Vertex, Inc. (VERX) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning. And welcome to the Vertex Inc. Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joe Crivelli. Please go ahead.

Hello, and thanks for joining us to discuss Vertex's second quarter financial results. I'm Joe Crivelli, Vice President, Investor Relations. David DeStefano, our President and CEO; and John Schwab, our CFO, are also with us today. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements about expected future results. Actual financial results may differ due to risks and uncertainties. These risks and uncertainties are described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In our remarks today, we will also refer to non-GAAP financial metrics. A reconciliation of these metrics to GAAP is provided in today's press release. The call is being recorded and will be available for replay on our Investor Relations website. I'll now turn the call over to David.

Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining us. In the second quarter, we delivered on several important strategic and financial priorities. The financial results once again had numerous highlights, but I want to cover the strategic developments that we have announced recently as they position us for sustaining the profit-driven growth that has been the hallmark of our company for more than 45 years. Earlier today, we announced the acquisition of ecosio, a fast-growing Austrian company specializing in e-invoicing and EDI for $69 million in cash, along with a multi-year revenue-based earn-out. The non-uniform proliferation of e-invoicing mandates with several large economies soon to adopt new requirements is making global reporting compliance more challenging for our enterprise customers. With this acquisition, we unlock additional value for our customers while opening new market opportunities for Vertex. This acquisition will enable us to address the burgeoning opportunity of e-invoicing head-on. We were attracted to ecosio for a number of reasons; first, its scalable fully cloud-based platform; second, its ability to handle e-invoicing across many countries that have mandates today; third, its ability to quickly expand coverage as new mandates are introduced; and fourth, the ease with which we can integrate the ecosio offering with the Vertex platform of VAT compliance and O Series tax determination. In fact, we have been working on integrating their technology on our platform since February as a potential partner. So we intend to launch our combined offering shortly. By bringing together Vertex and ecosio, we can deliver a comprehensive global solution with reliable end-to-end indirect tax reporting along with continuous transaction control or CTC capabilities to mitigate the risk of non-compliance. This in turn will streamline the entire compliance lifecycle from tax determination through reporting. So I'm pleased to welcome the entire ecosio team to the Vertex family and look forward to bringing the two organizations together in the third quarter. Also in late June, we announced the acquisition of tax-specific artificial intelligence capabilities. This technology will apply AI to simplify and expedite the manual and time-consuming processes of tax categorization. This involves matching customers’ SKUs with applicable tax rates wherever they do business globally. Tax categorization is required not only when implementing a new Vertex solution but is also an essential ongoing task as SKUs, rates and jurisdictional rules are constantly changing. Getting this right is critical for achieving tax accuracy, especially for high-volume businesses that must manage indirect tax compliance globally at scale. Consistent with the hallmark of our 45 years of success, numerous customers have signed up to be design partners to ensure we deliver with excellence. Additionally, beyond product categorization, we will be deploying the acquired AI capabilities to support furthering our industry-leading tax content database and have application with our data management capabilities. We are excited about the commercial and financial potential of this technology and this acquisition. Now turning to the financials. When we talk with investors about our financial goals, we typically mention long-term rule of 40 targets, including mid to high teens revenue growth, mid-20s adjusted EBITDA margin, and a 65% to 70% free cash flow to adjusted EBITDA conversion rate. For the second quarter results, we are making good progress towards these goals. Revenue was $161.1 million in the second quarter, up 15.3% year-over-year, software subscription growth was 15.8% and cloud revenue growth was higher than our full-year guidance at nearly 30%. Adjusted EBITDA was $38.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin was 23.9%. Notably, since completing our multi-year investment program one year ago, we've grown adjusted EBITDA in the mid to high double digits for four quarters in a row and seen our adjusted EBITDA margin expand by over 800 basis points. Accelerating our cash flow conversion following our three-year investment cycle was an essential financial priority of our organization as it demonstrates earnings quality and the power of our financial model. So I'm very pleased that the second quarter free cash flow was a record $36.9 million, up from $4 million in Q1. While the increase in free cash flow is in part due to the accounts receivable collections catch-up that we have discussed previously, the performance still far exceeded our internal expectations. In addition, this quarter, NRR was 110%, down 1 point from 111% in last year's second quarter. Scaled customer count, which represents customers delivering annual revenue of over $100,000, grew 14% year-over-year, and GRR was 95% in the second quarter, which achieves our targeted best-in-class range of 94% to 96%. Two of our customer metrics were impacted by the completion of our Systax acquisition in the second quarter. John will provide more color in a moment. Including Systax, ARR was $548.4 million, up 17.3%, and average annual revenue per customer was $123,560, up 13% year-over-year. While the overall revenue growth rate and customer metrics were strong and in line with our expectations, they were a bit lower than the last two quarters. This is in part due to the planned strategic slowdown in implementation services and the publicly reported slower than expected migration acceleration of SAP ECC customers to HANA S4. Beyond that, we did see somewhat lower cross-sell and up-sell activity in the first half of the year. On the flip side, a more positive trend was that the second quarter was our second best of the last two years for new logo revenue, and June was the best month of the year for cross-sell and up-sell. Given our visibility into second half opportunities, we remain confident in our outlook and have narrowed our full-year revenue guidance to the upper part of the range. We have also substantially increased our adjusted EBITDA guidance. John will discuss this in a moment. Finally, I'll note that in the second quarter, we were GAAP earnings positive for the third quarter in a row. And while this may change temporarily in the back half due to integration expenses related to ecosio, we believe the ability to deliver positive GAAP earnings and positive free cash flow makes Vertex an uncommon SaaS company. Now turning to notable wins in the quarter. One of the biggest wins in the second quarter was with an existing customer in the food delivery industry. This customer renewed its contract with Vertex in May. In addition to a significant increase in entitlements, the customer also upgraded its mobile transaction processing systems to Vertex O Series Edge. The result was more than seven figures of new revenue for Vertex. Also in the second quarter, organic growth for a global specialty food and beverage retailer led to additional tax determination entitlements. As transaction volumes rise with increased adoption of their mobile app, we are expanding our partnership to meet their growing requirements. We've seen increased investment over the life of the partnership, with revenue from this top 10 customer now in the mid-seven figures. An SAP-driven ECC to S/4HANA cloud transformation resulted in a mid-six figure competitive upsell for a transportation equipment manufacturer. As part of their move to the cloud, this customer took the opportunity to address increased demand and complexity with their leasing services. Our differentiated industry-specific tax content turned this opportunity in our favor. In total, this ended up being a fourfold increase in ARR for this longstanding customer. As part of their analysis, the customer did solicit competitive bids, and our competition tried very hard to buy the business with significantly discounted pricing. However, Vertex prevailed as we were able to leverage our long-term relationship with the customer and track record of top-notch customer support, as well as our close relationship with SAP. A cloud transformation resulted in a mid-six figure win from a national clothing retailer. This longstanding customer had relied on Vertex to support their business in North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pac. The burden of maintaining a tax engine within their infrastructure was great enough to initiate their move to the cloud with Vertex in advance of a larger ERP migration. This 24-year customer did not see competitive bids during the process, which is evident of their confidence in Vertex and our solutions. Investors are sometimes surprised that the number of major companies that still calculate indirect tax with homegrown solutions. As an example, we had a win in the second quarter with a subsidiary of one of the largest financial services companies in the world that wanted to sunset their internally developed VAT calculation solution. This mid-six figure deal was catalyzed by the company’s continued M&A activity and their inability of the legacy code to seamlessly integrate with a new ERP system. Another along these lines, Vertex won a low six-figure new customer when a multibillion-dollar data analytics company reevaluated its approach to indirect tax in conjunction with the consolidation of multiple ERPs to a single instance of Oracle. Due to the nature of their business, they needed a flexible solution that could manage a high volume of transactions when subscription billing activities peak at month-end. Interestingly, the incumbent solution was a combination of two competitors' data overlaid by the company's own manual processes. On the new logo front, we had a number of competitive displacements. An international professional services provider selected Vertex over an incumbent competitor to support its SAP S/4HANA cloud transformation journey. This led to high six figures of new revenue for Vertex. Likewise, a national facilities management provider selected Vertex to support its implementation of Workday Financials. Organic growth changed their tax scenarios requiring greater agility to support business expansion. Their existing solution was not able to scale and meet their complex needs. Additionally, they were extremely unhappy with the level of customer service from an incumbent competitor who had been largely unresponsive. The result was a new scale customer for Vertex. And on the international front, we had a six-figure new logo win with a Brazilian fashion company that was implementing Oracle Cloud. We were referred into the deal through our partnership with Shopify. The customer was using one of our competitors previously, but they had outgrown their capabilities, which were focused on the small business segment of the market and were looking for a partner that could support their aggressive worldwide growth plans. Finally, we just went live with a major Japanese conglomerate that selected Vertex to support a 58-country global tax automation project spanning North and South America, EMEA, and APAC. This 18-month implementation project was one of the most complex ever completed by Vertex and one that we believe our technology is singularly qualified to handle in the indirect tax automation industry. John will now take you through the financials. John?

Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. I'll now review our second quarter financial results and provide guidance for the third quarter and full year of 2024. In the second quarter, revenue was $161.1 million, up 15.3% compared to last year's second quarter. Subscription revenue increased 15.8% period-over-period to $136.4 million. Services revenue grew at 12.8% to $24.7 million. As we have mentioned previously, we are intentionally slowing services revenue this year by steering implementation revenue to our channel partners who are an important referral source for our new software opportunities. As a result, we expect services revenue growth to continue to decelerate in the third and the fourth quarter. Cloud revenue was $66.3 million in the second quarter, up 29.6% from last year's second quarter and ahead of our guidance for the year. Net revenue retention or NRR was 110%, down one percentage point compared to last year. And gross revenue retention or GRR remained at 95% at quarter end within our targeted range of 94% to 96%. As David mentioned, for the first time this quarter, we are including Systax, our Brazilian subsidiary, in our annual recurring revenue and average annual revenue per customer. This is because we acquired the remaining ownership of the company during the second quarter. Note, however, that the Systax financials have been consolidated with ours since 2020. Accordingly, including Systax, ARR was $548.4 million, up 17.3% compared to last year's second quarter, and AARPC was $123,560, up 13%. Excluding Systax, ARR was $542.3 million, up 16% and AARPC was $126,400, up 15.8%. There was no GRR or NRR impact from the inclusion of Systax. For the remainder of the income statement discussion, I will be referring to non-GAAP metrics. These non-GAAP metrics are reconciled to GAAP results in this morning's earnings press release. Gross profit for the second quarter was $118.8 million, and gross margin was 73.7%. This compares with gross profit of $99.1 million and a 70.9% gross margin in the same period last year. Gross margin in our subscription software revenue was 80.4% compared to 78.4% in last year's second quarter and 78.6% in the first quarter of 2024. And our gross margin on services revenue was 36.8% compared to 30.5% in last year's second quarter and 40.5% in the first quarter of 2024. Turning to operating expenses. In the second quarter, research and development expense was $12.7 million compared to $11.9 million last year. With capitalized software included, R&D spend was $34.7 million for the second quarter, which represents 21.6% of revenue compared to 17.8% of revenue in the prior year period. Selling and marketing expense was $37 million or 23% of total revenues, an increase of $5.2 million and approximately 16.5% from the prior year period. And general and administrative expense was $30.6 million, down $2.6 million from last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $38.5 million, an increase of $16.5 million or 75.2% year-over-year and exceeding the high end of our quarterly guidance by $5.5 million. Our earnings quality is demonstrated by our very strong cash flow in the second quarter. Operating cash flow was a record $57.7 million, and free cash flow was a record $36.9 million. This was in part impacted by improved accounts receivable collections that had been necessary since we converted the ERP system last year. We estimate that this had a positive impact on free cash flow of approximately $10 million to $12 million. We believe that there will be additional gains to be had here. So we are optimistic that we can continue to deliver strong positive free cash flow on an ongoing basis. We ended the second quarter with $325.5 million of unrestricted cash and cash equivalents and no bank debt, and our investment securities totaled $8.7 million. For additional liquidity, we also have $200 million of unused availability under our line of credit. As noted in the ecosio press release this morning, we will use approximately $69 million of cash when we close the deal, which is expected to be later this quarter. We expect ecosio to contribute approximately $15 million of revenue in the first full year after closing and to be modestly dilutive to adjusted EBITDA for the first two years after closing as we continue to invest in the business before turning adjusted EBITDA accretive in the third year. Now turning to guidance for the third quarter of 2024. We expect total revenue in the range of $164 million to $167 million, which would represent 14.1% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We do not break out revenue guidance between software and services, but I do want to provide some added color here and note that the planned slowdown in services will impact our overall revenue growth rate more noticeably in the third quarter. We do expect software revenue growth to remain in the high teens in the third quarter fueled by strong cloud growth. Despite accelerating second half investments, including AI-related R&D, we expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $33 million to $35 million, which would represent an increase of $7 million at the midpoint. For the full year, we are adjusting guidance as follows. We are narrowing the full-year revenue guidance at the upper part of the range and now expect total revenue of $654 million to $660 million, representing annual revenue growth of 14.8% at the midpoint. Prior guidance was $650 million to $660 million. We now expect adjusted EBITDA in the range of $139 million to $145 million, representing a year-over-year increase of over $40 million at the midpoint. This is also a significant increase from the prior guidance of $130 million to $135 million. And we continue to expect full-year cloud revenue growth of 28%. Note that this guidance does not include any impact from ecosio. We will adjust guidance accordingly after the transaction closes. David will now make some closing comments before we open up for Q&A. David?

Thanks, John. In summary, it was an eventful first half of 2024. With the strategic transactions we have announced, we have set the stage for continued technology leadership and accelerating profitable growth in the indirect tax space. We are very excited about the potential our acquisitions bring to the table and what they will enable within the Vertex solution in the coming months and years. Our strong financial performance is possible thanks to the winning formula we have put in place to drive success. We are extending our global capabilities and the power of our unified platform while strengthening our partner relationships and consistently delivering exceptional customer value and service. Because of this, customers continue to turn to Vertex when their business complexity grows and disrupts their ability to be as tax compliant as they need to be. Our market-leading indirect tax solutions and 900 million rule content database are mission-critical for our customers looking to support business growth and manage continuous compliance globally. This was evident in the deals we won this quarter as customers selected Vertex to effectively manage indirect taxes across multiple enterprise applications, global jurisdictions and high transaction volumes. With that, operator, please open the call for questions.

Our first question will come from Brad Reback with Stifel.

David, on your commentary around lower cross-sell and up-sell in the first half of the year, how would you sort of break that out between a lower renewal cohort in the first half versus sales execution? And then I have a quick follow-up.

I'm going to let John answer the specifics on that just to make it simple.

As we think about sort of the change there, again, what I would say is we talked a little bit about softness from the cross-sell and up-sell, and we did see a little bit of a pullback. I think if you recall, we did have a very strong Q4 and we got a lot of benefit there. While those numbers are still there, some of that backlog and some of that activity really got spent. And it's not uncommon for us to see a little bit of a slower start to that cross-sell, up-sell activity as the years get going. And so we feel like we're on target there. And I think from an additional entitlement standpoint, there was also a piece there that was a little bit softer in the second quarter. So that's sort of how you see that little bit of a pullback that you saw in the NRR ratio.

And then on NRR, I know it was down 1% year-over-year, but it was actually down 2 percentage points sequentially, which is a bit of a larger move given the backward-looking nature of that metric. Was it the same issues impacting that that impacted the lower cross-sell, up-sell or were there other items there?

They were the big drivers, Brad. They were the two big drivers. Again, cross-sell, up-sell really was the one that was softer, again, driven by the fact that of that real strong Q4. Again, the budgets were a bit depleted. So not uncommon for us to see that. And again, I think that kind of carried its way through. So we weren't really surprised by it. And again, the guidance we gave for the full year, we have confidence in how we're going to work through the back end of the year.

Our next question will come from Joshua Reilly with Needham.

Congrats on the ecosio acquisition. I guess a couple of details on the deal here. First, I believe they operate in about 30 countries. What is the right number in terms of where most business and your customers are operating today? And then second, is there any type of provision in the deal agreement that would allow another bidder to come in with a separate offer? And then I have a follow-up.

Josh, I appreciate the two questions. And just to satisfy the latter one because obviously, we had an experience here in Q1 of this year. No, this is purely regulatory, perfunctory regulatory. There's no open bidding process, no window that can change the outcome. It's just the regulators going through their normal approvals on any transaction. As far as the opportunity here, I think ecosio really gives us the ability to expand our business in a number of ways, and the technology they have is really the leading reason why we were so excited about the opportunity moving forward. And I see great potential in us bringing that into the market here. We've been working with them for months. So we'll be ready to hit the market here in Q3 with the offering.

And then just following up on that, it also appears they have an EDI solution, which would be a new market for you guys. There's obviously a lot of legacy and modern cloud players in that kind of product set. Is that something that you would envision further investments in entering that market aggressively as well as e-invoicing?

The focus with the 30 countries they cover is really, Josh, around how do we expand that first and foremost through the CTC. There was good overlap in terms of what our priority countries were with the portfolio they already cover, and we're really going to focus there; they have some great EDI customers. And I think as we go through the journey together, we'll explore that further. But both sides are exceptionally clear. The focus and the opportunity is really in the CTC space. They give us a platform with what they built in EDI that scales at the volume that we believe is going to be the invoicing volume we're going to see as we move forward here. And with the bigger economies that are now starting to move into it, like France and Germany, this well positions us to be supportive of our customers' needs in those jurisdictions.

Our next question will come from Rob Oliver with Baird.

With your comments about the first half being slightly weaker on the cross-sell and up-sell. On the other hand, David, in your prepared remarks, you mentioned that June was the best cross-sell month of the year. I wanted to get some additional insight on whether this indicates a change in market dynamics regarding willingness to buy, or is it something your team is implementing internally? Also, how does the pipeline look as we approach Q3? I have a quick follow-up as well.

I believe you're touching on an important point. We conducted a significant amount of cross-selling in the fourth quarter, which led us to adjust our budget. Typically, enterprise customers show stronger performance in the latter half of the year. The results in June certainly suggest success, and we expect to see positive developments in our pipeline moving forward. The reason we increased our guidance for the second half of the year is due to our strong visibility into upcoming opportunities, which gives us confidence in our team's capabilities and expected execution. I see this more as a timing issue rather than a fundamental shift in competitive dynamics. Our brand strength and the support from our partners for new cross-sell opportunities remain unchanged. Therefore, I feel very assured in stating that this is a timing matter.

And then just a quick follow-up relative to the current Pagero partnership to the extent that you guys can or are willing to comment, I would like to hear how should we think about potential either transition there or unwind or what the right way to think about that is and timing?

Rob, spot on and should address it head-on. We'll be looking to unwind that moving forward here. Obviously, it served us for a period of time and we enjoyed our relationship with them while we were partners. But now moving forward here with the wonderful technology we acquired and actually the scalability of it was super impressive to us relative to what we've seen with other partners. So this is actually a good move for us and would be a more efficient move for our customers going forward.

Our next question will come from Chris Quinter with Morgan Stanley.

Just wanted to follow up on that ecosio acquisition. Is there any color you can provide on their growth rate? I know you mentioned high growth. And then the 15 million in revenue contribution that you expect over the next 12 months, are those inclusive of synergies or just stand-alone at ecosio?

The $15 million is the stand-alone projection for ecosio. There will be some modest synergies included, but we want to highlight the size and significance of ecosio as a separate entity while considering the purchase price against the overall scale of the acquisition. That’s the perspective we aimed to provide.

The growth rate has been impressive; we don't give specifics out on their growth rate. We want to go on the process of actually auditing; they were a private company. But it was an impressive growth rate that actually attracted us to the business and their technology.

And then I wanted to take a step back and ask about AI at a higher level. We've seen companies adopt AI to create internal software tools across multiple different use cases. And there was a recent article that Amazon is using AI to build some of its own internal tax compliance tool. So it would be great to hear your thoughts on how you think that kind of landscape will shake out and what are the opportunities and the risks for...

Chris, as we've often said, our number one competitor is the in-house capabilities of the customers we work with, that's often what we're replacing. And so it's not surprising to me that a leading-edge company like Amazon is exploring how they can apply AI. I think in that scenario, they're using it primarily for just invoice validation, which is more of a finance accounting versus a tax compliance solution. But that is part of the reason we made the exciting acquisition we did in June because it affords us to productize something that when a customer creates a tool, oftentimes the challenge they have is how do they maintain it. It all feels good when they launch it. And then over time, it becomes this unwieldy thing that can't keep up as the business continues to morph and grow. And so one of the things that we've been so successful in is taking tools like that and turning them into scalable products that support our customers not only in the short term but also are built to design around the changes that are going to happen with the legislative and business models they're dealing with. And so I'm very, very well positioned with what we're doing. And the fact that so many customers are interested in being design partners on what we've recently acquired tells me we're on the right track.

Our next question will come from Steve Enders with Citi.

I guess to start, I wanted to dig into the comment about what you're seeing from the SAP ecosystem and maybe some slower than expected upgrade cycles going on there. I guess, it would be just great to kind of get your view on maybe what's changed versus your expectations and maybe how you kind of see that cycle playing out here over the next few years?

As we've mentioned before, since going public, we've generally observed that efforts related to major ERP transformations effect our performance with a lag of two to four quarters. They announced in June of last year the end-of-life transition involving about 10,000 customers. We anticipated that the largest companies would adopt these changes first, which is occurring, but the more extensive implementations take longer to progress. The data from Gartner and SAP suggests that mid-sized companies, specifically those with revenues between 1 billion and 10 billion, are adopting a more cautious approach to migration. We had hoped to see a more significant increase in uptake earlier this year from this segment. While we've begun to engage with some of the bigger players, the mid-sized companies haven't generated the volume we anticipated. As we evaluate our guidance for the second half of the year, we see shifts in the pipeline. This situation has merely delayed progress by a couple of quarters, which will have an impact due to our revenue recognition policies. Nevertheless, I remain very satisfied with the level of activity we’re experiencing, as our teams are collaborating effectively. Additionally, our cloud growth rate remains strong at 29.9%, putting us in a solid position to further enhance our cloud offerings through the SAP platform.

I want to delve deeper into expectations for the second half. It seems there might be some improvement in upsell and cross-sell in June, along with some pipeline shifting to the latter part of the year. How confident are you about the revenue ramp-up in the second half and the associated expectations? Is there anything else you’d like to mention regarding the potential impacts of this shift, particularly as it relates to 2025?

Right now, with the visibility of activity we have, the customer success team we've built has been exceptional; it's beginning to move that through the pipeline. I'm really happy with how the function we've invested in over the last three years is starting to yield results. We are well-positioned across the customer base to take advantage of the opportunities we see. So, I'm feeling very optimistic about that. Furthermore, the reason we raised our guidance for both revenue and margins is that we anticipate strong execution in the latter half of the year.

Our next question will come from Daniel Jester with BMO Capital Markets.

Maybe on ecosio, the two-year sort of investment plan post-acquisition. Are there any sort of big particular projects that you envision? One of the things I noticed and maybe this is a follow-up on sort of an earlier question is that it seems like most of their country base in Europe. So is there an opportunity to globalize this asset to serve Latin America and other regions?

So certainly, they have global coverage, even though their primary customer base is based in Europe, just like our customer base is; a lot of it is based in the US, but they have global needs. I think they've experienced the same thing. Hence the reason they have 30-plus countries that they're already covering the CTC requirements for. But I think more importantly, it's the investment you talk about is really about how do we move that up to some of the various jurisdictions that they don't cover, and Latin America would be one. The great news is with our Systax platform in Brazil, we're already covering Brazil for e-invoicing and we can expand from there. So we've got a nice position to work from and expand that. Ultimately, the opportunity we believe that is best served is how do we deliver this value to our existing customers. You think about the invoicing volume of the multinationals that we work with here based in the US, bringing that in with the scale and efficiency that the ecosio platform brings is a great opportunity to now bring forward into our customer base. Hence, we've been working on that partnership for months because we were planning to do that regardless. This acquisition just makes it a lot more controlled for our side.

Regarding your comment about the slower growth of entitlements in the first half of the year, I'm curious about whether we should consider the impact of high inflation in 2022 and 2023. Perhaps your customers have reconsidered their renewal strategies in light of this environment. As we move into a more moderate situation, do you see that customers may be more strategic in their approach to entitlements? If that’s the case, how should we expect this to unfold for the rest of the year and into the next?

When we consider entitlements, we usually find that much of what occurs is related to demand and the specific needs of their business. As their requirements change in different areas, they adapt and apply our services in new regions, or the intensity of their activity may increase to a level that leads to more frequent renewals at a higher rate. Therefore, I don't expect the economy to significantly influence this aspect. Historically, we've observed that while there may be fluctuations of a few percentage points, overall, the demand from businesses primarily drives the factors that lead to expansion and acceleration, which, in turn, affects entitlement activity. I don't foresee any major changes in this regard. Although we did notice a slight decrease during this period, I don't believe this will be a persistent issue that will undergo dramatic shifts over time.

Our next question will come from Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs.

I guess just to start, I think you mentioned that this was the second best new logo quarter for the business. Any particular verticals or regions of strength to call out? And then when you think about the partner ecosystem, where have you seen the most traction so far this year and particularly in the quarter that's worth calling out?

I think we are making significant progress. We've discussed our investment and collaboration with the Microsoft community, particularly with the launch of Azure and our TCS solution earlier this year. Our efforts within that ecosystem have shown another Shopify success; we value their support in our partnership and are experiencing growth there. Additionally, we are achieving good results in the NetSuite space, and our relationship with Oracle has been excellent. By leveraging this partnership, we are furthering our reach in the NetSuite space. Those are the key highlights for me. Workday continues to perform well in Workday Financials as they find ongoing success, but I'd emphasize Shopify, Microsoft, and NetSuite as standout partners for the quarter. I believe that addresses your main question. If you have further inquiries, I'm ready to assist.

In terms of new logos, I wouldn't say there's been any concentration in any particular industry or segment of the business. I think we had real nice participation kind of across the spectrum of the companies that we serve and the types of industries we participate in.

And then John, just on gross margin, I think that came in really strong this quarter. Just puts and takes around that metric as we go into the back half and going forward, how should we think about what that looks like over the medium term?

We saw a significant increase in margins this quarter. Looking ahead for the rest of the year, I don't expect to see any further growth in that area. We had a very strong quarter and were pleasantly surprised by how well it performed. I believe we are in a middle ground regarding expectations for the remainder of the year. While we anticipate that the leverage will persist, I do not foresee any further improvement from the current margins. An increase of one or two points in margin is quite robust, and we are satisfied with that outcome.

Our next question will come from Alex Sklar with Raymond James.

I would like to begin with a two-part question about ecosio. First, David, do you have everything you need from a technology standpoint regarding invoicing, or are there advantages to having another ecosio-like solution? And John, could you provide more details on the earn-out targets for ecosio? What growth or retention targets are included in that earn-out, and over what time period are we looking?

Given our customer base and all what we've learned is we really want to bring forward a single technology platform that best integrates with our current core platform and makes it easier for our customers to have a great experience. So the intent will be to build out on the platform we had versus trying to buy small businesses in other jurisdictions and then cobble them together in some way; we think that's a harder road to go at times. And so we're going to target our investment on building on the platform. That was a big part of our diligence. And having the good fortune to partner with them for so many months and work on that gained a lot of confidence that it scales well. So that's the approach we'll be taking there.

In terms of additional color regarding the earn-out, I think we talked it's revenue-based. It goes over a three-year period. I'm not at liberty to talk through the mechanics of kind of what those earn-out targets are. What I would say is, as you would expect from a smaller company, they had some significant growth over the years and we expect that that significant growth will continue. And we based the earn-out on the growth trajectory of a company sort of in that size range.

Maybe just one more follow-up for you, David, on the back of Adam's question. New logo contribution to ARR ticked up this quarter. You called out a few competitive displacements. And I'm just kind of curious if anything has changed in terms of how you're viewing the vended displacement opportunity going forward?

Those situations are always opportunistic. Typically, when a customer outgrows a competitor or finds that the competitor's service doesn't meet their expectations, we receive a call. This can happen due to a transformation they are undergoing or because their business model is becoming more complex, which the competitor struggles to support. However, I wouldn’t say there’s any specific factor we are targeting in that area, and I don't see any dynamics that have fundamentally changed. We're fortunate to collaborate with a partner ecosystem that includes DMAs, Grant Thornton, PwC, and Deloitte, who provide strong support for us in this process.

Our next question will come from Patrick Walravens with Citizens JMP Securities.

One for each of you, starting in the weeds a little bit, John. Why is the allowance for doubtful accounts relatively so high? So this quarter is $17.7 million, I think, or 15% of accounts receivable. And by comparison, I was just looking back when Avalara was acquired in 2022, it was like 5%. I would have thought it would have been the other way around because you're more enterprise. So what do we need to understand there?

I can't comment on Avalara's ratios and our ratios. We have our policies we've been maintaining for long periods of time regarding how we set our allowances and how we work through them. But our allowance methodology has been very consistent over periods of time. Again, because we bill annually in advance, sometimes it could be a bit larger than others because again, the offset is the full amount of annual billing that goes on. However, that said, I think we've seen that allowance grow over the last year or so, and a lot of it had to do with some of the implementation of our new ERP system. Now that you've seen kind of the nice quarter we had from a cash flow perspective and an accounts receivable perspective, I expect to see that start to tick down a little bit in terms of what's the makeup of that. So a little bit had to do with that, that bump. But we feel very good about the progress we made in 2024 and especially the progress in the second quarter where we really saw that cash flow come out. So in terms of collectibility in our accounts receivable, it's very, very strong. We have a blue-chip client base and have not experienced any significant issues with respect to collectibility there.

And then David, putting execution to the side for a second. From a strategic point of view, what is the most important thing for you guys to get right over the next 12 months?

The two acquisitions we made position us well. From a strategic perspective, I see us moving forward with those two and introducing new offerings to the market. We are working on some exciting developments with AI that we believe will enhance data management and improve user experience for our customers. Additionally, as we continue building our cloud platform, we are uncovering natural opportunities that will allow us to explore different industry verticals and potential compliance areas over time.

Can we get a hint on like an example of that of an adjacency?

We want to continue to prove to you that we deserve the right to earn that path before we share all that. But trust me, we did what we did as the first two steps and we're continuing to look at new opportunities.

Our next question will come from Jake Roberge with William Blair.

Just from a go-to-market perspective, do you feel like you have the right team in place to address the invoicing opportunity in Europe or is there more that you need to ramp up on that front now that you fully have that product in place with ecosio?

I think in Europe, we've got decent coverage. There will probably be a couple of strategic hires that we'll make in that space. And then obviously, we want to be really thoughtful about how we go and support our US customer base with the right talent. So definitely part of our investment over the next two quarters that we teed up in the guidance includes some thinking about how we're doing that, and we'll give you more specifics on that guidance once the acquisition is actually closed.

And then I know that the former Pagero partnership was still very early days, but for the deals that you had already closed with that partnership, what will happen with those logos now that you're unwinding the relationship, is that just a smooth transition over to ecosio or is there anything else to think about on that front?

The good news is the way that our team designed the portal, the ability to swap out one provider as a back end for another is pretty straightforward. We never really put that relationship where another partner actually had the direct relationship with our customer. We always own those relationships. So it's a very smooth and easy swap out.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Joe Crivelli for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. If you have any follow-up questions or if you'd like to schedule more time with the team, please e-mail me at [email protected]. And with that, have a great rest of your day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.