Analyze your cohorts

Track the evolution of your customers over time with cohort analysis. Measure their retention, expansion or churn to understand retention dynamics and optimize your decisions.

In Fincome, cohort analysis allows you to track the evolution of a group of customers acquired during the same period in order to assess their retention, expansion, or attrition over time. In other words, you can group your customers by acquisition date (for example, by month or by quarter) and observe how their metrics evolve after X months of using the product. This approach helps identify retention and growth trends for each customer generation.

In Fincome, a cohort therefore corresponds to a group of customers acquired during the same period (month, quarter or year). It is automatically determined from the subscription start date.

Fincome offers only time-based cohorts. It is not possible to create cohorts by segment, product or plan. However, you can cross these time-based cohorts with other filters (plan, CSM, channel…) in other reports.

1. The Cohort Analysis page

Overview of the cohorts tab

The Cohorts tab thus provides a dedicated view to analyze MRR evolution with retention and churn rates over time for each customer generation.

Accessible from your Fincome interface > Analytics > Cohort Analysis, it lets you choose the level of cohort granularity: monthly, quarterly or yearly. Each cohort therefore groups customers who started using your service during the selected period. Fincome automatically generates a cohort dashboard where each row corresponds to a cohort and each column to the tenure (for example M+1, M+2, M+3… for a monthly cohort). This gives you an overview of how the new MRR acquired in a period evolves over time.

Track MRR, NRR, churn and expansion evolution

In the "Cohort Analysis" tab of Fincome, you can analyze the evolution of your customers' key metrics over time, according to the chosen cohort period (monthly, quarterly or yearly).

For each cohort, Fincome displays:

• Gross retention (without upsell) : it measures only the portion of MRR retained from one period to the next. It can therefore never exceed 100%.

• Net retention (with upsell): it includes expansions and can exceed 100% if customers generate more MRR than their initial level.

• All types of churn (churn rate in value with and without contraction, logo churn, churn rate in value calculated at the subscription level).

By tracking these metrics month after month, you can identify whether variations are due to upsells (net retention > gross) or to downsells or churn (net retention < gross and view Churn Rate).

To go further, you can click on the amounts displayed in the monthly cohort tables: Fincome then shows you the details of the customers concerned as well as the associated MRR movements. It then becomes easy to spot when a spike in upsell or churn occurred, and to understand which customers it happened to.

Finally, you can deepen the analysis by navigating to the MRR Movements tab and applying the native cohort filters (monthly, quarterly cohort…) to precisely visualize the upsells, contractions or churns originating from a given cohort. This allows cross-referencing retention and churn indicators to better understand the dynamics at play in each customer generation.

3. Filters and breakdowns by cohorts

Cohorts in Fincome are automatically calculated from your customers' subscription start date, which then allows them to be used across the platform's analytical views. Thus, beyond the dedicated Cohortstab, you can find these native cohort filters (monthly, quarterly, yearly) in many reports: MRR Movements, Retention, Churn, etc. This allows you, for example, to filter MRR movements only for customers from the Q1 2024 cohort, or to compare behaviors between different cohorts over time.

In addition, these cohort axes can be combined with other standard Fincome filters: customer segment, CSM, acquisition channel, plan type, etc. You can thus very precisely isolate a subset (e.g.: Standard plan customers acquired via Outbound in Q2 2023) and track their metrics in the appropriate views.

Finally, in several dashboards, you can break down results by cohort (or cross the cohort with other axes such as pricing plan or churn reason), which complements the analysis from the Cohorts tab. This flexibility allows you to exploit cohort data transversally in Fincome to better understand the evolution of your customer base over time and identify drivers of retention or expansion for each customer generation.

Client example

The fast-growing HR company Octime used Fincome to centralize its revenue KPIs, notably retention and cohort analysis. Before Fincome, tracking these metrics was done manually in Excel, making trend reading difficult. Thanks to the Cohorts tab in Fincome, Octime was able to analyze customer behavior over time, by generation, and detect churn or expansion patterns that were impossible to observe before.

Result: Octime was able to adjust its product and commercial strategy on certain offers and optimize its pricing and investment decisions with a very concrete ROI.

Read the full case: Structuring Octime's SaaS growth