Our director for M&A and IR will be talking about the full year results for 2022, the quarter four for 2022, and also, of course, the forecast for year 2023. Let's get to it. Looking back at the fiscal year of 2022, I think what I'd first like to start off with is really thanking our employees and our customers and our shareholders for the first year as a listed company. I think we did very well for ourselves during the year. We did a very good net sales growth of almost 31%, and then adjusted EBIT of 30%. Our rates of customers that we acquired during the year accelerated through the year, both organically and through M&A.
A really big thank you for the first year as a listed company to everybody who has a stake in Lemonsoft, whether you're an employee or a customer or a shareholder. I think, as an organization, we learned a lot through the year, and we were also able to accelerate on our growth, even though the market is a little bit softer than in the second half than what we were expecting. We did three acquisitions with a combined net sales of about EUR 3.1 million and EBIT of EUR 0.9 million, and we will continue also looking into the M&A space, as we go forward to ensure that we support our organic growth also from the acquisition space. We also strengthened our corporate governance and our transparency.
We established a shareholders' nomination committee, a boards audit committee, and we're currently looking into moving into IFRS reporting as well. All in all, I would say that we had a very successful year in 2022, with all our key metrics being really positive. Really thankful for that and looking forward to year 2023 as well. If you look at the fourth quarter as a whole, we basically did very well for ourselves also in the fourth quarter. Our net sales growth continued at 30.5%. Our sales revenues were up on the SaaS front at 22.4%, and gross margin was high at 89.9%. Adjusted EBIT, 33.5% of net sales.
I think we did very well in the fourth quarter. We noticed in the fourth quarter that the macroeconomic situation was starting to affect customers. We did, you know, the necessary actions in order to push our revenues, you know, so that we could achieve our targets that we set for ourselves during the year. That meant, of course, a very strong end to the year as well. Looking back at the fourth quarter, positive feelings around that as well. Now, during Q4 2022, we also had change negotiations, not because of having to reduce costs, but simply because we wanted to go to a industry vertical organization.
We organized ourselves from the start of the year, around our key verticals, meaning that we have the possibility to sell, support customers, and also deploy our solutions within those industry verticals. I think that's a really great thing and looking forward to the effect of that also during 2023. During Q4, we also acquired Duunissa.fi. That's a smaller acquisition that we did to kind of augment our market share in the work time management space. Duunissa brought us around 400 customers that we then added to the customer base as well. All in all, from a customer acquisition point of view, I would say really good, really good quarter, really good year. We've never had as many customers as we have today.
Especially the fourth quarter was good, so we acquired almost 600 new customers during the quarter. Happy with Q4, but of course also some signs of moderate headwinds in the market in the terms of the macroeconomic climate in Finland is still pretty challenging. Our customers are suffering from higher inflation rates, higher energy prices, higher interest rates, and so forth. That's also something to consider when we go forward. Looking at the key financial trends next. Our net sales, as you can see, over the last couple of years have developed really favorably, as has our adjusted EBIT as well, as well as our operating cash flow. From my point of view, our business is really good. It's stable, it's growing, it's recording.
What we need to ensure during the coming year is taking even better care of our current customers to make sure that the customer life cycle value of our customers go up as well. Net sales positive and growing up to EUR 22.6 million. Adjusted EBIT at EUR 6.7 million, and then operating cash flow at EUR 6.2 million. Really happy with those key financial figures as well. If you look at from a customer point of view, this is the quarterly split now over the last couple of years.
You can see the net sales over the last two years, as well as the rolling 12 months has been really developing favorably. As I mentioned during, you know, in the beginning, we had a really good year from a customer acquisition point of view in 2022. Over 8,000 customers, and that's of course our strength also going forward, that we're not dependent on one single vertical, not on one single customership, but we really have this broad long tail of customers that we're able to monetize and grow. From that point of view, humble and honored to be able to help serve 8,200+ customers in the Finnish SMB segment.
If you look at the SaaS metrics in 2022, as said, we had a slight market headwind during H2 and especially during the last month in 2022. We're still at a recurring revenue rate of 80.5% of our revenue. That's really strong and, of course, we would like to keep that as is or even grow that if possible to even better numbers. We did see during the last quarter, and especially during the last two months, some increased churn in terms of revenue.
If you look at our focus verticals, when you think of manufacturing industry, you think of wholesale and retail, you think of construction and professional services, clearly what we saw that the construction market in Finland is still difficult, and our customers in that space also have difficulties. We did see an increase in churn from 21 to 22, going from 3.1% to 3.5%. I still think that's at a really good level. I was reading a report on the Nordic B2B space yesterday, which was released by Monterro. I think if I compared us to our peers in the Nordic space, then their churn was around 6%, and so much higher than ours. Where we need to do better is on the net revenue retention front.
You can see that we're down to 103% from 108%. I think it's a consequence of the current financial climate in Finland at the moment. You can see that our customers are clearly suffering from the macroeconomic conditions. As such, they are trying to protect their profitability. Their first priority might not be growth. We have seen customers actually reducing seats and optimizing their processes. Optimizing their processes actually is a good thing for us because it means that we sell more consulting, training, and services from that point of view. Of course, if companies at the same time are reducing and optimizing seats, then that's reflected in our net revenue retention rate.
For us to have a really good focus on this going forward in 2023 and making sure that we handle the customers, well from start to finish, that means from marketing to sales to deployment to support, in the right way, we aim to improve, of course, our net revenue retention rate. If I take a step back and look maybe a little bit at the bigger picture, on our growth strategy on our market where we operate, we're still continuing executing the growth strategy that we put in place in 2021, where the two main components are product leadership and customer experience. We're executing our current product development roadmap as planned.
We acquired Duunissa.fi to increase our market share in work time management and use that as a kind of entry-level product for our customers so that we can then upsell to other Lemonsoft portfolio products. We've invested quite a lot of time and effort during Q4 in product bundling. Product bundling from this point of view means that we've packaged the seats and the licenses for new customer acquisition in a different way for 2023 to ensure that the customer gets as much value as possible out of investing in a Lemonsoft product. We hope to see that impact then also from making it easier to buy and making it quicker to implement as well. On the customer experience side, we've increased the resources available for sales and deliveries during the year.
I think that the move to an industry vertical organization is a good thing. There's clear accountability for sales, for customer, so customer success, customer support, as well as deployment. Through that change, we are of course looking to have more efficiency and being able to serve our customers better. On the new sales side, I would say, the industrial manufacturing sector and the wholesale and retail sector are still going pretty strong. We see a good amount of leads being generated. Our sales pipeline continued to grow during the quarter. While, as I mentioned earlier, there's a softening in construction which has been going on for a number of months.
You can see that also from the macroeconomic research being done, for example, by the Finnish Research Institute, ETLA, that the construction is clearly one of the segments which is suffering at the moment. From a direct sales point of view, we've been successful in new customer acquisition, but we can see longer sales cycles. It's not a big increase. It's about 1.4 weeks according to the data that we have. Still, it's something that is impacting, you know, decisions from a customer point of view. We did successful expansion sales to current customers during the quarter, especially in the professional services vertical.
We had a major expansion with a client going into actually North America and also Asia-Pacific, expanding use of one of our project management products into that area, which was really quite good to see. Channel sales is stable, so we can see that new customer acquisition there is better than Q3 on a stable level. Of course then the customers that we acquire through the accounting partner channel, those are smaller customers with a smaller monthly recurring revenue as well, but stable nonetheless. I want to really emphasize the Logentia offering, one of the acquisitions that we did during 2022.
We can see, and Alpo will talk more about this in the coming slides on M&A, but Logentia's offering on transport optimization and CO2 analytics is really almost unique in the market. There's not that much competition. If you look at it from a medium-sized business or even a large-sized business, then that transport optimization service as well as the CO2 analysis is almost mandatory to have. It's easy to sell, easy to deliver, and we saw good growth from the Logentia offering during Q4. As said, market condition is still challenging for customers and the macroeconomic uncertainty continues, but I think we will have to live with that to through 2023, and we've tried to kind of weigh that in also in our forecast for this year.
I think that was that about, this full year 2022 from a kind of customer operations point of view and a market update point of view. I'll hand the word over to Alpo, so you can have a little bit of information on our continued M&A strategy. Alpo, please go ahead.
Thanks, Jan-Erik. Overall, we had a very strong year in terms of M&A. We completed three acquisitions, all of which support our growth strategy well. We did one transaction in Q2, one in Q3, and the final one in Q4. The one in Q2, Logentia, focuses on transport optimization and especially cost management. Very good offering to all logistics customers using logistics services and also for manufacturing companies as well. They have Logentia has a very interesting CO2 offering as well, which is very relevant for larger SME companies and bigger companies as a whole to use in terms of compliance and to improve operations in terms of sustainability analysis and to comply with other targets.
That we are eager to see how we can roll to larger businesses. In Q3, we acquired Finazilla, focusing on reporting, budgeting, and forecasting solutions. Basically all companies that are creating budgeting, forecasting in Excels and other types of fairly manual processes can benefit a lot from Finazilla's operations. And we are integrating Finazilla into Lemonsoft in a deeper way and eager to see how we can roll that to a larger customer base. In Q4, we acquired the business of Duunissa.fi, which is a work time monitoring solution, adding to our existing offering in the space with, for example, Kellokortti. What Duunissa provides is especially lead generation and easy access product for us.
We got the very wide customer base with the good fit to our industry focus, so especially in construction, but also in manufacturing and PSA and professional services. We are at the moment looking into offering a larger product offering to the customers of Duunissa. If we go deeper into the financials in those for those companies, in total, we got with those three businesses, we acquired roughly EUR 3.1 million in revenue. Growth for the three businesses in 2021 was 18% and accelerating a bit during the past year, 2022. Happy to see positive development there as well. Profitability for the three businesses in total was very, very high, and we are happy to get around almost EUR 1 million in profitability in adjusted EBIT level already in 2021 and developing well in 2022 also.
As a whole, we had a very successful year, and we aim to continue our M&A agenda. We are continuously evaluating a lot of potential target companies. At the moment, the market makes life a bit difficult for smaller businesses that are not cash flow positive. We have, of course, discussions with all types of businesses, but especially companies that are profitable and have a good Offering, they seem to be developing positively and have a good growth track still even in the current market. We evaluate those businesses, especially at the moment with the short-term perspective to see whether that growth continues and whether we can accelerate that going forward. With that, I'll give back to you Jan-Erik.
Thanks Alpo, and I think now it's time to look a little bit at the, on the financial side. I'll give the word over to Mari, our CFO, and Mari, please go ahead on the net sales side.
Yes, thank you Jan-Erik. The strong growth in net sales is primarily based on SaaS revenue growth and consulting and other sales. Net sales were EUR 6.4 million and adjusted EBIT margin was 33.5% of net sales in the review period. Net sales growth has been 30.5% in the review period, and SaaS has grown by 22.4%. SaaS revenue growth, especially, due to new customer acquisition and acquisitions of Finazilla and Logentia, which net sales are not included in the comparison period. Organic growth was 8.6% in the review period due to slower net revenue retention development. Expenses. Material and services cost comprise purchase relating to hosting licenses and other external services, which is approved gross margin. Cost base consists primarily of personal expenses. During the review period, we have capitalized R&D expenses of EUR 307,000. Other operating expenses is in line with plan. Thank you.
Thank you, Mari. A quick look at our head count and, as mentioned earlier, we are at the end of the year at 184 employees. A couple of employees down. We of course had the change negotiations during December where we went in not with the aim of reducing cost, but with being able to deploy a more efficient organizational structure within the company to be able to serve our customers better with a focus on the industry verticals that we are really strong in. That's why we have a industry manufacturing unit that is working with those customers.
We have a construction segment unit working with those customers, we have a professional services and accounting segment unit working with those customers, which I think makes perfect sense with the responsibility then to execute on the sales activities, the marketing activities, the customer success activities, as well as the deployment and support of our solutions. 184 employees and still the split by function, then we are continuing to invest in our product development drive. We have around 55, 56% of our staff is still in R&D, but that relative number will for sure go down over time as we scale up on the operations as well, so.
Looking at our peers on a Nordic level, I think we have comparatively more people in R&D. Then again, we have a different kind of product strategy. We have a much broader product portfolio, which then in turn requires more investment across the board in terms of resources and so forth. That's about our personnel and R&D staff or number of employees. If we look at, you know, what do we expect in terms of a dividend for 2022? This is the board's dividend proposal, increasing it by one cent per share. That means that the proposed dividend distribution would be EUR 2.6 million, up from EUR 2.4 million in the last year.
This of course is only a proposal from the board. The decision will be taken later on in the AGM and approved. Let's see how that pans out. The interesting part, what is then our outlook for 2023 in terms of growth and profitability? We do recognize that there is significant uncertainty in the market. It will have a weakening effect on our growth during at least the first half of the year. We have a pretty modest growth target from my point of view. Net sales growth 10%-20% compared to 2022. From a profitability point of view, adjusted EBIT of 25%-30%.
Our growth target here includes of course, the acquisitions that we've already made as well as our current business, but doesn't take into account any other acquisitions. As Alpo explained earlier, we're still looking to continue on our M&A strategy and execute that in a good way to support our growth. 10%-20% growth and 25%-30% profitability. Of course, nobody would be happier than us if we would be able to exceed those numbers during the year. We're looking to execute by growing the sales through our industry verticals. We're looking to take even better care of our current customers and grow the net revenue retention rate and average spend per customer.
Of course, complementing that with some inorganic growth throughout the year would be nice as well. As said, challenging market conditions for our customers is also reflected in our market environment. We are still positive. Our base business is stable, it's profitable, it's repeatable, and so forth. I'm really positive also about the year 2023 from that point of view. I'm looking forward to acquiring new customers and, maybe even spending time with some new colleagues as well, so. Good. Any comments from Alpo and Mari on the outlook for 2023?
Yeah, I think as we mentioned in the release, the first half will be challenging in terms of market conditions. We'll see how the market develops and very much looking forward to market going back to sort of stable situation in the second half hopefully, and then at the latest in 2024. Yeah, we continue our growth both organically and inorganically, and we'll definitely do that regardless of the market conditions.
Very good. Some more information about the upcoming events in 2023. We have the publication of our annual report during week 11. We have our AGM on the 4th of April, the interim report for January to March will be released on the 28th of April. Quite a busy week also here, or busy first quarter here also on the IR front. Of course, as always, if you have questions, comments, feel free to contact myself or Alpo or Mari in any type of questions you might have. Of course, we also have time in this session to go through any questions that have come up during the presentation. Maybe we can spend the last part of the presentation on Q&A. Alpo, what do you think?
Yeah, definitely. We have, again, quite a few questions, actually. More than ever, so happy to go through all the questions that we've received. Let's start off with organic growth and how our profit forecast, what kind of profit forecast, organic growth is assumed. If you want to, Jan-Erik, first start with reiterating on how we see the financial year organically.
Yeah. As said, the market situation is, of course, what it is. We need to work with the organic growth kind of components that we have available to us. That is taking care of our current customers. That is acquiring new customers. That is working with our packaging and pricing. That is working on our deployment process so that we can get projects quicker into use so that we can get MRR rolling for customers and so forth. It... At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, the market, when you look at it from an industry vertical point of view, pretty good when you talk about industrial manufacturing, wholesale and retail, but then softening when you're looking at construction, and then maybe flat when you're looking at professional services and accounting and so forth.
It's a kind of balancing game, and I think we're looking to capitalize as much as we can on our strong offering from a product point of view to manufacturing and wholesale and retail to make sure that we get that growth.
Yeah. As for, from a financial perspective, the organic growth was about between 8% and 9% in Q4. The market situation in the first half is not the best we've had, so we expect that we continue somewhere around there. If we develop positively, then we can expand that, but that remains to be seen. Going to margins in a deeper way, we've received a question of margins looking surprisingly low for the guidance for 2023, and why is the operating leverage not positive from sales growth to adjusted EBIT in 2023? You want to, Jan-Erik, begin commenting on that? I can continue.
I think we're pretty confident that, you know, from a profitability point of view, the guidance that we're giving now, 25%-30%, that's pretty safe. Let's put it like that. From a growth point of view, of course, how quickly does that turn into something that goes on to the bottom line, that's a process that we're looking to speed up, right? The quicker we can get the customer in, the quicker we can get the deployment done, the quicker it will also be visible in the bottom line. As said, we were pretty cautious from the forecasting point of view for 2023, wanting to see, you know, how does H1 pan out and so forth. Confident on the, on both accounts here that these are numbers that we can make. If we can exceed them during the year, fine, that's fantastic. Not a problem. This is where we are at the moment.
Yeah, I think we could continue from that towards new products and product potential product launches since basically we have been developing a few products that will be launched during the year and we expect new revenue from there. Of course, those expenses when developing products come beforehand. If you want to, Jan-Erik, comment on that, what are we expecting to see during 2023?
From a product launch perspective then, one thing that we are doing to boost our presence in the construction segment. The construction segment you need to understand is basically divided into, you know, new construction and then renovation, right? The offering that we have is basically more focused on renovation is what is going to pick up now when the construction of new property or new project is slowing down. The business moves over. We're launching Lixani 5, which is our product for that segment, we are looking to expand on that segment, on taking market share and rolling that product out during, you know, Q2 onwards, basically. That's one kind of positive leverage and that we can expect from that, from the product point of view.
Yeah. We also got a question regarding the number of customers, whether they are all invoicing customers. Well, I can begin commenting on that since basically we have. The customers that we have, the 8,200 customers are all customer companies using our system. So no, not invoicing customers. Invoicing customers is not a figure. We are roughly half of that which we are not reporting. But those are companies that use our systems and might have larger groups that are invoiced as a whole. I think that's. If you have anything on that, Jan-Erik, please feel free.
No, I mean that's exactly how it is. 8,000+ organizations using our software. The majority of those are invoiced directly. Part of those are invoiced indirectly through our channel, that's how our business model works.
Good. What are our current thoughts on international expansion?
It's a good question, and one which I might have forgot to mention during the early part of the presentation. We're making a growth strategy update. We've been working on that since the latter part of 2022 and continuing now in 2023 as well, internationalization is one theme that we are going through in that work. We need to understand what does the Nordic market look like, where do we have possibilities, what would be the right way of going to market, and so forth. Definitely a theme for the strategy work, but then it's not done yet, so once we're ready, we will of course publish the result of that work, and that might also have a part of or some targets related to internationalization included.
Good. We'll come back to that certainly later on in Q2 report. Going back to the financials a bit, what drove the consulting and other growth in Q4, should we expect this level going forward as well?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think, what drove the level of consulting during Q4 was what I talked about, that customers were kind of realizing that they had to be more efficient in their operations. The market conditions were pushing them to figure out, "Okay, how can I do my order delivery process a little bit more smarter? How can I optimize my transportation costs a little bit more?" Those customers who invested in process development, they actually invested in consulting, training services, analytics, things that we classify as services or consulting and services related. That's what drive that, drove that growth.
I think, during... Going forward, I think you will see a level of consulting and service sales going forward anyway, which is... Let's put it like this. I think customers will have more and more need of these types of services during the year to make sure that they're still competitive and cost efficient during the year. Some customers will look at the number of seats they have and the software that they use, but then others will see, "Okay, I've got this process. I need to optimize that. What's the best way of doing that?" That's an opportunity for us going forward. I'm kind of quietly positive about that one.
The other thing, I think what we've seen in the market is that customers are looking to get, as many, or much more kind of data-driven in their decision-making, and in their, in their operations. We've had a lot of customers that we're now working with, on integrating different systems, making sure that there's a decent, or a very good reporting system, on the, on the back end, that you can do proactive analysis and not just, you know, after the fact and so forth. I think, our data and digital products, the projects that are basically customized for customers will grow as well, and that's also part of the consulting and services revenue.
Yeah. So to summarize, basically Q4 result, uh, uh, for consulting and other was quite, quite high, uh, basically due to M&A and other, uh, cons- uh, large co-consulting pro-pro, uh, processes as well as, uh, the sort of success-based, uh, fees that we, we got in. Uh, so, so not expecting to grow 70% going forward, definitely.
No, maybe not at that rate, but it's still an essential part of our offering and for customers who want to improve their business, it's a, it's a good service to buy from us.
Moving on to personnel. Well, first of all, looking back, was there an increase in the average costs per employee? Basically, how did salary levels increase and how will they increase going forward? Jan-Erik or Mari, please.
Yeah, of course. I mean, the market, the job market and talent acquisition market is kind of slightly easier than it was before, I think. We do have seen during 2022, and we've accounted in 2023 also to make sure that our staff is adequately remunerated so that salary levels are on the right level. We do see increasing kind of personnel costs from that as well. I think that's the state of the market still in the IT industry, where we're not, we're not in a position where we can take advantage of Meta or Google or the large kind of consulting or the large tech companies laying off 10,000 people, right? We're still working in a smaller market where the talent acquisition or the competition for talent is still pretty big. We have seen an increase in costs from that point of view. Mari, do you want to comment further?
No. It was very good. I think so that. No, nothing to add it.
Good. Of course, as we know, the negotiations in the market have resulted in roughly 3.5% increase in salaries. We expect that to drive our costs as well.
Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead Jan-Erik.
No, of course, that's clear. It was actually, it took a long time for the negotiation result to come through and, but, I think it's in line what we expected anyways.
Yeah. Good. What are our plans regarding hiring in 2023? How do we expect our headcount to develop? If, if we can discuss that also based on different departments.
Sure. I think we will overall, we'll be pretty kind of cautious from a hiring point of view during the first half. We want to see how the market develops, and how the sales develops. If we recruit, we have clear areas where we know we want to strengthen. Part of that is still on the sales side. Part of that is also on, for example, particular roles in our R&D organization. It's not as if we're kind of stopping recruitment, but we're selective on the roles that we take on.
Good. We have quite a few questions on M&A. Let's begin with the ones looking back. How did Finazilla and Logentia perform in Q4? How about core Lemonsoft ERP system, the growth there in comparison? If you want to begin, Jan-Erik, and I can continue.
Yeah, I think, from a growth perspective, I think Logentia and Finazilla both performed very well, especially Logentia, which is a very, very quickly growing and very profitable offering. A combination of Logentia SaaS product as well as the added value from the consulting and services in that business is really good for customers. Performing, I would say, even above, you know, the targets that we've set for them. Finazilla was in line with expectations, in line with plan. With Finazilla, I read a market study from IBM just the other day where it said that only 10% of companies are still using, you know, decent tools for planning and forecasting and budgeting, and 90% are still manual or in Microsoft Excel. I mean, I love Excel.
It's a great product. I wouldn't want to do my budgeting and forecasting with that. If I could combine it with an ERP so that I can get my operations data in, I can get my forecasting correct, I can get my budgeting and follow-up correct, I would much rather do it that way. I see good opportunities for us leveraging the Finazilla product across the Lemonsoft customer base.
Yeah. As a whole, Finazilla and Logentia, from a growth perspective, both are growing, according to our expectations. If we compare that to Lemonsoft ERP system, the growth is higher. That's of course based on the fact that both are quite easy to take into use and the sales process is fairly quick, in comparison to Lemonsoft ERP system. It takes a longer time to take an ERP system into use, and the growth is, thus a bit slower than. We can of course retain ERP customers for a very, very long time.
Yeah. If you compare those kind of three products, what you can say is sales cycle is of course kind of longer for a Lemonsoft ERP solution than for Finazilla and Logentia. On the other hand, the average deal size and then the customer lifetime value is higher. It's a game of, you know, pluses and minuses, right?
As for M&A landscape, and the competition, whether that's tough and multiples moving up or down, well, I can comment on that. No really big changes in the smaller end of M&A targets. Multiples may be a bit going down but that depends very much on the target. Perhaps unprofitable companies with a negative cashflow have been highly valued before and not that anymore. As for profitable companies that have a stable growth rate, no real changes. Probably more sort of reasonable price expectations overall. The M&A landscape looks good. Good companies are in our radar and we continue discussing, as mentioned.
One question on M&A candidates in our pipeline, and whether they have overlapping customers with our current pool of customers, maybe we could start discussing that with the companies that we've acquired. So if you, Jan-Erik, would like to comment whether there are similar companies already there or the same companies and how we can cross-sell?
Okay. Just so I understand the question right, do you want to understand the cross-sales, up-sales potential of the latest acquisitions?
Yeah, that, as well as whether there are same companies, in the customer base of the companies that we've acquired.
Yeah
... with Lemonsoft.
Okay. Good. Yeah. Sure. Both yes and no. We have, for example, very, very good. We've started the cross-sell, up-sell of Finazilla across the Lemonsoft ERP customer base, and there we have a clear kind of sweet spot for those customers who are, let's say, medium-sized from, from our point of view, so turning over, you know, more than a couple of million EUR. They need a tool, and it's easy for us to kind of show the benefits of Finazilla there. We do have some overlap in terms of customers between the acquisitions. There we're, of course, looking to again see what can we do from a product kind of integration point of view to make sure that the customer gets the most value out of it.
One example is, for example, we have a large PlanMill customer, doing time, project, and resource management, and, you know, sharing and then using Finazilla for budgeting. Making the data integration between those two systems is a no-brainer because then you have, again, a more efficient process, and we have, you know, up-sell work that we can give to the customer and deliver more value. We do have a, you know, customers which are using, you know, across the range also from our acquired companies.
Yeah. From an overall perspective if we think about smaller companies, there are typically a larger number of companies with both under Lemonsoft and under the acquired business, so it... Typically there's no real big overlap. There's a lot of companies that enable cross-sell. If we go to larger companies, for example, Logentia and Lemonsoft, there are some overlap, especially wholesale customers since there's a limited number of potential customers. Typically the larger companies then have so many different kinds of needs that we can anyway do up-sell for the businesses. Not a real question for us.
Yeah. And customers really want us to kind of combine and up-sell, cross-sell, right? They want to have as much as they can from the, the one kind of vendor even though they're kind of separate products. If we integrate them well, we make a well-functioning process, it's all more value delivered to customers, right?
Yeah.
With less investment for them.
Exactly. Good. I think that's for M&A. I think a final question regarding capital deployment and how our EPS, the shares outstanding continued to increase. Well, that's of course the acquisition of Logentia where we paid 25% of the purchase price through shares. Do we plan to buy back shares going forward to offset dilution? Well, Jan-Erik, we've discussed it quite a lot, so if you want to.
Yeah. It's certainly worth considering, right? It depends of course, how we, how we want to go forward, and there's no... It needs a decision by, you know, the board and the AGM to be able to do something like that. I would see it as a valuable tool for us to be able to, you know, to leverage the stock. To me it... Yeah. I think that's all I can comment at the moment on that.
Yeah. Definitely. We want to maintain the EPS high, and to do that we will need to kind of retain a stable level of shares outstanding. Good. Yeah, I think we've covered all the questions, so thank you. Jan-Erik, the final word to you.
I just want to once again kind of reiterate that we had, I think we had a very successful year in 2022. I think we, in spite of kind of challenging market conditions in the second half of the year and especially in Q4, we were able to make an excellent result for the year. Our customers are loyal, our employees are very skillful, and I'm looking forward also to working more with the analysts and shareholders on this call to make sure that we can grow the business even further during 2023. Thank you so much. As said before, if there's any questions or anything, just reach out to myself or Alpo for more information. Otherwise, I wish you a great weekend, and see you again soon