Renewal and retention watch
Covirage puts every contract on a calendar by the month it ends, and sets beside each one what the customer has actually been doing: usage against what was bought, orders against their own pattern, service contacts, and when anyone last spoke to them. The renewals that need a conversation rise to the top months before the notice date.
A renewal rate is a score at the end. What can be acted on is earlier: seats going unused, orders slowing against the customer's own pattern, tickets stopping, a contact leaving, a contract signed by a predecessor that nobody has in view. Each is in a file the business already has.
Contract value ending per month and per owner, with the notice date and whether a conversation has been logged.
Usage against the curve for the contract's age, order pattern, service contact pattern and contact recency, each against the account's own history.
Renewal rate by count and by value with a stated grace window, net and gross revenue retention by cohort, and the movements that must add up.
Three steps, in this order.
The contract register with end dates, billing by customer, and whichever of usage, tickets and activity you hold. Client IDs only.
The grace window, what counts as active use, and the contact cadence per tier. Stated on every table.
A ranked list per owner of renewals needing a conversation, and the retention tables for the board.
Short answers. The Help centre has the long ones.
Yes. Service contracts, framework agreements, rate agreements and insurance placements all have end dates. Where there is no contract at all, account coverage and dormancy do the same job from order dates.
Renewal counts contracts that were due and renewed. Retention counts customers or revenue across a period whether or not anything was due. Both are reported, and labelled.
On most bases the first measurable signal appears four to nine months before the revenue is gone. The calendar looks twelve months ahead for that reason.
Written for this job: the measures, the data you already hold, and the arithmetic.
The difference between renewal rate, retention rate and churn rate, which denominator each uses, why they do not add to 100 percent, how each is computed on customers and on revenue, the period and cohort rules that make them comparable, and a worked example where the three tell three different stories about the same quarter.
16 Sept 20262 min readA template for reviewing a lost or sharply declining customer: build the timeline from the ledger, the activity log, the service record and the contract file first, then hold the conversation. This page gives the timeline table, the eight questions the data can answer before the meeting, the three that only people can, how to classify the cause, how to turn one review into a rule that finds the next account early, and a copyable one-page form.
17 Sept 20265 min readThe complete renewal calendar calculation on five contracts, small enough to check by hand: end date, notice period and monthly value from the register, the notice window start per contract, the activity log's renewal-type entries in the last ninety days, the untouched-in-notice list, value ending per month, the co-terminus customer whose services end months apart, the rolling contract with no end date, and the identity that the calendar's total equals the contracted base, so a reader can reproduce every figure and then run it on their own register.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what net revenue retention a company should have: the widely quoted 100 percent floor and 120 percent aspiration are SaaS investor figures that depend on segment, contract structure and what is counted as expansion. This page gives the ranges by segment, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one base, the cohort, the gross retention underneath, and the expansion source, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what renewal rate a contract business should have: the 85 to 95 percent figures commonly quoted depend on whether the rate is by contract count or by value, on what is done with contracts that renewed late or at a reduced scope, and on the mix of renewal cohorts by age. This page gives the ranges by desk, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one base, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min readThe honest answer to what share of contracted seats or licences should be in use: the 70 to 85 percent figures quoted depend on what active means, on the time since the contract started, and on how use is spread across the account, because a customer at 80 percent with all use in one team is a different renewal from one at 60 percent spread across five. This page gives the ranges, the three measurable things that set the right figure for one base, and the table to compute before anyone quotes a percentage.
17 Sept 20263 min read