MRR forecast
The MRR forecast projects your Monthly Recurring Revenue into the future and lets you stress-test it with three simple levers. Where the CMRR report projects only the changes you already know about (scheduled churn, planned upgrades, expiring discounts), the MRR forecast is a statistical projection: it takes the shape of your last six months and carries it forward, then lets you ask "what if we win more customers, retain more revenue, or raise prices?"
It is built to be transparent — every baseline number comes from your own recent movements, and the whole projection is reproducible by hand.
Overview
The report has three parts:
- Three levers at the top — New customers, Net revenue retention, and Prices.
- A chart — your actual MRR history, a dashed baseline (what happens with no changes), and, when you move a lever, a blue scenario line.
- A table — the period-by-period decomposition behind both lines: new business, net revenue change on the existing base, customer count, and total MRR.
The chart and the table share one timeline, so a quarter in the table lines up with the same point on the chart.
How the forecast is calculated
GrowPanel uses a customer-count model, the same approach used across the industry, rather than a raw MRR extrapolation. Two things drive your MRR forward:
- New business — a roughly fixed number of new customers each month, each worth your average sale price. New business does not scale with how big your book already is; your acquisition engine adds logos at a fairly steady rate.
- Net revenue retention (NRR) — what happens to the revenue from the customers you already have. Expansion and reactivation add to it; contraction and churn take away. NRR acts on the base, so its effect grows or shrinks as the base does.
Each month, the projection does:
Next MRR = This MRR × (monthly NRR) + New customers × ASP
Every input is the average of your last six complete months:
| Baseline | What it means |
|---|---|
| New customers / month | Average number of new paying customers per month |
| ASP (average sale price) | Average new-customer MRR — new business is priced at this |
| ARPA (average revenue per account) | Current MRR ÷ current customer count |
| Net revenue retention | Monthly change in revenue on the existing base (expansion + reactivation − contraction − churn). Above 100% means the base grows on its own |
Because nothing here is hidden, you can always tie the forecast back to the numbers you already see in your MRR and movements reports.
Why a steady account can trend toward a flat line
If your monthly NRR is below 100% (the base loses a little net revenue each month) and new business stays flat, the forecast will bend toward an equilibrium — the level where the revenue you add from new business exactly balances the revenue the base loses. That is not a bug; it is the honest consequence of "flat acquisition + net churn." To model continued acceleration, raise the New customers lever to reflect a growing acquisition engine.
The levers
Each lever starts untouched at your six-month baseline (shown beneath it, e.g. "37 customers/mo (avg. last 6 months)"). Move it and the label shows the change, e.g. "37 → 48 customers/mo".
New customers
How many new customers you win each month, as a percentage change on your baseline. New MRR is that count multiplied by your ASP.
Net revenue retention
How much revenue you keep and grow from existing customers each month, in percentage points (monthly). Above 100% means the base expands on its own; below 100% means it contracts net of expansion. This single lever folds together expansion, reactivation, contraction and churn, so an expansion-led account is projected as growing rather than shrinking.
Prices
A price change applied either to new customers only (your ASP goes up, existing customers are untouched) or to all customers (a one-time step-up of the whole book, plus the higher ASP going forward). Choose which from the dropdown in the lever's heading.
Use Reset to return every lever to its baseline.
Reading the chart
- The solid line is your actual MRR history (labelled Actual MRR on hover).
- The dashed grey line is the baseline forecast — where you land with no changes (labelled Baseline).
- The blue line appears when you move a lever — your scenario.
The chart defaults to a quarterly interval and shows history alongside a three-year horizon. Use the horizon dropdown (top right) to switch between 1, 2, 3 and 5 years, just like the CMRR report. The summary strip below the chart reads out where the scenario lands in 1, 2 and 3 years and at the end of the horizon.
Reading the table
The table decomposes every period — both history and forecast — into:
- New business — new MRR won that period (new customers × ASP).
- Net revenue change — the net movement on the existing base (expansion and reactivation, minus churn and contraction). A negative figure here alongside rising total MRR simply means growth is driven by new business faster than the base is churning.
- Customers — projected number of paying customers at period end.
- Total MRR — the resulting MRR.
- Growth — the period-over-period change in total MRR.
Because the table starts at the same date as the chart, you can read the actual decomposition of your recent quarters and then follow it straight into the projection.
Currency, segments and filters
The forecast honours the same controls as your other reports: switch base currency, apply a segment, or filter by plan, country and custom variables. The baseline is recomputed from the filtered movements, so you can forecast a single plan, region or segment in isolation.
Related
- CMRR — a forward projection of only the committed changes you already know about.
- Monthly growth goal — set the target you are steering this forecast toward.
- MRR and MRR movements — the actuals the baseline is derived from.
