Layer cake and MRR bridge: two charts boards ask for

Two charts show up in a lot of board decks and investor updates for subscription businesses. One explains how revenue got from where it was to where it is. The other shows whether the customers you won years ago are still paying. Both are now in GrowPanel: the MRR bridge and the layer cake.

The MRR bridge: from start to end, one step at a time

Take the demo account in the chart below. Its growth rate says MRR went up 22% over the last year. The bridge says new business added 45% of the starting MRR, expansion another 26%, and churn took back 52%. That second version is the story a board wants to hear, and it's what a bridge shows.

The bridge is a waterfall. The first bar is your MRR at the start of the date range. Then one bar for each kind of movement: new, expansion and reactivation step up, contraction and churn step down, and paused, resumed and FX impact appear when they happened. The last bar is where you ended up. The steps always add up to the difference between the two totals, and anything a movement doesn't explain gets its own "Other" bar, so nothing hides in a net number.

It's the new Bridge tab in the MRR report, and the ARR report has the same tab in ARR. Pick a month, a quarter or a year, and filter by plan, region or channel to see where growth came from and where it leaked. The table under the chart gives each step's amount, the number of customers behind it and its share of the starting MRR. Read the bridge guide.

The layer cake: does your growth compound?

The layer cake stacks your MRR by the year customers started paying. Each layer is one year's customers, followed for as long as they stay, and each new year sits on top of the ones before it. The total height is your MRR.

What you look for is the shape of the old layers. When they hold their thickness after the first year or two, expansion is making up for churn and every new year adds to the business. When every layer thins out, most of each year's new sales go to replacing revenue you lost, and growth gets harder the bigger you get. It's the same question net revenue retention answers, drawn so you can see it year by year.

You'll find it as the Layer cake tab in the Cohorts report, next to net revenue retention and logo retention. Switch between MRR and customers to see whether a year holds its revenue because its customers stay, or because fewer customers pay more. Read the layer cake guide.

Charts you can take to the board

Both charts download as an image from the chart's ⋯ menu, ready for a deck. That menu got a few new options along the way: grouped charts can be shown as lines, stacked or 100%, with the values written on the chart, and every plan, market or currency now keeps the same colour in every chart and table. More on chart options.

Both reports are live for every account, built from the same billing data as the rest of GrowPanel's subscription analytics. If you want to see them before connecting anything, they're in the live demo.