SaaS & Subscriptions / Customer Success

Gross Revenue Retention GRR

The share of last period's recurring revenue you kept from the same customers, ignoring any upsell, it can never exceed 100%.

The fork, why two teams get different numbers

The window and the cohort. Point-in-time GRR annualizes a single month (1 − monthly gross churn, compounded); cohort GRR tracks a fixed starting cohort's revenue over a trailing twelve months. They disagree whenever churn is lumpy. There is also a base-timing fork: denominator = MRR at the start of the period vs MRR twelve months ago vs the cohort's original contract value. Finance tends to the trailing-12 cohort view; CS dashboards default to the annualized monthly view because it updates faster. Gross revenue CHURN is simply 1 − GRR and inherits every one of these forks.

The trap

Expansion leaking into a "gross" number.

In the Metric LibraryGet the Metric Library

Reference: SaaS operating-metric convention (no single standards body)