, this last year we saw a really robust new business growth.

Operator

Next one on the line is Peter Levine from Evercore. Your line is now open.

Peter Levine — Evercore Group LLC — Analyst

All right. Thanks for taking my questions. I think a concern for investors as it relates to software is the risk of any deteriorating or economic downturn in Europe due to the geopolitical environment we unfortunately see ourselves in. So I think international makes up 40% of your business. Can you dissect that further to let us know what your exposure is to EMEA, Europe specifically, and what kind of assumptions are baked into the guide looking at your European segment? Longer sales cycles, sales disruptions, churn, any color would be great. Thanks.

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Peter. I think the first thing I’d point out is that as long as businesses are continuing on with their endeavor to succeed in their business, they need Coupa, right? And that’s first and foremost. And we’re seeing incredible engagement from customers, large and small across the world. Europe in and of itself EMEA is about 25% of our business and then rest of the world gets us up into that 40-ish percent range. On the margin I think there might be a bit more sensitivity to COVID and to the ongoing situation, of course, in the eastern part of Europe right now but nothing meaningful from a pipeline perspective, customer interaction perspective. So all of our best estimates on the impacts of these items are baked into our guidance, but we don’t foresee a meaningful impact. Now that could change, of course, depending on what happens in the world. But from where we sit now, we feel pretty good about that.

Operator

Next question comes from the line of Siti Panigrahi from Mizuho. Your line is now open.

Siti Panigrahi — Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. — Analyst

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about LLamasoft transitioning from on-prem to SaaS. What sort of trend you have seen in terms of customer churn or anything — any color will be helpful?

Rob Bernshteyn — Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Thanks for the question. Well, look, obviously, we’re in the process of converting customers from term licenses to SaaS upon renewal. We’ve had great success with that. In fact, the majority of these term licenses have converted to SaaS. And customers are beginning to really understand the value proposition of an integrated business spend management offering. Now there’s a lot of work that goes into making this as special as we want to make it. We have now a truly extensible cloud offering in the market. We’re building on top of this common data model that supports a wide range of use cases, 80-20 type applications that we could go-to-market with over coming years that can really unlock the power of SaaS in the area of supply chain design and planning. This is largely a services-based market that’s dying for an 80:20 solution to address the needs of the masses.

At the same time, we’re training consultants on developing best practices around our supply chain design and planning approach. I mentioned in my prepared remarks as well. We’re looking to integrate that solution into our supplier risk area, and in my mind, most importantly, unlocking the power of community.ai as it pertains to supply chain design. So folks can be smarter and smarter about the way they plan their agile supply chains in real time to maximize dollars and maximize efficiency and fulfill demand that they have for their own customers in the marketplace. So very early in the trajectory here, but we feel like we’re in a really good spot with the offering we have and the approach that we’re taking.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]

Disclaimer

This transcript is produced by AlphaStreet, Inc. While we strive to produce the best transcripts, it may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies. This transcript is provided as is without express or implied warranties of any kind. As with all our articles, AlphaStreet, Inc. does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company’s SEC filings. Neither the information nor any opinion expressed in this transcript constitutes a solicitation of the purchase or sale of securities or commodities. Any opinion expressed in the transcript does not necessarily reflect the views of AlphaStreet, Inc.

© COPYRIGHT 2021, AlphaStreet, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reproduction, redistribution or retransmission is expressly prohibited.

Most Popular

CCL Earnings: Carnival Corp. Q4 2024 revenue rises 10%

Carnival Corporation & plc. (NYSE: CCL) Friday reported strong revenue growth for the fourth quarter of 2024. The cruise line operator reported a profit for Q4, compared to a loss

Key metrics from Nike’s (NKE) Q2 2025 earnings results

NIKE, Inc. (NYSE: NKE) reported total revenues of $12.4 billion for the second quarter of 2025, down 8% on a reported basis and down 9% on a currency-neutral basis. Net

FDX Earnings: FedEx Q2 2025 adjusted profit increases; revenue dips

Cargo giant FedEx Corporation (NYSE: FDX), which completed an organizational restructuring recently, announced financial results for the second quarter of 2025. Second-quarter earnings, excluding one-off items, were $4.05 per share,

Add Comment
Loading...
Cancel
Viewing Highlight
Loading...
Highlight
Close
Top