Introduction

Learn how to build a simple, strong system to report your startup ARR. It shows steps to keep your revenue numbers clear and correct.

What’s the problem it solves?

Startups often spend months fighting broken revenue reports that collapse when things change. This guide fixes that by giving clear steps to make ARR reporting stable and easy.

Quick Summary

The guide begins by explaining that Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the most important number for any subscription business. It shows why tracking ARR well helps teams answer every big question about growth, marketing, and product choices.

Next, it breaks ARR into five parts: new customer revenue, expansion from existing customers, contraction when they downgrade, churn when they leave, and restarts when they come back. For each part, the authors explain why it matters, how to spot changes, and what teams can do to move the numbers the right way.

Finally, the guide walks through building a daily ARR report. It shows how to gather raw billing data, clean it up, join it to a table of dates, and calculate daily changes. It also shares simple habits for sharing these numbers every day, so everyone in the company sees and acts on the same clear view of revenue.

Key Takeaways

• ARR is your north star metric for any subscription business.
• Break ARR into its parts to see what drives growth and where leaks happen.
• Build four tables step by step: raw data, clean data, date table, and the final ARR table.
• Calculate daily changes to spot trends early and share them widely.
• Keep reports simple so every team member can understand and use the data.
• Tie every project back to how it moves ARR.

What to do

• Gather all subscription and invoice data into one raw table.
• Clean that data by handling overlaps, discounts, and one-time charges.
• Create a date table and join it so you have a record for every day.
• Calculate daily ARR changes and split them into new, expansion, contraction, churn, and restart.
• Send a short daily report to your team with key charts on ARR and its parts.
• Review weekly with leaders to connect experiments back to ARR movement.
• Use only simple metrics that anyone can read and show how they link to ARR.

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