NRR Simulator
Net revenue retention reaches the board pack as one number. Three movements pulling against each other produced it, and the total shows none of them. A stable but undeveloped base reads exactly like a leaking base rescued by a handful of fast-growing accounts. The plan and the headcount those two situations call for have nothing in common; the aggregate has removed what the decision runs on.
The calculation lives in a spreadsheet rebuilt for every review, one nobody can reproduce a quarter later. Definitions drift on the way: a downward renegotiation books as contraction once and as partial churn the next time. The series stops being comparable and scenario discussion stalls for want of a shared basis. The simulator fixes the conventions and shows the gap between two assumptions.
NRR Simulator
How to read the result
What you enter
- Opening recurring revenue for the cohort
- Expansion: upsell, cross-sell, contracted volume increases
- Contraction: downgrades, seat reductions, downward renegotiations
- Churn: revenue from accounts lost outright
- Scenario tested: expansion points gained or contraction points avoided
How to read the result
- Opposite structures produce identical totals: NRR only reads alongside its components
- The gap between scenario and baseline names the lever that carries weight in this cohort
- Above 100%, broad contraction can sit in the shadow of a few concentrated expansions
- What gets settled next: defend the installed base, or fund growth
What the result does not tell you
- The cohort is closed. No new-logo revenue enters it, and total company growth stays outside the frame.
- An account already lost but still inside its notice period appears nowhere: this is a closed-period measure, and the loss lands in the next one.
- Expansion shows as an amount, never as a cause. An indexed price increase looks identical to usage-driven growth, though only one of them repeats.
- The scenario holds the other components still. Badly calibrated upsell pressure on fragile accounts feeds contraction all the same, and the arithmetic does not carry it.
Useful for framing a budget round or a portfolio review. The reported figure for the period is produced somewhere else.
CONTACT
A first thirty-minute conversation
A retention, expansion or pricing challenge? Thirty minutes is enough to frame it and to find out whether there is something worth working on together.