Churn Recognition

You’ll need to be an Admin or Owner in ChartMogul to update your Churn Recognition setting. Read more about user roles and permissions.

This article provides information on the Churn Recognition setting available in ChartMogul. Learn how to configure this setting.

Screenshot of the three Churn recognition setting options described here

ChartMogul offers two main churn recognition options:

  • At the time of cancellation — ChartMogul recognizes churn at the time the subscription is canceled or expires in your billing system. This option gives you a real-time view of your forward-looking MRR and is closer to the concept of Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR).
  • At the end of the service period — ChartMogul recognizes churn at the end of the subscription’s current paid-up billing period, even if the subscription is canceled immediately in your billing system. This is often considered good practice for MRR reporting.

If you’re using Recurly, you have an additional option:

  • At the moment a cancellation event is triggered, regardless if churn is set to happen immediately or at the end of the billing period — If you select this option and aren’t using Reculy, ChartMogul will recognize cancellations as churn at the time of cancellation.

Here’s an illustration of how ChartMogul reports the date of churn based on the Churn Recognition option you choose:

Diagram showing two options for recognizing churn: at the time the customer cancels or on the subscription’s renewal date

Additional Notes

Limitations with Shopify, Google Play, and App Store Connect

The Churn Recognition setting works the same for all supported billing systems, except as noted here:

  1. Shopify — Since we only import non-recurring transactions from Shopify, this setting is not relevant.
  2. Google Play — When importing using the Daily Sales Report, ChartMogul recognizes subscription cancellations at the end of their billing period.
  3. App Store Connect — Similar to Google Play, the App Store reports don’t provide cancellation dates. Because of this, we report cancellations at the end of the service period. However, cancellations resulting from refunded subscriptions follow the churn settings.

Due to limitations with these billing systems, ChartMogul recognizes cancellations as churn at the end of the service period.

Churn Recognition

For all sources (except Stripe, Recurly, and Braintree) that have churn recognition set to At the end of the service period, churn in a given month may be different than what you expect.

In ChartMogul, a subscription’s cancellation date and its service period start date must be different. As such, ChartMogul subtracts one second from the cancellation date.

For example, a subscription starts on January 1 and has a renewal on February 1. In January, the customer cancels the subscription. ChartMogul calculates January 31, 23:59:59 as the cancellation date (subtracting one second from February 1, 00:00:00) and recognizes the churn in January (not February).

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