Bottomline sees big revenue increase, but earnings loss

Despite a 15 percent increase in revenues, Portsmouth-based Bottomline Technologies lost $7 million, or 20 cents a share, in its last quarter – a noticeable drop from the previous year's quarterly profit of $2.5 million.

In its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, the payroll services and software firm said it would have made $11 million – a $2.3 million gain over the "core" net income of the same quarter a year earlier — if generally accepted accounting principles didn't require that the company include such items as the $4.7 million equity compensation awarded to executives, some $2.7 million in acquisition-related expenses, some $834,000 in restructuring expenses and a $4.9 million loss on derivative instruments related to a huge financing deal.

All told, the company reported revenues for the second quarter were $63.6 million, an increase of $8.5 million, from a year earlier. The increase was the result of particularly strong gains in the subscriptions and transactions segments.

Revenues also were noticeably higher in the commercial banking segment. That was mainly due to the company's acquisition last March of the commercial banking business of financial software giant Intuit Inc. The company also last year acquired Albany Software, a United Kingdom firm, to help the company compete better with cloud-based technologies, but so far that has resulted in less than 2 percent revenue gain.