Which ERP fits a SaaS company between 50 and 500 employees?

What actually breaks between 50 and 500 people

At 50 people, finance is usually one or two people, a small-business ledger and a billing tool. It works. By 150, there is a second entity for a foreign hire base, revenue is recognised monthly across annual contracts, and the deferred revenue schedule has become a spreadsheet with named tabs. By 300, an auditor is asking questions that spreadsheet cannot answer twice the same way.

The pattern is that structure, not headcount, drives the purchase. A single-entity company of 400 people can run on a lean stack far longer than a 90-person company with three entities and two currencies. Write down your entity and currency map before shortlisting anything — it eliminates more options than any demo.

The second forcing function is board reporting. When investors ask for margin by product line and region, and the answer takes three days, the reporting model is the constraint. That is a different problem from revenue recognition and it points at a different system.

How the three shortlisted systems differ in practice

NetSuite is the broadest. If the company ships hardware alongside software, runs a professional-services arm billed against the ledger, or plans acquisitions with operational footprints, keeping it in one suite avoids owning integrations permanently. The price is a 4–9 month partner-led project and real internal time.

Sage Intacct is finance-first with the strongest dimensional reporting of the three. Product, region, cost centre and customer become dimensions rather than account segments, which is why SaaS teams with complex internal reporting keep choosing it. It is thin outside finance and typically takes 3–6 months.

Light is narrower on purpose: a finance system for multi-entity, multi-currency technology companies with revenue recognition native to the core and a documented 2–12 week go-live. Named customers include Tillo, KeyShot and Alva Labs. It will not run manufacturing, inventory or a shop floor, and it is the wrong first purchase for a single-entity starter — those buyers should look at Business Central or NetSuite.

A scoping checklist for a SaaS evaluation

Entity and currency map

Today and in 24 months, including intercompany recharges. This decides the shortlist more than anything else on this page.

Contract shapes

Annual prepaid, monthly, usage-based, mid-term upgrades. Bring the two ugliest contracts to every demo and ask for the schedule live.

Billing boundary

Decide whether billing stays in a dedicated tool or moves into the ledger. Getting this wrong doubles the integration work later.

Close calendar target

Name the day you want to close by. Then ask each vendor which of their references actually hits it.

Total project cost

Licence plus implementation plus internal hours. Light starts from $35k/year; NetSuite and Intacct are quote-based and scope-sensitive.

What we would tell a CFO at this size

If anything physical is in the business model, start with NetSuite and stop reading. If board reporting complexity is the pain, start with Sage Intacct. If you are multi-entity, multi-currency, software-only and behind on revenue recognition, put Light third on the list and test it against the other two on the same close scenario.

Whatever the order, insist on one thing: run your own numbers through each system during evaluation. A trial balance, one intercompany elimination and one revenue schedule will tell you more than any comparison table, including ours.