Coupa Software Incorporated

Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call

12/6/2021

spk14: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Coupa Software third quarter fiscal year 2021 earnings release conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. At the conclusion of the prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If anyone should require assistance during the call, please press star 0 on your touch-and-phone. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today, Mr. Stephen Horowitz. Please begin, sir.
spk18: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Coupa Software's third quarter conference call. Joining me today are Rob Bernstein, Coupa CEO, and Tony Toscornia, CFO. Our remarks today include forward-looking statements about guidance and future results of operations, strategies, market size, products, competitive position, and potential growth opportunities. Our actual results may be materially different. Forward-looking statements involve risks 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 comparison are against the same period of the prior year. With that, I will now turn the call over to Rob.
spk02: Thanks, Stephen. Welcome, everyone, and thanks once again for joining us. Let me start with a few financial highlights from our 51st quarter of execution as a business. We had strong performance. including 38% calculated billings growth and $186 million of total revenue. We also delivered a record profitability of $0.30 per share, representing 67% growth over last year and a $28 million of adjusted free cash flows for Q3, bringing us to $130 million on a trailing 12-month basis. During the quarter, we continue to see strength in the enterprise segment with respect to large, strategic, multi-year deals. We're also firing on all cylinders in our mid-market segment with incredible growth and a very strong deal size momentum. And we are seeing an increased level of prospect engagement, including a significant desire to return to in-person meetings, which we believe to be a very positive trend. These results are all being driven by a massive push for digital transformation of the back office, resulting in widespread adoption of our comprehensive business management platform by customers of all sizes and across many industries. Companies that develop a sound strategy for this transformation and put in the work to see it implemented are seeing their status escalate. To capitalize on this digital transformation of the back office, we have a winning strategy. based on the three waves of capturing all spend, optimizing every dollar through switch synergy, and then amplifying community value. The first wave of capturing all spend is centered on our robust transactional core. Simply put, we believe that we have the best solution in the game, a fully cloud-based scalable transactional core that processes tens of millions of daily transactions while maintaining an easy-to-use intuitive interface. This enables our customers to quickly drive meaningful adoption of the platform across their organizations, even when operating with many siloed ERPs. One example is Jabil, a global Fortune 500 company focused on manufacturing solutions with more than $29 billion in revenue. 260,000 employees and 100-plus plants across 30-plus countries and a particular concentration in Asia Jabil needed one platform to integrate with their many ERPs. They migrated from an older legacy platform to Coupa and have now processed billions of dollars in spend through our platform over the past three years, including 96% of their 1.4 plus million POs issued to over 27,000 active suppliers. Most importantly, they now have visibility into and control over their business spending. Now, another key component of our transactional core is Coupa Pay, where we continue to see strong uptake with our highest attach rate ever on new deals this quarter. One of the key drivers for the Coupa Pay acceleration phase we discussed during analyst day was for us to further strengthen our partner ecosystem. To that end, we signed a partnership agreement this quarter with a major global financial services firm to expand the ability of our European and Asia Pacific customers to make fast, seamless, and secure payments via virtual cards. New and expanded partnerships are one of the areas of focus as we build to maximize our payment solution for our customers. Travel and expense is also an integral part of our transactional core. We've been thoughtfully investing in this area with the aspiration to provide our customers with the industry's most comprehensive end-to-end T&E solution, including a bookings engine, optimized pricing, and direct integration with Coupa Pay for reimbursements. We are planning to release this solution soon. Now let's surf onto the second wave of our winning strategy, where we're looking to optimize with Sweet Synergy. Our platform capabilities are helping customers unlock more value from the more than $3 trillion of spend they have cumulatively processed through the platform. Let me share a couple of examples with you. Our first example is that of a leader in the beauty and personal care industry that manufactures cosmetics in 14 nations across South and Central America, generating more than $1 billion in annual revenue. They are using Coupa supply chain design and planning to optimize their inventory, improve service to their customers, and save money. Their supply chain is very complex, with factories in four countries, 250 plus new products being introduced every year in a rapidly changing demand environment. To properly forecast, they need to understand how much inventory to build, the trade-offs between service levels and inventory holding costs, and which factories should produce which new products. Using the Coupa supply chain design and planning solution, this organization improved their overall service levels while driving a 25% reduction of total inventory, 35% reduction of their safety stock, and saved millions of dollars in the process. The second sweet synergy example I'd like to share with you highlights a multi-billion dollar frozen food delivery company that is among the first Coupa community members to take advantage of the synergistic integration between our supply chain design and strategic sourcing capabilities. First, the customer used Coupa's supply chain design capabilities to evaluate and optimize multi-stop routes for their more than 100 million of annual logistics spend across almost 300 different carriers. Then the design simulations were put into action. The simulations were driven downstream to strategic sourcing, capturing one-way direct lane full truckload costs and per mile costs for a subset of dedicated carriers. This resulted in lower costs and increased asset utilization. This is a great example of maximizing value through the combined capabilities of our supply chain design and our strategic sourcing solutions. Now let's drop in on the final and third wave of our winning strategy, amplifying community value. More specifically, amplifying the value of the data and the collective community through prescriptive insights and community interactions. First, let me give you a sense of just how much data our customer base is generating. As I noted a moment ago, we have now surpassed $3 trillion in cumulative spend on our management. with $1 trillion coming in the last year. This equates to over $80 billion per month, more than $2.7 billion per day, and well over $100 million during this earnings call alone. More importantly, our customers have saved tens of billions of dollars over the years. And as our community of customers has grown, so has our ability to increase average deal sizes fairly. When we started this journey over a decade ago, we were closing deals in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Today, our largest deals are in the mid seven figures annually, and we see a path to doing eight figure deals. And it's not just with our enterprise customers. As I mentioned last quarter, we closed our first seven figure deal in the mid market as well. With proven measurable impact and a rapidly growing data set converging to drive higher annual subscription fees, let's dive deeper into the data. Our customers have taken advantage of thousands of prescriptive insights derived from our community.ai initiative this quarter alone. These prescriptions are ranked and displayed based on the total estimated impact that actions will have on the business, empowering customers to make the right choices to optimize business results. But the vision is far broader. The power of our community comes not just from data, but also from the exponential brainpower that exists across our robust customer community, which lives directly within our core platform. One customer shared with us that prior to Coupa, every four months, their team would spend more than 60 hours reading software documentation and performing regression tests to gain insights. To optimize this process, they leveraged Coupa's user community and identified a fellow customer who had automated testing. Conversations with the customer and their IT team led to an internal development project, which allowed them to reduce cycle times by 80%. They continued to use the online community often, conducting research and trading insights on industry best practices within the community. With prescriptive insights and community interactions delivering measurable value, Expanding the size of the community and the available functionality greatly benefits our customers. Further, building on the power of community from customers to partners, last quarter we launched our Coupa app marketplace. We already have nearly 100 apps that are enabled. We're in the process of being enabled for our customers. Within these apps, there are two ways our customers are attracting value. The first is through pre-built integrations that make our customers' investments in other enterprise software more valuable. The second is where they have gained access to new functionality, such as tax engines, supplier collaborations, ESG and corporate responsibility, and many more. Let me share an example of one of the new applications in our app marketplace, an integrated tax engine that focuses on customer taxes for supplier transactions. In this ever-changing environment, it's obviously imperative that our customers understand if they're being charged the correct sales tax. The Vertex built integration supports tax calculation on invoice validation, empowering our customers with more control and oversight by pairing tax automation with KUPA's procurement transformation. And there are many other great examples like this from the app marketplace that help our customers unlock more value from our comprehensive business management platform. Because our customers are unlocking such significant value, they love to share their experiences with their colleagues. To that end, we are thrilled to be bringing back our in-person community conference in April, Coupa Inspire. As in previous years, this event will include inspirational stories of BSM transformation from some of the most well-respected companies in the world and offer attendees the opportunity to network with their peers as well as industry thought leaders and analysts. Inspire is the premier event in business spend management. It's always been a dynamic, energetic forum for our customers to interact, exchange ideas, and help new prospects behold the power of spend. To summarize our three-wave strategy, we believe that we've brought to market the world's best platform for capturing spend transactions. We've developed ways to optimize value for the spend with sweet synergy. And those two waves have helped us grow our user community and a treasure trove of data, fueling the third wave, where our community can come together to unlock exponential value that would otherwise simply not be possible. This three-way strategy grounds our vision of becoming the industry's most comprehensive, open, user-centric, prescriptive, and accelerated solution in the market. With these vision areas in mind, let me share a recent new customer win report that emphasizes why companies choose to partner with Coupa. As has happened so often over the years, the CPO was offered a free subscription from a legacy provider. But we all know that there is no such thing as free. In fact, free can be quite costly. As he evaluated his choice of partner, he found that Coupa represented the lowest risk and highest likelihood for success. What's more, the win report highlights the customer's trust in us to keep their best interests in mind and their confidence that we will continue to have an industry-leading roadmap. To help seal the deal, his previous employer has also chosen Coupa, giving him undeniable certainty of value creation. I chose to share this win report with you because it really does hit on the key reasons we win. Clear vision, strategy, shared values, history of execution, and how tightly we partner with our customers to ensure their success. It also demonstrates an increasingly prevalent trend, a thriving community of decision makers choosing to work with us wherever they go based on proven success. It's these reasons why across all industries, companies of all sizes continue to select Coupa and stay with us year in and year out. Adding these and so many other great organizations to our community is rewarding. However, this is still just the beginning. We have a massive opportunity in front of us. And as much as we're competing to win the BSM market as it currently exists, we're also galvanizing market interest. Tens of thousands of companies are still leaving value on the table by not adopting a comprehensive approach to managing their business spending. To drive awareness, we recently invested in amplifying our brands. during the World Series, F1 racing, Premier League soccer, and Bundesliga soccer. The result of these efforts was hundreds of millions of impressions and a 5x increase of traffic to Coupa.com. We believe that great companies build great brands, and we are setting out to do just that. And we're doing so grounded in our core values as a company. So as has become our custom, let me share this quarter's Most Valuable Player award winners. who best exemplify our values as voted by our colleagues across the world. I'll start with Abhijit Mukherjee, who exemplifies our first core value of ensuring customer success. Abhijit works tirelessly to ensure that our integration partners are delivering solutions with outside value for every Coupa customer. Next, Neeraj Puri was recognized for embodying our second core value, focusing on results. Neeraj expanded the depth and breadth of our competitive analysis library. He also improved our reporting to demonstrate how business value engineering impacts sales successes. Finally, Ben Simmons epitomizes our third core value, striving for excellence. Ben is best in class in how he leads his team to excellence by fostering an environment where questions are encouraged and authenticity is welcomed. Now, before I close, I'd like to mention that Gardner has selected Coupa as the leader for our procure-to-pay offering for the sixth consecutive time. We don't take this leadership designation lightly as we continue to assertively grow our business. To that end, I'd like to celebrate that we welcomed our 3,000th colleague just this quarter. On the foundation of our differentiated culture, which is grounded in a deep commitment to our core values, we aspire to operate with the agility of 300 and the might of 30,000 people. This approach continues to help us attract top talent while investing in unlocking the personal and professional aspirations of our colleagues. And speaking of talent, in the recent Great Place to Work survey results, well over 90% of our employees self-reported as ascribing to our core values. This is particularly promising given that roughly half of our current employees joined remotely during the pandemic. We're incredibly proud of the clear, measurable value that we are delivering to our community. We're proud to play a leading role in this industry as we help transform how companies do business for the better. And with that, let me now hand the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Tony Cascogna.
spk17: Thanks, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm proud to report that we delivered strong financial results for the third quarter. We continue to see rich levels of engagement with customers and prospects as we partner with them to solve their pressing business spend management needs. This is reflected most notably in our new business performance, calculated billings growth, and RPO growth. We also delivered strong gross margin, operating margin, and cash flow results for the quarter. With Q4 already well underway, we are focused on finishing the year with strong execution as we continue to invest for fiscal 23 and beyond. Let's now discuss the details of our third quarter financial results. Calculated billings for Q3 were $193 million, up 38% year over year. Total revenue for the quarter was $186 million, up 40% year over year. Subscription revenue was $165 million, up 40% year over year. Q3 non-GAAP gross margin was 74%, which is in the range of our mid-term target of 74% to 75%, as we continue to leverage our seasoned playbook for the rapid, successful integration of acquisitions. Non-GAAP operating income was $28 million, or 15% of total revenue, and non-GAAP net income was $24 million, or $0.31 per share, on approximately 77 million diluted shares. Q3 operating cash flows were $31 million, and adjusted free cash flows were $28 million. Cash at quarter end was $668 million, up from $634 million a quarter ago. In terms of complementing growth with profitability, we delivered best in class Rule of 40 results of 61%, We continue to drive consistent and significant profitability while investing for long-term durable growth. This is a key element of our agile financial model, especially in a likely forthcoming rising interest rate environment. As a reminder, we define Rule 40 as a trailing 12-month revenue growth rate plus the trailing 12-month adjusted free cash flow margin. Let me briefly touch on organic calculated billings and revenue. Q3 inorganic billings contribution from supply chain design and planning, formerly Lomasoft, landed slightly above our estimated range of $15 to $17 million going into the quarter. It's now been more than a year since we closed the acquisition, and the business operations were integrated into core CUPRA several quarters ago. In some cases, it's difficult to segregate the inorganic contribution from organic, so this should be considered an estimate. After making this adjustment, you'd arrive at an organic calculated billings growth in the mid-20s percentage-wise on a year-over-year basis for Q3. With respect to revenue, the contribution from supply chain design and planning was approximately $24 million total in Q3, including subscription revenue of $17 million, professional services revenue of $5 million, and software license revenue of $2 million. The growth of our core business is healthy and strong. Let me share a few key data points. For the fiscal year to date, new business, including new customers and add-on business, is up nearly 90%. The number of customers with annualized subscription revenue above $100,000 is is more than 1,300 at the end of Q3 compared to 1,000 a year ago. Also, we ended Q3 with approximately $1.2 billion in total RPO, a 58% increase over last year. Our robust RPO growth is a function of the strong year-to-date new business growth I just noted. We continue to see robust engagement and partnership with customers and prospects for large enterprise deals. We are also growing increasingly excited about our mid-market opportunity, which represents nearly half of our $94 billion total addressable market. As we continue to make significant investments in both enterprise and mid-market, we also look forward to continued traction in several of our other key growth levers, including payments, the federal sector, supply chain, and other solutions across our platform as the next several years unfold. We are early in our trajectory in these three areas, but are pleased with our progress and will continue to provide updates. To summarize, new business and RPO growth in our core business is healthy, and the work we are doing with respect to acquired solutions and contract migration will benefit our business and our stakeholders in the coming years. With that, let's now turn to guidance. With the recent news about the Omicron variant and new safety measures being put in place in various regions of the world, it's possible some customers and prospects will continue to operate with some level of caution. The potential impact is still unknown, but it could become a factor to consider as the world learns more in the coming weeks and months. Now for guidance. We expect total Q4 revenue of $185 to $186 million. This includes subscription revenue of $166 to $167 million and professional services and other revenue of approximately $19 million. We expect Q4 calculated billings of approximately $290 million. As a reminder, When considering calculated billings guidance from an organic perspective, you should back out the one-time opening deferred revenue benefit of $14.8 million for Lomasoft from Q4 of last year. After making this adjustment, the resulting organic calculated billings guide would be in the mid-teens, percentage-wise, up from high single digits last quarter. Additionally, you should also consider the $3 to $4 million of expected year-over-year migration of legacy Lomasoft license revenue. Moving down the income statement, we plan to continue investing in our business to capture the clear market opportunity. We expect a Q4 non-GAAP gross margin of 70% to 71%. We expect Q4 non-GAAP operating income of $8 to $10 million, and non-GAAP net income of $2 to $4 million, resulting in non-GAAP net income of $0.03 to $0.05 on approximately 77 million diluted shares for the quarter. We expect Q4 adjusted free cash flows of approximately $10 million. Moving on to the full year, we expect total revenue of $717 to $718 million. This includes subscription revenue of $627 to $628 million and professional services and other revenue of approximately $90 million. We expect a non-GAAP gross margin for the year of approximately 71% and a non-GAAP operating income for the year of $70 to $72 million, resulting in non-GAAP net income per share of $0.66 to $0.69 on approximately 76.5 weighted average diluted shares from the quarter. We will provide fiscal 23 guidance on our next call, but as you roll your models forward, we'd like to remind you that we recognize revenue based on the number of days in a quarter. And since there are fewer days in Q1 due to February, steady state subscription revenues are lower in Q1 compared to Q4. Also for Q1, as Rob mentioned, We will be hosting our in-person Inspire Conference in April in Las Vegas. We will also have some beginning-of-the-year sales-related events. These activities will increase OpEx on an apples-to-apples basis for Q1. That concludes our prepared remarks. We'd now be happy to take your questions. Operator?
spk14: Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. And also... Please limit your questions to one. Your first question is from Stan Slosky with Morgan Stanley.
spk16: Thank you so much, guys, and congratulations on a very good way to finish the quarter. From my end, maybe a quick question for Tony. Tony, you mentioned the potential impact from the variant and how people are, you know, your customers and prospects are thinking about budgets. How did that impact the guidance that you put forward for Q4? And is there an extra layer of conservatism, perhaps, that you're including in there to account for these new developments? Thank you.
spk17: Thanks, Dan. No, the Omicron variant did not factor heavily into my guidance for the quarter. Certainly it's something that we need to keep an eye on, of course, because the news is unfolding very fastly here. However, we haven't really seen any sort of meaningful impact to our customer and prospect base as of yet. It's just something that I wanted to call out should that become a much bigger issue, which all of us will be aware of from the news and the like. It's something for everyone to keep in mind.
spk16: Got it. Thank you.
spk14: Our next question is from Michael Turin with Wells Fargo.
spk08: Hey there. Thanks. Good afternoon. I appreciate you taking the question. I'll keep it to one with maybe just two parts. Tony, just in terms of the Q3 revenue upside, there are more moving pieces in the model right now. The upside was maybe a little more limited than what we've seen in prior quarters. So Is there any change to overall guidance framework or is it just some of the impacts that you laid out? And then just characterizing that and putting that in context with Q4 and what's generally a larger deal quarter that, you know, is often just tough to forecast with precision. Can you just walk through the puts and takes there as well? Thank you.
spk17: Sure, sure. Thanks, Michael. So with respect to the revenue beat, you know, it really all comes down to linearity in the quarter. In Q2, which we noted at the time, we had very favorable linearity from the timing of deal closure during the quarter. In Q3, although we did have a very strong business quarter, the linearity during the quarter was not quite as favorable as Q2. We also experienced a bit of the traditional Q3 seasonality that you see in Europe with the European holiday season. So that's certainly part of the equation as well. And with respect to Q4 guidance, Our approach is very, very consistent based on the numbers we have.
spk08: Okay. So just, I mean, in terms of characterizing, I know there have just been puts and takes of the prior years with just thinking about large deal activity and commentary around, you know, just pipeline versus closure. Is there anything you can add just to characterize the shape of what you're seeing there? And then I'll hop off. Thank you.
spk17: Sure. As we've noted in the last several quarters, we've seen increasing fidelity with regard to predictability with deals, closure rates, and engagement with customers and prospects. And that's continuing into Q4. As you noted, Q4 is one of our biggest quarters of the year. Every year it's our largest quarter of the year. So we expect that to continue. Thank you.
spk14: Your next question is from Matt VanVleet with BTIG.
spk15: Yeah, thanks for taking the question. I guess following up on the last question a little bit and what you've talked about in the past of continuing to grow the size of the landing deals. And Rob, you mentioned a customer that has 96% of their POs on the system. So Are you still seeing that same appetite? Are you seeing large enterprise customers wanting to go in and really make these wholesale, you know, digital transformational type of projects getting in? Or are you starting to hear more customers wanting to maybe take a more modularized approach as they kind of ease their way into this and just how that's affecting the pipeline? Thanks.
spk02: Sure. Thanks. Thanks for that question. You know, When COVID hit, obviously, we saw large enterprise customers, yes, either slow down their broader transformation initiatives or take a more modulized approach. We're actually seeing the opposite dynamic happening now, which is the willingness to engage back to the kind of more meaningful sales cycles we were in the heart of before COVID hit, which is broad-based, full-scale business spend management transformation. And what's really compelling, as I'm sure, I think you would know from our value proposition is very often the thinking, particularly in working with our systems integrators on these digital transformation initiatives for their clients, is that the savings and value that could be generated from a relatively fast time to value deployment of Coupa could actually be reinvested in the broader digital transformation they're doing across all areas of CRM, HCM, data storage and manipulation, collaboration, all the other key areas, many of the other key areas they're thinking about. So there's almost a double win there that we're on the cusp of capitalizing on in coming quarters and years. All right, great. Thank you.
spk14: Our next question is from Alex Izukin with Wolf Research.
spk09: Hey guys, thanks for taking the question. Rob, maybe for you, just along the lines of the last question, does it feel like we've, if you look at it from an aggregate bookings perspective, clearly momentum is improving. The deals are kind of getting back on track. You're talking about a reacceleration of momentum. Have we troughed from a bookings perspective and a revenue perspective and now it's kind of, I don't want to say smooth sailing, but you can see line of sight to back to pre-COVID levels. You can see elevated momentum in the pipeline. Like you can see the right things on the horizon and we're close at hand. And then if you think about, Tony, from a conservatism parameters in the guide, you mentioned the tough comps, but what are you, you know, kind of baking in that we should think about, you know, in terms of the actual momentum and like, are you baking in, most of the deals getting signed at the end of the quarter, better linearity, some puts and takes there would be super helpful.
spk02: Yeah, thanks, Alex. I mean, you asked a lot there. I think at the core, you're really rightfully digging into our feelings around the real health of the business. So let's dissect that a little bit in the context of everything that we're doing at Coupa, right? If you look at, to kind of take away some of the obvious areas like seasonality, obviously there's some seasonality components to this, We're obviously in the process of doing some license conversion work, as you obviously know. And there obviously have been some near-term headwinds that we fully anticipated with some of the acquisitions that we've done. If you take Bellin, for example, where we purposefully are working through modifying that offering to better serve the 80-20 rule, which means in some cases moving on from legacy business that doesn't fit that profile. but we're rather setting ourselves up for the longer term. The same kind of 80-20 principle applies to Llamasoft and what we're doing in building up our Coupa supply chain and designing capability. But when you talk about health of the business, and this is as Tony noted below, noted earlier rather, for the fiscal year to date, new business, just look at new business, including both new logos and add-on business, That's up nearly 90 percent from last year. Right. And I think another important data point that really starts to cut through the noise is that that revenue growth from the core the core itself grew faster this past quarter than any of the last several quarters in both our emerging both our enterprise segment and frankly was even more pronounced in our mid market segment. So we're seeing some really promising signs here. But it does require a little bit of dissection and cut through some of the noise around the periphery. And look, we couldn't be more excited about, as I said, the coming quarters and years.
spk17: And Alex, as you may recall, as you pointed out in the beginning of your question, the COVID-related trajectory last year from Q2 to Q3 was highly abnormal from a seasonality perspective and As I noted, it created an unusually difficult compare for Q3. We also had a bit of the more typical European seasonality this year that had some impact on Q3. And Rob walked through some of the near-term headwinds related to the work we're doing with acquisitions. But as Rob pointed out, our core business is very, very strong and growing. And Q3 new business was just slightly below that of Q2.
spk14: Your next question is from C.T. Peningrani with Mizulo.
spk01: Thanks for taking my question. Tony, it seems like some of the expenses bounced back this quarter after a dip in Q2. I'm wondering, as you look into next year, do you expect some of these pre-COVID expenses coming back? How should we think about next year?
spk17: Sure. The key thing to point out here, C.T., is In Q1, we're going to be having our Inspire Conference in April, which we're very excited about. It's been very successful for many years, so we're looking forward to that. The past couple of years, we've been doing more localized, highly curated events, but it'll be great to be getting everyone back together. So that will have some additional sales and marketing expense. We also have some decently sized beginning of the year sales events to kick off the year, which we're very excited about. So you should consider those in the P&L for Q1. Also, of course, we have fewer days in Q1. So just from a pure mathematical standpoint, the apples to apples revenue goes a little bit down because we recognize fewer days of revenue. And on top of that, I would just say, you know, we're excited about our business and we're continuing to make investments across the business.
spk14: Your next question is from Brad Seals with Bank of America.
spk07: Oh, great. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Wanted to ask a question about just the in person meetings coming back inspires coming back and in April. How important is that conference been traditionally For you know lead generation, you know, beginning of the year and and you mentioned a return to office could be a real positive for your, for your business in person meetings. Maybe just elaborate a little bit on that and what you meant there. Thank you so much.
spk02: Yeah, sure, Brad. Absolutely. In both cases, we think that getting back to a more in-person interaction ought to present the tailwind for our business. Physically, being able to sit across the table from a senior executive and lock arms around a broad-based digital transformation project is something we simply haven't had the opportunity to do for nearly two years now. So that in and of itself we believe, ought to be a tailwind. And Inspire undoubtedly is a real, not just a prospect building sort of conference, but it's an energy building conference. And we have thousands of customers that are highly successful with deployments of Coupa that are delivering measurable value for them. Obviously, those people in the same physical environment with prospects and partners, even our own colleagues, is incredibly, you know, energy creating, right? And that energy leads very often to faster deal cycles, you know, fair price points of those sales cycles, quicker deployments, more value being created. So we're looking forward to that, and certainly, as Tony mentioned, hoping that, I think as we all hope, that these variants are not going to present, you know, the kind of safety precautions that led us to close down, you know, nearly two years ago, right?
spk14: Your next question is from Peter Levine with Evercore.
spk11: Great. Thank you for taking my questions. Rob, you highlighted a new pay partnership with a global financial service firm. Can you provide any or some additional color on how the revenue split works, expectations in terms of contributions, or kind of what the bank customers are using now to And just a quick follow-up is, was this partnership factored into the metrics given at the analyst day around pay, or should we look at this as kind of additional upside? Thank you.
spk02: Well, look, I mean, I think we're never going to limit our own upside in what we do working with anyone, whether it be a partner, whether it be a customer, whether it be our pace of development. We never want to limit our upside. But, you know, looking backward, first of all, just looking at the pay business, let's take a moment for that. things are pretty darn healthy, right? Our customer ads have been strong and they're getting stronger. We continue to have new logo attach rates of greater than 30%. In fact, in Q3, it was even higher than that. In fact, it was our largest attach rate quarter ever for that offering. And our energies are being spent in what I believe to be the right places, building a broader ecosystem of partnerships, no doubt, one of the ones I mentioned in my prepared remarks. But even more so, working with our customer community of deployed Coupa Pay customers and deploying Coupa Pay customers to suss out the 80-20 functionality we need to continue to putting into our releases, three of which we do every year, to get to a place where we can develop really the industry's first all-in Coupa Pay offering that can support the needs of companies from mid-market to the largest enterprises in the world. So that's really what we're playing for here, and we feel like we're well on our way.
spk14: Your next question is from Ryan McDonald with Needham.
spk04: Thank you for taking my questions. Rob, for you, you started to talk about travel and expense again and some of the investments you've made there to sort of relaunch that product or improve upon that product. Can you talk about, especially now that you're thinking about in-person conferences next year, how you're starting to think about travel and expense and if we're going to see a recovery there over the next six, 12 months? Thanks.
spk02: Sure. I mean, look, it's a great question. I wish I had an answer that could be delivered with incredible fidelity around the rate at which travel will kick in. But what I can tell you is what we're doing which is we're expanding a really robust expense management offering that's being used now, today, by hundreds of customers around the world to expand upstream with a bookings engine that's going to make it super simple and intuitive for them to actually make their travel plans, to seamlessly integrate that into our expenses core, to seamlessly make it possible for you to then pay and reimburse for that travel and expenses. and leverage the power of our community to identify fraud and recommend and prescribe travel options for employees and users around the world. So while I can't predict you the pace at which travel is likely to improve, I think we all intuitively think it will, we just don't know at what pace, what I can tell you is we're gonna be in market with an offering that I think is quite compelling and unlocks more of the value of our suite synergy and delivers measurable results for customers.
spk14: Your next question is from Steve Koenig with SMVCNICO.
spk10: Hi, Rob and Tony. Thanks for taking my question. I'm curious what you all are seeing with respect to business spend. And I don't know if I heard your business spend index that you sometimes highlight. And how, if at all, are supply chains issues and labor shortages affecting your outlook as it runs through any impact on customers' business spend. Thank you very much.
spk02: Sure. It's a very interesting picture that's developing there. By the way, if you're interested in this, simply go to spendindex.com and you could drill in a little deeper on what we're seeing industry by industry, category by category. But here's the big picture of what I see happening in this whole supply chain area. it's very similar to when COVID first hit. What happened was that the world was really, as we all recall, in this acute kind of situation. And that meant, by the way, deal sizes stopped, deal closures significantly halted. People were just trying to figure out how to begin to work from home and do what they need to do. And what we're seeing today, interestingly, is that we're seeing the downstream implications of COVID on global supply chain issues, right? And those global supply chain issues today are acute, very similarly to the way COVID was acute for us in March of last year. So what we're doing in this market, in this environment, is that we're helping our customers, we're helping prospects address kind of near-term acute supply chain issues with some of the tools that we've developed that we have in the marketplace, but we're at the same time locking arms with them and anticipating broader and deeper supply chain design and planning transformations to take hold once this kind of acute phase begins to settle. And I can tell you that perspective is informed not only by my own personal interactions with senior executives within our prospect and customer base, but via many touch points with our own sales leadership team, which is having these conversations you know, day in and day out. But we're really proud to be right in front of them even in this acute phase at some level. And I shared with you in my prepared remarks one example of, just one example of immediately being able to save on freight and leverage our integrated supply chain design and planning to sourcing capability. So it's good today, but it's even more promising as we kind of get past this acute phase.
spk14: The next question is from Terry Tillman with Truist.
spk06: Yeah, thanks for taking my question, Rob and Tony. It's one question, I promise. It's two parts, though. You know, in the actual quote of the press release, Rob, you talk about in 4Q actually closing strategic customer deals. Anything notable in terms of, you know, you've got a month under your belt, larger kind of milestone deals that were closed that's kind of giving you confidence? And then secondly... Related to that, are you seeing Europe actually bounce back here in the fourth quarter today? Thank you.
spk02: Well, without calling out customer names, without getting their approval on that, I probably wouldn't do that. But when I look at some of the late-stage deals in our pipeline, as well as some of the ones we've closed in the course of the previous weeks, it's a very compelling picture for us, and it gives us even more energy to push forward at full speed. In terms of Europe, I don't think I have anything statistically significant in the report. There are signs that are negative. There are signs that are positive by country, by week, if you will. So unfortunately, not much there to share.
spk17: And Terry, just to add, the European seasonality that I noted is the typical Q3 holiday seasonality that you historically see in the European region. Nothing out of the norm. And then on top of that, it brings home the point that the COVID-related trajectory last year kind of washed away the impact of that typical seasonality, us being meaningfully up from Q2 to Q3 when things started kind of improving to some degree at that point. So really the point there is just to call out that we're seeing more normalized Q3 seasonality in Europe this year.
spk06: Understood. That's helpful. Thanks.
spk14: The next question is from Brent Braceland with Piper Sandler.
spk03: Hi, this is Clark Jeffries on for Brent Braceland. RPO growth accelerated for the fourth straight quarter to 58%. I think it is the highest in several years. You gave some good color on the deal size trajectory, but I was wondering if you could comment on how duration has trended. How much is duration helping the uptick in RPO that we're seeing, or is this predominantly new business here today?
spk17: Yeah, thanks for the question. So, you know, you're right. RPO growth has grown meaningfully, and it's up 58% year-over-year, which is a strong figure. As far as duration, there's really no impact from duration. You know, whether you're looking at the mean or the median, deal links have been very consistent the last several quarters, and even going back further than that, very, very consistent. You know, three years on average for a new business deal, and less than that for renewals. You know, The reason RPO is growing so healthily is simply that we're doing a lot more new business this year than we did last year, which Rob and I both talked about today. And those deals tend to be large, multi-year deals, so you get that pronounced effect in RPO. And also, we don't typically discuss CRPO, current RPO figures, but to give you a sense this quarter, CRPO growth was in the mid-40s year-over-year, percentage-wise. You know, and if you back out Lomasoft, it was still well into the mid-30s percentage-wise. So, again, this is a very strong reflection of the healthy new business growth in our core.
spk14: The next question is from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.
spk13: Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Actually, just to touch on what you just said with organic CRPO growth in the mid-30s, Can you just talk about, you know, the divergence between that mid-30s and, you know, versus some of the organic billings numbers we have seen over the past several quarters and, you know, what might be causing some of that difference and, you know, how to think about trailing 12-month billings, you know, as a leading indicator maybe versus that CRPO disclosure that you just gave?
spk17: Sure, sure, sure. So thanks, Taylor, for the question. As I noted, new business deals are on average three years. We often do large deals that are even longer than that, right? And so when you look at RPO, if you do a three-year deal, of course in billings you get a one-year benefit in the numerator for the current period, but in RPO you get a full three years benefit from that, right? So mathematically, it's very strong. When you look at CRPO, as Rob mentioned in his remarks earlier, there's some near-term kind of friction or headwinds in the financial modeling perspective that pertain to some of the legacy agreements from Lomasoft and some of the other acquisitions we've done, which we are working through, of course, to benefit our stakeholders and our business in the coming quarters and years. You, of course, have the license migration that's going on and our push for professional services to continue to have our partners very strategically perform those professional services. So some of the near-term noise and calculated billings, really, you cut through some of that when you look at the current RPO numbers. And as I mentioned, we don't typically share those. But this quarter, we felt like it was particularly important to give a clear picture of the underlying health of the business.
spk14: Great. Thanks. And next question is from Bob Napoli with Wig & Blair.
spk19: Thank you. Yes, I guess just following up on that, I had the same question on the divergence there, but with the momentum that you seem to have on new business and on the growth of RPO, as we think about, I know you're not giving guidance for next year, but should we see, you know, acceleration? Do you have confidence in your 30% growth? revenue growth targets over the medium term given the rebound you're seeing? Any color on the medium to longer term growth targets organically that you've had?
spk17: Thanks for the question. So we give next year's top line revenue guidance formally at the next call. So we'll address that more specifically at our next call. I think our approach will be very consistent with what it's been in the last several years.
spk14: Your next question is from Rishi Deloria with RBC.
spk12: Hi, this is Richard Bolan on for Rishi. So it's great to hear the continued traction that you're seeing in the mid-market. Could you maybe take a step back for us and talk about what's driving the strength there in the mid-market, maybe what you're doing from a go-to-market standpoint? or any ways you've kind of adopted certain products for the platform to better suit the mid-market? Thanks.
spk02: Sure, that's a fine question and one that we committed to really drilling into as a business back at our roadshow. You know, for those of you that may not have been following us for now, well, I guess over a decade, is that we really began in the mid-market and we built the business quarter over quarter in a way where the average subscription revenue per deal has increased virtually every quarter now for 51 quarters. And what we committed as the IPO is that even though we made our way into the enterprise, we're actually going to go back and we're going to find a way to build a really strong mid-market and upper mid-market business where the cost of customer acquisition was reasonable, where the renewal rate was incredibly strong, where the price per deal was fair and growing, and where the value we'd be delivering to customers would keep them forever. And I'm very excited to share with you that we've done very much all of that since. Now, why are they selecting us? Well, first of all, from a value proposition perspective, they're getting a full suite of business management solutions with an incredibly fast time to value, with embedded best practices and access to community of thousands of other customers around the world that they could learn from on a real-time basis, all while delivering unprecedented usability, wide adoption, and saving money for their companies as they scale and they grow. So we're being selected as the platform of choice for business management for these companies as they continue pursuing their own missions and visions. And to address that from a go-to-market perspective and an implementation perspective and a partner perspective and a business model perspective, we have done the heavy lifting over these years to put us in a position to easily say to you that the mid-market and upper mid-market businesses can stand on their own, are growing exceptionally rapidly, and have a really, really special future ahead for them.
spk14: The next question is from Pat Walravens with JMP Securities.
spk05: Hi, this is Aaron Kimson. I'm for Pat. I know that you guys don't regularly disclose gross or net retention, but could you give some color on the magnitude of those metrics and trends you're seeing within them?
spk17: Sure. So as far as renewal rates, the gross renewal rate and dollar-based expansion have been in the same range for the last several quarters and As you know, historically, we've had very strong figures for both.
spk02: While we wait for the next question, I actually would like to add to that in terms of renewal rate because it's one of the areas of incredible resiliency that we've seen with this business. A number of folks reached out to us when COVID hit and were wondering how resilient our install base would be, particularly when our primary buyer, someone that is a buyer, and in some sense makes a living at looking at other market alternatives and pushing down price points, et cetera. And I can tell you we've maintained a very resilient and consistent renewal rate through the COVID environment, have been paid, paid on time, and paid fairly for the value that we continue to deliver.
spk14: At this time, there are no further questions.
spk18: All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining us again this quarter, and we look forward to speaking to you in about 90 days. Thank you.
spk14: That concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.
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