Paying Customers Movements
The MRR movements counted in customers instead of dollars — how widespread each change really is.
What is it?
Paying Customers Movements counts how many accounts moved in each movement type during a period — new, expanded, contracted, churned and reactivated — as counts rather than dollars. It is the account-level companion to MRR movements.
Counts and dollars answer different questions. $5,000 of churn MRR could be one large customer or a hundred small ones, and the count is what tells you which. A movement that is large in dollars but tiny in count is a concentration risk; one that is small in dollars but large in count is a systemic problem.
How to calculate?
For each movement type, count the accounts that experienced it in the period: first-time payers as new, upgrades as expansion, downgrades as contraction, cancellations as churn, and returns as reactivation. Note that expansion and contraction change revenue without changing the total account count — only new, churn and reactivation move the number of paying accounts.
Read the counts beside the dollar movements. When the two disagree — plenty of churned logos but little churned MRR, or the reverse — that gap is usually the most useful thing on the chart.