Business performance
MRR, ARR, net and gross retention, and the waterfall that explains where every dollar came from.
This is the screen for answering "how are we doing?" with numbers instead of feelings. It is built for whoever runs the business, not for the day-to-day of a single account.
The headline metrics
| Metric | What it is |
|---|---|
| MRR | Monthly recurring revenue |
| ARR | Annual recurring revenue |
| NRR | Net revenue retention, expansions included |
| GRR | Gross retention, expansions excluded |
| Net new MRR | How much MRR grew in the period, losses already netted out |
| NPS | Your book's aggregate satisfaction |
NRR and GRR together tell the whole story. If your NRR is above 100% but your GRR is low, you are losing customers and covering it with expansion from the ones who stayed. That is real growth, but fragile.
Periods and comparison
You pick the period with four shortcuts:
- MTD, month to date
- QTD, quarter to date
- YTD, year to date
- TTM, trailing twelve months
And every metric is compared against one of two baselines: the prior window or the same window last year. The second is what you want when your business has seasonality, because comparing December to November says nothing if December is always different.
The MRR waterfall
This is the most useful part of the screen, and the hardest to reconstruct by hand. It breaks the MRR movement between the start and the end of the period into five parts:
| Part | What it represents |
|---|---|
| New | Customers who did not exist at the start |
| Expansion | Existing customers who grew |
| Reactivation | Customers who had churned and came back |
| Contraction | Customers still here, paying less |
| Churn | Customers who left |
Two businesses can close the quarter on identical MRR from opposite situations: one grew through expansion with zero churn, the other lost half its book and papered over it with new logos. The waterfall is what tells those two apart.
Watch contraction as closely as churn. A customer downgrading is rarely a happy customer: usually it is churn that has not happened yet.
Health and voice of the customer
The screen crosses the money with two more things:
- Health distribution across your book, in four groups: healthy, at risk, critical, and no score. That last group matters, because those are accounts you have no information about, not accounts that are fine.
- Voice of the customer: NPS, CSAT, CES and adoption, aggregated.
Seeing MRR concentrated in critical-health accounts is the definition of risk, and this view is what puts it in front of you.
How to read it
- Start with NRR and GRR, not MRR. MRR tells you where you are; retention tells you where you are heading.
- Use the year-over-year comparison if your business has seasons. If it does not, prior-window is more sensitive.
- Cross the waterfall with the health distribution. If your expansion comes from at-risk accounts, it is borrowed expansion.
- Check the "no score" group. A book with many accounts lacking a health score has a data problem before it has a business problem.
Common problems
"The numbers do not match my accounting"
They should not match exactly. This view measures recurring revenue, not invoiced revenue: it excludes one-off charges, services and ad-hoc adjustments.
"I see accounts with no health score"
Those are accounts with very little information: no usage events, no tickets, no recent activity. Connecting a product integration is usually what fixes it.
"My NRR is above 100% and I still lost customers"
That is exactly what NRR can hide. Compare it against GRR: the gap between the two is how much expansion is covering how much loss.