As the subscription business model is being adopted by most of the businesses today, effectively analyzing the SaaS metrics has become a lifeline in understanding the health of a subscription business. Few of the critical SaaS subscription metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Churn Rate, Retention Rate, Growth Rate, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) are essential to determine the strength of a business.
Zoho Analytics’ (previously Zoho Analytics) recent integration with Stripe provides users with powerful subscription analytics for users who run their business on Stripe. This integration comes with insightful reports and dashboards that will enable you to perform deep analysis, continuously measure and optimize your business processes.
In this blog post, I’ll highlight a few vital reports offered by Stripe’s Subscription Analytics, powered by Zoho Analytics.
*Scroll down or click here to view the full dashboard.
This dashboard provides you a quick overview with the most crucial SaaS metrics. Let’s dive deep into each report to discover the value they hold for your business.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
MRR is one of the most important metrics for any SaaS business. Apart from revenue generated through new purchases, SaaS companies can acquire a considerable amount of recurring revenue each month (the older the company, the more recurring revenue it receives). The concept is simple: as long as the customer stays with you, they’ll pay you the monthly subscription amount. Growing MRR is a positive sign for any subscription-based business. The above chart shows you both the new and existing recurring revenue trend across months.
Customer Churn Rate Cohort.
Customer churn is another significant factor that every business needs to keep track of regularly. Churn gives you the number of customers you lose on a monthly or yearly basis. It is widely accepted that a company with a high churn rate has to work primarily on reducing churn rather than acquiring new customers. A marginal drop in churn rate can increase your customer retention and revenue contribution. The above cohort shows you the churn rate over the lifetime of customers nicely color-coded to identify where immediate actions are required.
Month-over-Month Customer Growth rate
Is your company growing fast or slow? Has it stopped growing altogether? The Month-over-Month customer growth rate report answers these questions. It provides you with a snapshot of the number of customer acquisitions, with the growth rate shown over time. The more customer acquisitions, the higher your growth rate, which means increased revenue—a healthy sign for the business.
Distribution of active subscriptions by pricing plan
SaaS businesses formulate their pricing matrices to optimize volumes and revenue. This report displays the distribution of active subscriptions according to the subscription plan. With this data, you can find out which plans are the most popular among your customers. The subscription count can aid you with MRR/ARR calculations to forecast revenue and look at further optimization of each pricing plan.
Unpaid Invoices by Invoiced Month
If you want to analyze pending invoices, then this report is definitely something to take advantage of. Based on the month and year, this report gives you an analysis of your paid and unpaid invoices. The summary provides you with a quick overview of your pending revenue stream. With this, you can plan on strategies to follow up the customers and make them pay their pending invoices within a short period of time. Not just that, you can also come up with action plans to reduce the number of pending invoices in the future.
These are just a few of the handpicked reports offered by the Zoho Analytics Advanced Analytics integration with Stripe. There are over 75 pre-packaged reports and dashboards to help you parse data easily. You can also create your own industry- or business-specific reports and dashboards using the intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Zoho Analytics also enables you to combine data from a variety of data sources such as CRM, Helpdesk, Campaigns, to perform cross-functional analytics.
Power up your Stripe subscription analytics with Zoho Analytics and stay informed about your essential subscription metrics.
Why does the Stripe integration not work with a restricted API key? Surely you only need READ access to Stripe data... Restricted keys were released over 6 months ago... STATUS_MESSAGE_START Problem connecting with Stripes; Please try after sometime ... OTHER_DETAILS_START [Stripe HTTP Error #Response : { "error": { "type": "invalid_request_error", "message": "The provided key 'rk_live_********************db0t' does not have the required permissions for this endpoint on account 'acct_'. This is a restricted API key, but the required permissions are not available for use by restricted keys." } } #Status : 403]
Hi Oliver, Thanks for posting. Stripe’s Restricted API Key does not have access to fetch 'Account' details. We need to fetch account details to keep track of the Stripe account which is integrated with Zoho Analytics and to get its default currency and Time Zone. Technical Details: GET https://api.stripe.com/v1/account is not supported with restricted API key. That's the reason for using the SECRET KEY.
Cool - I understand... but why not just ask us to provide that info instead? This doesn't feel like something which should block the integration (or warrant elevated privileges to the ENTIRE account).
Ollie: We have set up this workflow since we wanted to completely automate the integration process between Stripe and Zoho Analytics with as little information to be filled in manually by the user. That said, we understand your point, and will try to address this in future.