Intellinetics - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 2025 revenue was $4.25M, down 5.8% year over year, with SaaS growing 9.8% while professional services fell 13.2%; diluted EPS was $(0.17) and Adjusted EBITDA was $0.08M, reflecting deliberate investments in sales, marketing, and IT infrastructure.
• Consolidated gross margin expanded to 67.6% from 64.3% YoY, driven by mix and stronger SaaS margins (86.1% vs. 84.6%), despite lower professional services volume.
• Management maintained FY25 guidance: year-over-year revenue growth driven by SaaS and positive Adjusted EBITDA, while 2025 Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be “reduced by more than half” versus FY24 due to growth investments; this matched guidance communicated in March.
• Commercial momentum in Payables Automation continued: live reference accounts +50% in Q1; initial Purchase Order feature launched; Capture-as-a-Service add-on introduced; backlog strengthened with the largest order-intake week in years and an $880K project commencing in Q2.
• Near-term stock narrative hinges on SaaS adoption scaling vs. temporary weakness in project-based professional services and elevated OpEx; catalysts include reference account growth, K-12 and HomeBuilder partnerships, and backlog conversion over the next 2–3 quarters.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• SaaS revenue growth and margin strength: SaaS grew 9.8% YoY to $1.54M and SaaS gross margin rose 142 bps to 86.1% (company consolidated GM to 67.6%). Management: “Payables Automation… provides an extremely quick return on investment… we plan to continue to make investments… to rapidly grow our SaaS revenue”.
• Product innovation and ecosystem expansion: launched initial Purchase Order module and Capture-as-a-Service; partnerships expanded across niche ERPs (HomeBuilder, K-12), with reference accounts up another 50% in Q1.
• Backlog and order intake recovery underway: “biggest single order-intake week in years” (> $2.4M TCV) and authorization to begin an $880K multi-month scanning project—expected to drive revenue recognition over 6–7 months.

What Went Wrong

• Professional services volume headwind: revenue fell 13.2% YoY (to $2.16M), pulling total revenue down 5.8%; timing issues around project starts and renewals were cited.
• Operating expense uplift compressed profitability: total OpEx rose 21.1% to $3.55M on sales/marketing and G&A (SOC 2, controls), reducing Adjusted EBITDA to $0.08M vs. $0.67M last year and widening net loss to $(0.73)M.
• Macro sensitivity in key verticals: management cited tariff uncertainty (U.S.–Canada) and high interest rates pressuring the building industry’s pace, extending some customer implementation timelines.

Transcript

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Roger Grabner, Director of Marketing. Thank you. You may begin.

Roger Grabner (Director of Marketing)

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you to Intellinetics 2025 First Quarter Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to remind listeners that during this conference call, comments made by management may include forward-looking statements regarding Intellinetics that are not historical facts. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and beliefs of management, and they are subject to risk and uncertainties that could cause such statements to differ materially from actual future events or results. Intellinetics undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements.

For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release issued today, as well as risk and uncertainties included in the section under the caption, "Risk Factors and Management Discussion and Analysis of Financial Conditions and Results of Operations," and Intellinetics' annual report on Form 10-K or their quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed today. Also, please note that on the call today, management will discuss non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA and total contract value. Non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP and may be different from non-GAAP financial measures presented by other companies. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in the press release issued today.

With all that said, I would like now to turn the call over to Jim DeSocio, Intellinetics President and CEO. Jim, the call is yours.

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Thank you, Roger. Our payables automation solution provides an extremely quick return on investment for our customers and offers our company a clear, organic growth opportunity to rapidly grow our SaaS revenue over the next four to five years, just with continuing a successful rollout with existing partners. We view payables automation as a transformative opportunity for our company, and we plan to continue to make investments to position the product for as rapid an adoption as we can drive. We have more reference accounts than we ever have, and that number will grow quarterly. With our homebuilder ERP partner, we closed two orders in February and two in March, and with our K-12 partner, we closed three more in the first quarter.

In addition to sales and marketing initiatives, we plan to enhance our development capabilities to bring features to market more quickly and to bring our solutions to new ERP partnerships, which become additional ecosystems for happy customers. Because we have a solution with a very rapid and identifiable payback, with an identifiable market that dwarfs our historic performance, now is the time for us to invest in scaling our business as we transform into a predominantly SaaS-driven company with a diverse, growing suite of solutions for customers in the digital transformation space. We have continued in 2025 to strengthen and institutionalize our sales tools and processes, for example, by hiring a sales engineer, senior payables automation solutions consultant, and VP of Sales, all of whom have significant experience with both the solutions we offer and markets we serve.

We've also made investments in IT infrastructure and controls for SOC 2 certification, believing certification offers significant benefits, including increased customer trust and loyalty, improved cybersecurity risk mitigation, and creates a competitive advantage over non-compliant SaaS providers. As expected and called out in prior communications, these investments reduced our EBITDA temporarily. We believe that these investments will bring additional revenue opportunities that should exceed the spend and be accretive at some point in later 2025 and into 2026. While our SaaS business continues to grow, our professional services business had a weak quarter. Shareholders should know that orders have already picked up this quarter. Earlier this quarter, we achieved our biggest single order intake week in years.

The record-breaking week for over $2.4 million of total contract value in new project contracts was driven by numerous state agencies and commercial clients, with revenue expected to be recognized over the next six to seven months as work is completed. In addition, last week, we received authorization to begin work and therefore begin revenue recognition on an $880,000 deal, total contract value, multi-month scanning project that was sold in Q4 of 2024 but had document pickup delayed by the client. We just started picking up that work this week. These projects will enable us to resume work at more historical levels in the coming months. Hopefully, recent political events that created uncertainty in the first part of this year are moving behind us, and we will enjoy more of the tailwind our products and services ROI engender.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Joe Spain.

Joe Spain (CFO)

Thank you, Jim.

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Joe?

Joe Spain (CFO)

Thank you, Jim. I will now review our financial results for the first quarter of 2025. Total revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2025, decreased 5.8% to $4.2 million as compared to $4.5 million for the same period last year. The following are the material components of our revenue presented on our statements of operations. First, SaaS, including hosting revenue, grew 9.8% to $1.5 million for the quarter from $1.4 million for the same period last year, primarily driven by continued payables automation early successes. Software maintenance services were down, as expected, decreasing $22,000 or 6.4% from 2024. As a reminder, these maintenance revenues are from support agreements with customers continuing on our premise solution. Professional services revenue decreased 13.2% to $2.2 million for the quarter from $2.5 million for the same period last year. Jim has just discussed the timing issues driving this decrease.

As a percent of total revenue, professional services revenue was 51% of total revenue for the quarter compared to 55% last year. Consolidated gross margin percent increased 322 basis points to 67.6% for Q1 this year compared to 64.3% last year. The increase was driven by better revenue mix as a result of reduced professional services revenue, but also, importantly, strengthening of our SaaS margins, which grew 142 basis points to 86.1% from 84.6% last year. Operating expenses increased 21.1% to $3.6 million for Q1 2025 compared to $2.9 million in Q1 2024. The increase is driven by our investments in sales and marketing, as well as infrastructure, which is reflected in admin. Jim has discussed these already as part of our strategy to accelerate sales and enabling us to scale. Net loss for Q1 was $728,000 compared to net loss of $175,000 for the same period last year.

The primary driver here was the increased spending levels in SG&A to enable us to achieve our sales growth this year in 2026 and beyond. Loss per share was $0.17 per share compared to loss per share of $0.04 last year. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $77,000 compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $673,000 for the same period in 2024. The difference, again, are the same investment factors we just discussed. Next, I'll turn to a brief overview of our balance sheet. In March 31, we had cash of $2.1 million and accounts receivable net of $1.4 million. Our total assets were $18 million, including $9.1 million in intangible assets and goodwill as part of acquisitions made since 2020.

Total liabilities were $7.6 million, including $2.9 million in deferred revenues, reflecting signed SaaS and maintenance contracts, and $1.35 million in debt principal as of March 31, 2025. Given our sales and marketing initiatives, we've temporarily paused our aggressive prepayments of our debt, and we will continue to assess the best use of our capital. For those watching our filings, you'll have seen our Form S-3 for a shelf registration. This will enable us to act quickly to further strengthen our balance sheet. As Jim noted, we do not want to miss the market opportunity we see before us. I want to wrap up with our financial outlook.

Based on our current plans and assumptions and subject to risks and uncertainties we describe in our filings in this call, we expect no change to the guidance we just gave in March, that we will grow revenues on a year-over-year basis for fiscal 2025, particularly growing SaaS revenues and maintaining positive adjusted EBITDA. The company expects its 2025 adjusted EBITDA will be reduced by more than half compared to fiscal 2024 due to the increased investments in sales and marketing intended to provide returns on those investments in late 2025 and beyond. With that, we thank you all for listening, and at this time, we'd like to open the call up to Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Howard Halpern with Taglich Brothers. Please proceed with your question.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Congratulations on continuing to move SaaS forward. That's a good sign. In terms of, so you talked about, I guess, seven new customers, I guess, in the first quarter. With those being implemented over the next number of months, how many implementations will you have, and what would those implementations mean in terms of annual recurring revenue?

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Oh, so I don't have the revenue off the top of my head for the ones that are going live, but we'll have about 22-23 customers at this point using the SaaS product, the payables automation product.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Okay. How is the—I don't know if implementation is the right word, but on the, not the payables, but the other side of the equation, the purchase orders?

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

The purchase orders we released our first—we had our first release of payables purchase order just went out in the end of April. We've already done four or five presentations. We're getting good feedback on the product, look and feel. Again, just to keep in mind, it is a first release, so it is maturing. We have other future releases planned as we go forward, but we're very bullish on that, and the initial feedback we've gotten has been very, very strong. I've actually had an outside consultant who's been in the payables automation space for 15 years or so, worked for SAP and some of the other big ERP players, and he gave it very, very high marks for look and feel and initial functionality.

It is a first release, and in any first release, we have more—we have a development roadmap to continue to enhance that product.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Okay. I'll just ask this, but it seems like it might not be impacting you based on the number of implementations you're going to have this year. You're not seeing any customer hesitation at all in maybe stretching out the timing of implementations, or is that sort of fear behind us?

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

It's actually the hesitation, I would think, is what's going on in the market, the headwinds that the tariffs have created between the U.S. and Canada. Interest rates are high in the building industry, so that's slowed builders a little bit more aware of how many houses they're selling. It's more from that side than having anything to do with our product and hesitation to buy our product. It's more about what's going on in our key demographic, which is the building industry.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Okay. With the new orders coming in in the professional services side, are those relatively stable to margin type of opportunities that we should model into?

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Yes, most definitely. We had a dip. We've always been very successful selling a big, I want to say, seven-figure deal, high six-figure deal. We did sell one in the fourth quarter, and for their reasons, they said, "Well, we signed." When we went to pick it up, they said, "Well, we need to delay it for a couple of months." They just committed for us to start that project. With the $2.4 million we sold in March, which was obviously great, great for our backlog, that other $880,000 is added on top of that. We are well over $3 million of work we have in our queue to perform going forward, which should really help get our numbers back to where they've been historically.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Okay. And then just one last one that's more of not a base business question. Do you still have—or is it a little bit in excess of 600 K-12 customers that you serve?

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Yes. Yep. That's another part of our growth strategy for the payables automation and Capture-as-a-Service solution that we offer. We just launched that, I want to say, in April, beginning of April. We just trained our K-12 sales staff on that product, and we've already started selling into that marketplace. We sold, I think, we have four to five right now. We had a couple of beta sites. The beta sites went very well. We did have a press release in Independence School District of Iowa. With the financial department, we can send that to anybody who's interested, touting how great the product was and has actually done a testimonial for us and actually spoke at a K-12 user group for us, touting how great the product was. We expect good growth on that side.

We just renegotiated our contract with our K-12 partner, Software Unlimited, that they will now be selling and representing the payables automation product as well. A lot of good things happening on all sides with that product, Howard.

Howard Halpern (Principal Equity Analyst)

Okay. Thanks, and keep up the great work, guys.

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Thank you. We're very bullish on the future.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back to President and CEO Jim DeSocio for closing remarks.

Jim DeSocio (President and CEO)

Thank you. As I said, Intellinetics is well-positioned for continued success. We believe in our strong competitive position in growing markets and our diverse set of solutions with ample cross-selling opportunities. We further believe that it is absolutely the right strategy to reinvest our historically strong cash flow into the company, particularly sales and marketing and development, in order to accelerate our growth. We appreciate the continued support of our long-term shareholders and aim to attract new investors as well by delivering strong and consistent financial results. Thank you for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking again at our next conference call. Thank you, and have a great evening.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference, and you may disconnect your line at this time. We thank you for your participation and have a great day.