Hi everyone,
I’ve been lurking on this board for about half a year now, and it’s been an invaluable resource to me as a relatively new investor. Thanks to Saul and everybody else on this board for collaborating and freely sharing knowledge about great growth companies. I switched my portfolio to a “Saul-style” concentrated growth portfolio late last summer, and I plan to continue learning from the investors on this board. I thought I’d make my first post on the board regarding some thoughts and questions about bill.com’s revenue (an 8% position in my portfolio).
BILL made some recent relatively large acquisitions of Divvy and Invoice2go, but for the purposes of this post and to get a clearer picture of the business performance, I will be discussing organic core revenue.
BILL defines their “core revenue” as subscription revenue + transaction revenue. As of their most recent reported quarter, this core revenue makes up 99% of their total revenue.
The subscription revenue portion of their core revenue is the recurring, predictable SaaS revenue that we all know and love on the board. However, this subscription revenue only makes up 30% of their total revenue.
The part of their core revenue that I want to focus on with this post is their transaction revenue. This now makes up 69% of their total revenue, and its proportion of total revenue has been rapidly increasing the last few quarters.
Their yoy organic core revenue growth is high and has accelerated nicely the last several quarters. The last 5 quarters (oldest to newest), their yoy organic core revenue growth has looked like this: 53%, 59%, 62%, 73%, 77%. So very nice acceleration. This, combined with their strong net retention rate of 124%, makes up the bulk of my investment thesis for BILL.
However, it seems like most of this revenue acceleration has come from their transaction revenue (as evidenced by transaction revenue’s rapidly growing proportion of total revenue). This transaction revenue is probably not as consistent/reliable as the classic SaaS subscription revenue. So on one hand, this high transaction revenue may make BILL a riskier investment compared to our other SaaS companies, as it may be more volatile and vulnerable to macro/market conditions. As well, I’m not sure how sustainable this acceleration of transaction revenue is.
On the other hand, this transaction revenue could represent an opportunity for BILL that other SaaS companies don’t have (similar to Snowflake’s consumption revenue model). The digital transformation that’s happening across businesses could act as a tailwind that keeps this transaction revenue growing. After all, without this extra revenue source, BILL’s revenue growth would certainly not be accelerating as much.
That being said, I feel that the tailwinds fueling this accelerating transaction revenue may not be as explosive or sustainable as the data explosion fueling SNOW’s consumption revenue model.
This is certainly a more complicated story than the pure SaaS companies with near 100% subscription revenue, so I personally wouldn’t want an outsized position in this company at this time (even if their organic core revenue acceleration is very compelling). What are everyone else’s thoughts on this? How do you think about BILL’s transaction revenue and its consistency/sustainability?
-tiger