10 Reporting Metrics Every Subscription SaaS Company Must Track

Most companies today recognize the value of data for making better business decisions. However, it can be overwhelming to get started. The key is choosing the right metrics to track for your business without amassing too much data to analyze.

In this guide, we’ll explore ten essential SaaS reporting metrics for subscription companies to track if they want to harness data to improve their business performance.

How to Choose SaaS Reporting Metrics

There are hundreds of metrics out there that many businesses track, but not all of them are relevant to SaaS companies. Even the list of metrics that are relevant to SaaS companies is often too long to be practical.

That’s why every company should choose metrics that align with their business goals. By avoiding the mistake of tracking too many SaaS metrics, you’ll be able to dive deeper into the data and actually take action on it.

10 Essential Metrics for SaaS and Subscription Companies

Now that we’ve discussed why it’s important to focus your analysis and reporting efforts on the most relevant data, here are ten metrics most SaaS and subscription businesses should track.

1. Trial Conversion Rate

Trial conversion rate is the number of free trial users that become paying subscribers within a given period of time. This is one of many metrics that our Trial Insights tool tracks to help you understand the performance of your free trials.

A poor trial conversion rate often suggests that users are either dissatisfied with your product or aren’t convinced that it’s worth the amount you’re charging for a full subscription. Digging deeper into your trial conversion rate can pinpoint these issues and help you improve the trial and platform experience.

Track trial conversion rate in Baremetrics

Track trial conversion rate in Baremetrics.

2. New Trial Sign-Ups

The number of sign-ups for free trials is another important metric for understanding the performance of your trials. It’s great if your trial conversion rate is high, but if there aren’t a lot of prospects signing up for trials in the first place, it’s still not going to lead to a ton of new subscriptions.

A low amount of new trial sign-ups, therefore, could indicate to SaaS companies that they need to invest more in marketing and sales efforts related to their free trial program.

Track new trials in Baremetrics

Track new trials in Baremetrics.

3. Number of Active Users

The number of active users—whether it’s daily active users (DAU) or monthly active users (MAU)—is the number of users that have interacted with your product within a given period of time.

MAU reveals the overall health of your business because a drop in active users could be a leading indicator of churn. The ratio between DAU and MAU can also measure “stickiness” or how many users consistently return to your product.

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4. Churn Rate

Churn rate is the number of customers or the amount of revenue that was lost in a given period of time. Every company has some degree of churn, but it’s an important metric to track and reduce because it has a huge impact on business growth. Churn negatively impacts recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, and many other SaaS metrics.

User churn in Baremetrics

User churn represents the rate that customers cancel their subscription to your service.

5. Monthly Recurring Revenue

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is all recurring revenue normalized into a monthly amount so that it’s a consistent number SaaS companies can track over time.

This is arguably the most important SaaS metric because its increases and decreases are key indicators of the health and growth of a business.

MRR in Baremetrics

Unless you provide some context, metrics like MRR are just numbers. Above we compare our MRR from two different time periods to compare the growth rate at a high-level.

6. Annual Recurring Revenue

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is similar to MRR, but it’s the total forecasted revenue for the entire year rather than a monthly amount. This metric is usually based on year-long and multi-year contracts, though the calculation can vary for different businesses.

ARR is helpful for understanding the current state of a subscription business as well as its potential profit in the future.

Track ARR in Baremetrics.

7. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average amount spent on marketing, advertising, sales, and other expenses to bring in a new customer. This metric is helpful for SaaS companies to determine how much they should invest in attracting new customers, especially when they compare it to the customer lifetime value metric.

8. Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is an estimate of the amount of revenue that a customer will bring in throughout their entire relationship with the business.

SaaS companies should track the lifetime value of their customers and ensure it’s higher than their average customer acquisition costs. Otherwise, a poor CAC-CLTV ratio indicates the amount the business is spending on attracting new customers is negatively impacting profitability.

Track LTV in Baremetrics.

9. Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers that stay with your business for a given period of time, which is the opposite of churn.

A high customer retention rate is crucial for the long-term sustainability of a SaaS business because it’s typically more expensive to acquire customers than to retain them. Retaining customers also leads to a greater customer lifetime value over time.

10. Cancellation Reason

For those customers that do churn, it’s important to understand why they’ve chosen to cancel their subscriptions. Their cancellation reason isn’t exactly a metric, but it’s still essential for SaaS companies to track so that they can reduce their churn rate.

Baremetrics Cancellation Insights can help you capture customer feedback so you can understand their reason for saying goodbye. You can then send them automated emails to try to win them back.

Cancellation Insights survey in Baremetrics

A customizable “Reason for Cancellation” form that you can embed into your app or send over email. Through this automated survey, you can gather the data about why your customers cancel before they cancel- and tailor your outreach better.

Cancellation Insights, an easy way to collect feedback on churned customers

How Baremetrics Helps

Baremetrics is a dunning, engagement, and subscription analytics platform that helps SaaS companies not only track metrics, but also take action on them. The platform provides Smart Dashboards that make it easy to dive into the metrics most relevant to your business. It also tracks 26 essential metrics for SaaS businesses, including the ones listed above.

In addition, data augmentation with Baremetrics can merge external data with your metrics for even deeper insights. You can connect with Zapier, import CSVs, or use the Baremetrics API to bring in your third-party data. As a result, you’ll be able to get a more holistic view of your business on a single platform.

Email reports also help you stay on top of your Baremetrics data. You can find out what’s going on with your SaaS business at any time and see any trends your metrics may reveal. This enables you to make timely, data-driven decisions that bring you closer to your goals.

There are also useful automated features like Recover, which can help you recover revenue that would have been lost due to failed customer payments. On average, this Baremetrics capability pays for itself 38 times over.

Track the SaaS Reporting Metrics That Matter With Baremetrics

As you can see, there’s so much data available to SaaS and subscription businesses. Focusing your subscription analytics on the metrics that matter most for your SaaS company is the best way to see results.

By tracking SaaS metrics with Baremetrics, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that propel your business forward. Ready to take your SaaS reporting to the next level? Sign up for a free trial of Baremetrics today.

A graph showing MRR over time correlated with events related

FAQ

What are the most important SaaS performance metrics for a subscription business?

The most important SaaS performance metrics for a subscription business are MRR, churn rate, customer lifetime value, trial conversion rate, and customer acquisition cost. MRR is the foundation because it normalises all recurring revenue into a single, trackable number that signals whether the business is growing or contracting. Churn rate tells you how fast you are losing customers or revenue, which directly affects LTV and long-term sustainability. CAC and LTV should always be evaluated together as a ratio, since a poor CAC-to-LTV relationship is one of the clearest signs a subscription business is spending more to acquire customers than it will ever earn from them. Tracking these key SaaS metrics in one place, rather than across spreadsheets, gives founders and finance leads the real-time visibility needed to act before problems compound.
What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery for subscription businesses?

Baremetrics offers automated failed payment recovery through its Recover feature, which is built specifically for subscription businesses running on Stripe, Braintree, or Recurly. Recover automatically retries failed charges on an intelligent schedule and triggers customer-facing email sequences to prompt cardholders to update their billing details before a subscription lapses. This matters because involuntary churn caused by failed payments is preventable revenue loss that does not show up as a deliberate cancellation but still erodes MRR. On average, Recover pays for itself 38 times over, making it one of the highest-ROI tools a subscription business can deploy to protect recurring revenue without any manual intervention from the team.
How do SaaS companies report on churn and separate it from other revenue movements?

SaaS companies report on churn accurately by breaking total revenue change into its component parts: new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR. Blending these together into a single revenue figure masks the real story, because a business with strong new MRR but high churn may look healthy on the surface while quietly losing its existing customer base. To report on churn meaningfully, subscription teams should track both logo churn, the rate at which customers cancel, and revenue churn, the percentage of MRR lost in a period, since these two numbers can diverge significantly depending on which customer segments are leaving. Baremetrics surfaces all four MRR movements in real time directly from your billing data, so finance leads and founders can see exactly where revenue is being gained and lost without building custom reports.
How can I benchmark my SaaS churn rate against similar subscription companies?

You can benchmark your SaaS churn rate against similar subscription companies by comparing your figures to industry data segmented by business model, pricing tier, or MRR range rather than using a single universal average. A monthly churn rate that looks alarming for a mid-market B2B SaaS business may be entirely normal for a self-serve product with a lower average contract value, so the relevant comparison group matters. Baremetrics publishes open benchmark data drawn from hundreds of real SaaS companies, covering churn rate, MRR growth, and other key subscription metrics. This gives founders and growth teams a concrete external reference point to assess whether their retention performance is competitive or needs attention, which is far more actionable than comparing against broad industry averages.
What is the difference between churn rate and customer retention rate for subscription businesses?

Churn rate and customer retention rate measure opposite sides of the same subscriber behavior, and for a subscription business both numbers are essential to track. Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue lost within a given period, while retention rate is the percentage that stays. If your monthly churn rate is 4 percent, your retention rate for that period is 96 percent. The practical difference is in how each metric is used: churn rate is the diagnostic signal that tells you how fast the business is losing ground and drives investigation into cancellation reasons, while retention rate is the forward-looking health indicator that informs LTV calculations, revenue forecasting, and investor reporting. Tracking both as part of your core subscription business metrics gives a fuller picture than relying on either one in isolation.

10 Reporting Metrics Every Subscription SaaS Company Must Track

Table of Contents

How to Choose SaaS Reporting Metrics