60 customers on a $19 monthly plan and 14 on a $190 annual. my stripe view, my spreadsheet and the number i said out loud to a friend last week are three different numbers, and the annual plans are the reason. the cash is genuinely lumpy so part of me wants to report it as it lands. what is the convention people actually use, and does it matter at this size?
worked example with your numbers so you can check whatever tool you use against it. 60 monthlies at $19 is $1,140. 14 annuals at $190 is $2,660 collected, but $221.67 of mrr. total mrr around $1,362, total cash in the months when annuals renew looks completely different. if a dashboard is showing you something else it is either counting cash or counting the annual at full price in month one.
that specific error makes annual customers look more valuable per month than monthlies, which then tempts you to discount annual harder. it compounds quietly.
ran mine against your numbers and my sheet was counting the annual at nineteen a month, which is the entire source of the drift.
i counted annuals as cash in the month they landed for my first year and the chart was unreadable. every renewal month looked like a growth spike, the month after looked like a collapse, and my churn rate calculation was nonsense because the denominator jumped around. rebuilding the history took a weekend and every number i had told anyone was wrong.
at 74 customers i would track both and care mostly about cash, honestly. mrr is the number for talking to people who benchmark companies, and it is also the number that makes you feel worse than your bank account does when annuals are a big share. the operational question you actually face this quarter is whether you can pay the bills in a month where nothing renews.
@baseweight_bel · 4h ago · 3 replies
mrr normalises, always. an annual plan contributes its price divided by twelve for each of those twelve months, regardless of when the money arrived. keep cash collected as a completely separate line, because those two numbers answer different questions and merging them produces a chart that is useless for both.
Reply
Report
@first_repo_finn · 16h ago
so the $190 plan is not $19 of mrr, it is about $15.83, and the discount lives in the mrr number rather than being invisible.
Reply
Report
@clay_soil_life · 4h ago
correct, and that is a feature. it is the only way you find out what the annual discount is costing you when annuals are half your base.
Reply
Report