Subscription box, app, and membership businesses depend on a handful of numbers – net new MRR, churn by cohort, LTV:CAC – yet most finance and growth teams calculate them differently across three different tools. We rebuild the revenue operations layer so billing, product, and marketing all work from the same number.
The Challenge
MRR is an estimate pieced together from Stripe, the app database, and a spreadsheet
Most consumer subscription companies compute MRR three different ways depending on who is asked. Finance pulls from Stripe reports, growth pulls from a BI tool built on a stale data warehouse sync, and the founder's board deck uses a hand-adjusted number from last quarter. None of the three reconcile because none of them handle proration, trials converting mid-cycle, or multi-currency billing the same way. The board gets a number nobody can defend under a follow-up question.
Churn is reported as a single number when it is actually three
Voluntary cancellations, involuntary churn from failed cards, and downgrades all get bucketed into a single churn percentage that hides which problem is actually growing. A subscription box company can have flat voluntary churn while failed-payment churn quietly doubles because a card network update broke retry logic. Nobody catches it because the dashboard only shows the blended rate, and the fix – which is a billing and dunning fix, not a retention offer – never gets built.
Cohort data sits in a BI tool that nobody beyond analytics opens
The team that can answer whether the March cohort is retaining better than February is buried three clicks deep in a Looker or Amplitude instance that marketing and the executive team rarely touch. Decisions about acquisition spend, plan pricing, and win-back campaigns get made on gut feel and 30-day retention snapshots instead of full cohort curves. By the time a bad cohort shows up in the blended revenue number, the spend that caused it happened two quarters ago.
Billing system updates break revenue reporting without anyone realizing for weeks
A plan restructure, a new annual tier, or a migration from Chargebee to Stripe Billing routinely breaks the mapping between subscription events and the revenue model. Net new MRR and expansion revenue get miscounted, sometimes for months, because nobody owns validating that the data pipeline still matches the new billing logic after a launch. The team finds out when a board number does not tie back to bank deposits.
How We Can Help
We begin with a revenue model audit: we extract raw subscription events from your billing system – Stripe, Recurly, Chargebee, Braintree, or an in-house ledger – and reconcile them line by line with what finance, growth, and the board deck currently report. Within the first two weeks, we identify exactly where the numbers diverge: proration handling, trial-to-paid conversion timing, refund treatment, or multi-currency conversion, and document precisely which number is correct.
Strategy follows. We establish one revenue model – the formulas for MRR, net new MRR, expansion, contraction, voluntary churn, and involuntary churn – and have finance, growth, and product agree to it in writing before anything gets built. This step is routinely skipped because it is the least exciting part of the work, which is why revenue reporting remains broken at most subscription companies for years.
Execution creates the pipeline that automates the agreed model. We build or repair the data pipeline from your billing system into a single source-of-truth revenue table, separate churn into voluntary, involuntary, and downgrade categories with distinct tracking, and create cohort retention curves that update automatically rather than being rebuilt manually for every board cycle. Where involuntary churn is material – and across most subscription apps and DTC boxes, it represents 20 to 40 percent of total churn – we build or improve the dunning and card-retry logic that Stripe Smart Retries or your billing platform's native tools leave on the table.
We also repair the revenue operations components beyond the dashboard: plan and pricing architecture that provides clear upgrade paths rather than confusing tier overlap, trial-to-paid conversion instrumentation that shows which acquisition channels generate payers versus trial tourists, and win-back flow logic based on the actual cancellation reason instead of a generic discount blast.
Measurement is the deliverable, not an afterthought. We provide a revenue dashboard used by finance, growth, and the executive team, with MRR, churn by type, cohort retention, and LTV:CAC defined consistently everywhere they appear. We train the internal owner of revenue reporting to maintain it and document every formula, so the next person who works on it does not need to reverse-engineer a black box.
What distinguishes this from a BI consultancy that builds a dashboard: we begin with the billing system and the money, not a chart library. A dashboard that shows the wrong number more quickly is not revenue operations. We correct the model first, then make it visible.
What we deliver
- Reconciled revenue model with MRR, net new, expansion, contraction, and churn formulas agreed across finance, growth, and product
- Voluntary versus involuntary churn split with dunning and card-retry logic audit
- Automated cohort retention reporting by acquisition channel and signup month
- Plan and pricing architecture review with upgrade path and downgrade leakage analysis
- Single source-of-truth revenue dashboard with documented formulas and an internal owner trained to maintain it
For most consumer subscription businesses, 20 to 40 percent of churn comes from a failed card, not a customer choice – yet the dashboard presents it as a retention problem when it is really a billing problem.
Our Methodology
We approach this as a 90-day rebuild, not an audit that ends with a slide deck nobody implements. The first 30 days focus on reconciliation: we extract every subscription event from your billing system, reconstruct MRR and churn using raw data, and identify every point where current reporting differs from the money that actually reached the bank. Before any dashboard is touched, we deliver a written revenue model approved by finance, growth, and the executive team.
Days 31 to 60 are dedicated to building the pipeline. We separate churn into voluntary, involuntary, and downgrade, set up cohort retention tracking by signup month and acquisition channel, and repair dunning logic where failed payments are quietly draining revenue. We also review plan and pricing architecture during this phase, because pricing changes are typically the fastest lever on a subscription P&L and are often blocked by distrust of the underlying data.
Days 61 to 90 establish the operating cadence: a weekly revenue review based on the new dashboard, a documented procedure for validating the pipeline following any billing system or plan change, and a trained internal owner. We do not remain the permanent operator of your revenue dashboard. The objective is a system your team manages without us, one that withstands the next pricing change or billing migration without breaking.
Our Working Process
Full rebuild engagements take 8 to 12 weeks, with a lighter 4-week option limited to the churn-type split and dunning audit for teams that already trust their MRR number. Days 1 to 30 cover reconciliation and model agreement, conducted primarily through working sessions with finance and the billing system owner. Days 31 to 60 focus on the pipeline and dashboard build, with weekly checkpoints to ensure nothing is built around a model later found to be wrong. Days 61 to 90 cover cadence installation and handoff.
Our team includes a revenue operations lead responsible for the model and reconciliation, along with a data engineer who builds the pipeline for your specific billing stack. From your team, we need access to the billing platform's API or data export, the finance owner of the current MRR number, and a growth or product stakeholder familiar with plan structure and acquisition channels. We need no engineering time beyond granting API access unless the billing system itself requires a dunning logic fix.
Weekly working sessions monitor reconciliation progress during the first month, followed by pipeline build status in the second. After handoff, we hold a 30-day check-in to verify that the dashboard made it through a real reporting cycle – a board deck, monthly close, or pricing change – without requiring us to repair it.
- One revenue number that finance, growth, and the board all trust and can defend under questioning
- Reduced involuntary churn through dunning and card-retry fixes
- Cohort visibility that catches a bad acquisition channel before two more quarters of spend go into it
- Faster, more confident pricing and plan decisions because the underlying data is no longer in question
If your consumer subscription company needs revenue operations leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
What does revenue operations work cost for a consumer subscription company?
The complete 90-day rebuild costs $18K to $40K per month, based on billing system complexity, the number of plans and price points you operate, and whether dunning logic requires custom engineering or platform-native fixes. The narrower 4-week churn-and-dunning engagement costs less, typically $12K to $20K total.
How soon will we see results from a revenue operations engagement?
The reconciled revenue model – the number everyone accepts as correct – is generally completed within 30 days. Dunning and card-retry improvements appear in the churn number within one to two billing cycles, because failed-payment recovery happens close to immediately once the logic is corrected.
How will your team collaborate with our current finance and engineering staff?
We conduct reconciliation sessions directly with the finance person who currently owns your MRR number, since they usually know where the existing model is wrong even when nobody has corrected it. Engineering involvement is mainly limited to API access and, when necessary, deploying a dunning or retry fix that we specify.
What sets Winston Francois apart from a BI or analytics agency?
Most analytics agencies begin with a chart library and ask what you want to see. We begin with your billing system and reconcile the money before creating anything visible.
How is ROI measured on a revenue operations engagement?
The main measure is revenue recovered through involuntary churn fixes, which is directly attributable and becomes visible within one to two billing cycles. Beyond that, we measure how much more quickly the team can answer a board question about MRR or cohort retention without manual reconciliation, and whether pricing and acquisition decisions are based on cohort data rather than blended averages.
What kind of consumer subscription company is best suited for this work?
Companies with $5M to $100M ARR operating a recurring billing model – subscription boxes, membership apps, streaming or content subscriptions – where MRR and churn shape board reporting and fundraising discussions. The best fit is a company that has outgrown a founder tracking revenue in a spreadsheet but has not yet established a dedicated internal revenue operations function.
