Track MRR and revenue without a BI tool
Stripe shows you today. It is much worse at showing you the shape of the last eighteen months. Pulling subscriptions and invoices into a sheet or a table on a schedule gives you a history you own, in a place where you can actually do arithmetic on it.
How to set it up
- 1
Pull subscriptions, not just charges
Charges tell you what happened; subscriptions tell you what recurs. MRR is a property of the latter.
- 2
Normalise the amounts
Stripe returns the smallest currency unit, so 5000 is $50.00. Divide by 100 in a computed field before anyone sees it.
- 3
Normalise the interval
A £1,200 annual plan is £100 of MRR. If you have mixed intervals and skip this, your MRR is wrong in a way that flatters you.
- 4
Decide snapshot or history
Overwrite gives a current picture. Append gives a history you can cohort on. Most teams eventually want both, in two jobs.
The connectors this uses
Questions
Sheet or database?
A sheet if the audience is people reading numbers. Postgres if you want to join revenue against product usage or support tickets, which is where the interesting questions actually live.
How far back can I load?
As far as Stripe holds, using created_after and created_before to walk backwards in windows rather than requesting everything in one run.