What Is Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)?
What is monthly recurring revenue? It is the total predictable, recurring subscription revenue a business generates in a given month, normalized so that annual plans count as one-twelfth of their annual value. One-time fees and non-recurring charges are excluded.
Calculate MRR and its movements — new, expansion, contraction, and churned — from your billing export
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| Customer ID |
| Plan |
| Billing Interval |
| Amount |
| Status |
| Start Date |
| Cancel Date |
| MRR |
| Segment |
| Country |
What usually goes wrong with it
Annual plans must be divided by 12 before being added to MRR
A customer paying $1,200/year contributes $100/month to MRR. A billing export that includes both monthly and annual plans in the same Amount column requires a conditional normalization before the figures can be summed — a step that's easy to miss.
DataMimi Datamimi applies a conditional normalization to the Amount column: monthly subscriptions are taken as-is; annual subscriptions are divided by 12; other intervals are converted to monthly equivalents.
MRR movements require comparing two snapshots
New MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR each require comparing this month's active subscriptions to last month's by Customer ID. A single subscription export doesn't contain enough information to calculate any of the four movements.
DataMimi It compares two uploaded billing exports by Customer ID and calculates new, expansion, contraction, and churned MRR separately — returning the full waterfall from one batch upload.
Trial subscriptions inflate MRR if included in the active count
Some billing systems mark trial subscriptions as 'active' with $0 MRR, while others assign them the full plan value. Including trials in the active subscription count without filtering produces an inflated subscriber count.
DataMimi Datamimi filters trial subscriptions by Status column or $0 Amount before calculating active subscriber count, so the MRR per subscriber metric isn't distorted.
Common questions
What is monthly recurring revenue as a formula?
MRR = Sum of (Monthly Plan Amount) + Sum of (Annual Plan Amount ÷ 12) for all active paying subscribers. Exclude one-time fees, setup charges, professional services, and trials.
What should be excluded from monthly recurring revenue?
One-time setup or onboarding fees, professional services revenue, usage-based overages beyond the base subscription, and trial subscriptions. Only normalized, recurring contract value belongs in MRR.
How is MRR different from revenue on an income statement?
MRR is a forward-looking metric that represents the annualized run rate of current contracts. GAAP revenue on an income statement is backward-looking — it records revenue as it is earned, which differs from when cash is collected or contracts are signed.
What does Datamimi cost?
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DataMimi reads the file you actually have — merged cells, headers below row one, totals pasted at the bottom — and shows which rows and columns every number came from.
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