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 evaluate 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 within each generation of customers.

1. Overview of the Cohorts tab

The Cohorts tab in Fincome is the view dedicated to this type of analysis. Accessible from your Fincome interface, it lets you choose the level of cohort granularity: monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Each cohort thus groups the 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 seniority (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.

2. Tracking the evolution of MRR, NRR, churn and expansion

In the "Cohort Analysis" tab of Fincome, you can analyze the evolution of key customer 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 there (monthly, quarterly cohort…) to precisely visualize the upsells, contractions, or churns originating from a given cohort. This allows you to cross-reference retention and churn indicators to better understand the dynamics at work in each generation of customers.

3. Cohort filters and breakdowns

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 T1 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.: customers on the Standard plan, 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 in the Cohorts tab. This flexibility allows you to use cohort data transversally in Fincome to better understand the evolution of your customer base over time and identify the drivers of retention or expansion in each generation of customers.

Customer example

The HR company Octime, experiencing strong growth, 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 of Fincome, Octime was able to analyze the behavior of its customers 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