The 8 KPIs Every SaaS Company Should Track (And Most Don't)

Most SaaS dashboards have ARR, MRR, and maybe churn. That's the beginning, not the dashboard.

Here are the 8 metrics that separate companies that understand their growth from companies that guess at it.

1. Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

NRR measures how much revenue you keep and expand from existing customers, excluding new sales. Formula: (Starting MRR + Expansion - Contraction - Churn) / Starting MRR.

If NRR > 100%, your existing customers are growing faster than they churn. That's the foundation of durable SaaS growth. Benchmark: Good = 100–110%. Great = 120%+.

2. CAC Payback Period

How many months of gross margin does it take to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer? CAC / (Monthly Revenue per Customer × Gross Margin %).

This tells you how capital-efficient your growth is. If CAC payback is 24 months, you're funding growth out of capital — which works in a bull market and kills you in a bear one.

3. Expansion MRR Rate

What % of revenue growth is coming from existing customers? Companies with strong expansion are far more capital-efficient than pure new-logo businesses. Track monthly.

4. Logo Churn vs. Revenue Churn

These tell different stories. Logo churn (# of customers lost) could look bad while revenue churn (% of ARR lost) looks fine — if you're losing small accounts and retaining big ones. Track both separately.

5. Time to Value (TTV)

How long from signup to the moment a customer gets their first meaningful value from your product? This is a leading indicator of retention. Long TTV = high churn risk.

6. Feature Adoption Rate

What % of your customers use each core feature? If 80% of churned customers never used Feature X, and 80% of retained customers use it daily — you've found your activation metric.

7. Support Ticket Volume per Customer

Divided by account size, this tells you where your product still has friction. High ticket volume in a segment = either a product problem or an onboarding problem.

8. Quick Ratio

(New MRR + Expansion MRR) / (Contraction MRR + Churned MRR). A quick ratio above 4 means you're growing efficiently. Below 1 means you're leaking faster than you're filling.

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These 8 metrics don't require a data warehouse to track — but they do require clean, consistent data. If you can't pull these in under 10 minutes, that's the first problem to solve.