The DataHero Blog

A common question among our users: “How do I measure my monthly recurring revenue from Stripe?” Monthly recurring revenue is a an important metric because it measures predictable revenue within your business. This is revenue based on a subscription, so for many SaaS businesses, it’s their lifeblood. It’s also one of the first metrics investors or your board will want to hear.

Using DataHero and Stripe, it’s incredibly simple to create a sophisticated graph in just a couple minutes:

1.) Connect DataHero to Stripe

• Click connect in the left menu and then select Stripe
  
• Input your Stripe credentials to give DataHero access to your Stripe information. Remember, we will show you a list of files available for import but won’t import anything without your consent.

2.) Import Your Data

For monthly recurring revenue, import Customer Invoices. There is a subtle difference between charges and invoices in Stripe. Invoices are recurring payments, charges are one time payments. Therefore, if you’d like to simply see monthly revenue import Customer Charges, if you’d like to see monthly recurring revenue, import Customer Invoices.

3.) Create Your Chart

Once you import Customer Invoices, DataHero will present a suggested chart of monthly recurring revenue, click it and you’re done!

4.) Segment

Drag on other variables like Plan, Coupon or Amount Refunded to get a clearer idea of where your Stripe revenue comes from.

 

5.) Adjust Time

For annual or daily recurring revenue, simply click the “Grouped by” dropdown under the time variable.You can even measure tricky things like amount by day of the week to see which days bring in the most revenue.

6.) Perform cohort analysis

Drag on “Charge Created”, “Customer Created” and “Amount” to see monthly recurring revenue broken down by when a customer was created. In the graph below, you’ll see that customers who were created in Quarter 2 seem to bring in the most revenue overall. You can apply this same idea to Subscription Start Date or Discount Start Date.

 

7.) Enable DataHero Live Charts

To keep your charts up to date in DataHero, enable Live Charts. Set Live Charts to update based on your schedule, and charts will automatically update as the data within Stripe changes.

Monthly recurring revenue can be calculated in a few different ways (contracted versus committed, monthly versus annual subscriptions and so on) but this idea should get you started. We love feedback on what our users are calculating, so please let us know what other Stripe questions you have in the comments below. And if you’d like to learn more about how to visualize your Stripe revenues,please click here.