Revenue Reporting in HubSpot and Beyond

HubSpot
July 13, 2020

If sales is called the lifeblood of a company, the result of sales — revenue— is actually what keeps the company alive. As former Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is known for saying, "Revenue solves all problems," according to a Forbes article.

It’s important to remember that revenue can be the result of a whole company’s efforts, not merely one department, which is where revenue reporting can help your teams realize and improve their contribution toward the company’s bottom line.

First we’re going to cover some of the basics about revenue reporting, then we’ll talk about revenue reporting features in HubSpot specifically. So if you’re here looking for HubSpot instructions, jump down here.

What is revenue reporting?

Investopedia defines revenue as “the income generated from normal business operations and includes discounts and deductions for returned merchandise. It is the top line or gross income figure from which costs are subtracted to determine net income...It is vital for a startup to get positive revenue early.”

Revenue reporting is just like it sounds: reporting on the revenue a company is making. Seems simple, right?

There can be many components involved in revenue reporting, such as types of revenue, sources of revenue, and more.

Sources of revenue can be especially important for a company to track, in order to decide where to invest more time and energy to grow the revenue channels that are already working, and to see where to fix the ‘leaky bucket’ where potential revenue is disappearing.

This practice is often called ‘revenue attribution’ which Business2Community defines as a way to “reliably identify which campaigns are helping drive incoming business revenue. It is worth noting that revenue attribution relies on both marketing and sales data sets to show which channels are resulting in downstream revenue.” We would also add that customer success data also plays a role, especially for recurring revenue.

Before we move on to that hot topic of recurring revenue, we want to mention that HubSpot offers multi touch revenue attribution reporting to help you see which of your efforts are bringing in revenue. If you have HubSpot’s Marketing Enterprise plan and haven’t set up that feature in your portal yet, that is a great place to start to getting more detailed revenue reporting.

What is recurring revenue reporting?

Gainsight’s Essential Guide to Recurring Revenue defines it as “the money a company can reliably predict it will earn from regular, stable transactions in the future.”

The guide continues to explain that recurring revenue most often comes from:

Subscription revenue
Long term contracts with regular payments (usually monthly)
Supplementary purchases, such as buying a coffee maker then the ongoing purchases of the K-cups for that machine would be supplementary.

Reporting on this revenue, and the ability to create forecasting reports as a result of the predictable revenue stream, becomes very important in order to predict and budget for future growth.

What are common recurring revenue reporting metrics?

For a revenue operations team, reporting is an important responsibility. A first step, and greater foundational responsibility, is aligning the company on which metrics should be reported on.

A few of the general reporting metrics suggested by our RevOps research include:

Customer acquisition - include the numbers of customers per time period and the cost to acquire (CAC)
Number of bookings
Annual recurring revenue (ARR)
Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value compared to customer acquisition cost (LTV:CAC)
Customer churn
Customer satisfaction
Net new revenue
Gross profit
Cash collections
Carry capacity
Ramp time

If you want to be super picky, the metrics above with ‘revenue’ in the title, specifically ‘recurring revenue’ would fall under the category of recurring revenue reporting metrics...though many other metrics listed are also related to recurring revenue such as lifetime value and churn.

During turbulent economic times, the above RENT gif's human-centered metrics may be what you focus on in life, and our friends at Chargebee recently wrote about how you may want to adjust which metrics you focus on in your company when agility is critical.

“While revenue metrics like LTV, CAC, NRR, and Quick Ratio are solid ways to diagnose long-term trends with respect to how the business is performing, it is important to look at the leading indicators of your revenue health, and act on them before they significantly impact growth and cash flows.”

Chargebee recommends SaaS companies choose these categories and metrics to report on in uncertain times:

Growth and Diagnosis:
- Total MRR
- Total and paid subscriptions
- Net MRR growth
- MRR Retention Cohort
Churn and Mitigation:
- Gross MRR Churn Rate
- Subscription Pauses, Downgrades, and Cancellations
Leakage and Collections:
- A/R Aging, At-risk Revenue, and Revenue Recovery
- Revenue Leakage & Refund Impact

Revenue Operations Executive at Clari, Rosalyn Santa Elena, shares her wisdom on revenue operations in a series of Linkedin posts, including this advice about metrics to report on:

"Depending on your goals, your metrics that matter will vary. Examples may be:

New revenue vs. target
Services/support/expansion/etc. vs. target
Expansion/upsell rates
Attach rate for services
New logo #
QoQ/ YoY growth
Net retention $ by x/y/z
Pipeline coverage x ratio
% of pipeline converted by stage
Avg deal cycle
Avg ramp period
Attainment by rep
Retention/churn rate
NPS, LTV, CAC, etc...The list goes on depending on the goals!"

If you want even more advice on metrics to track and report on, including revenue-related metrics, check out what popular reporting software company, Databox, has to say.

Remember that you do not need to use all of these metrics at all times!

You should pick the ones that matter most to your current company goals, making sure that all teams agree these are the most important revenue reporting metrics to track.

Funnelcake’s RevOps Framework explains how a RevOps team can help you with this daunting task of choosing aligned metrics to report on: “RevOps owns metrics from end-to-end, ensuring everyone in Marketing, Sales, Success – as well as Finance, Product, and the Executive team – understands core business metrics and how to use them.”

How do you use HubSpot for (non-recurring) revenue reporting?

For a refresher on HubSpot Reporting 101, see our blog summarizing a Reporting HubSpot User Group we attended.

The standard revenue reports available in HubSpot include:

Companies Revenue by Source. Using a specific time range.
Companies Revenue by First Conversion. Using a specific time range.
Closed Revenue by Source. Closed deal amounts that are broken down by the original source of their associated contacts. Deals need associated contacts to be listed in this report.
Recent Deal Amount by Source. Hot tip: this is another report where only deals with associated contacts will be included.
Deal Forecast. This is how you can see how much deal revenue is within the current deals in each stage of your pipeline, as long as they have a monetary amount associated with them and the close date is in the time frame you specify.
Deal Forecast by Owner. Same as above, broken down by deal owner. It's calculated by multiplying the deal amount by the deal stage probability.
Deal Closed vs Goal. Revenue from closed deals compared to your team's quota or a custom goal. This report is especially useful for evaluating your team's progress and setting attainable sales goals.
Deal Leaderboard. This report ranks sales team members by their amount of closed deal revenue.
Deal Revenue Leaderboard. This one ranks deal owners by their total forecasted deal amounts. It breaks deals down by pipeline stage.
Deal Revenue per Stage by Deal Type. Pretty self explanatory, with the caveat that this is for forecasted amounts for deals, calculated by multiplying deal amount by deal stage probability.
New Deals Created: Ranks your deal owners by the number of new deals they create.

If you have the Professional or Enterprise level of HubSpot, or the Reporting add-on, you can also customize these reports or create a custom report using revenue.

How can you use HubSpot for recurring revenue reporting?

If you have HubSpot’s Sales Hub Enterprise, you can track and report on recurring revenue.

HubSpot’s recurring revenue reporting properties

Here are the properties that will appear in the revenue analytics tool:

Recurring revenue amount: A monthly value of the total amount of recurring revenue associated with a deal.
Recurring revenue deal type: New business, Renewal, Upgrade, and Downgrade are the options here.
Recurring revenue inactive date: The date the customer stops paying the recurring revenue amount for the deal
Recurring revenue inactive reason: Churned, Renewal, Upgrade, and Downgrade are the options here.

Adding values to these recurring revenue reporting properties can be a bit tricky, so we suggest looking at HubSpot’s step-by-step instructions here.

Recurring revenue reporting with HubSpot’s revenue analytics tool

Once you navigate to the revenue analytics tool within the reports area and specify your date range and frequency, you’re ready to choose date range and frequency for your report.

For forecasting instead of reporting, choose a date range in the future. Note that future revenue is predicted based on known Closed Won deals in the time range you select. So you need to have closed won deals in the future time range in order for that forecasting to work.

Choose 'Any Pipeline' or a specific pipeline here:

Hubspot Revenue Reporting

Click one of these metrics to filter the report by:

New recurring revenue: new business deals or upgrades of deals.
Existing recurring revenue: renewed deals that have an empty value for the Recurring revenue inactive date or reason
Lost recurring revenue: churned or downgraded deals

Hubspot Revenue Reporting