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What it is

cohort_gross_revenue_retention is how much recurring revenue one cohort still holds after contraction and churn inside it, against what the same customers held when the cohort opened. Expansion is not in it. Like its net counterpart, it is not one number for a cohort. Every month of the cohort’s life carries a value, and the shape those values make is the figure — how much of a vintage’s opening revenue survives as it ages. It is a ratio, not a percentage: 0.92, not 92. Higher is better. It cannot rise above 1.0, and that is not a benchmark or a target — it follows from the calculation, which has no term that can add revenue back.

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How it is calculated

Measured.
Only recurring lines count. One-off charges — onboarding, professional services, training, setup — are excluded. Membership is frozen when the cohort opens, so every point describes the same set of customers. A cohort with few accounts in it produces a curve that moves sharply on a single customer; below the minimum population, the curve is marked as an estimate with the account count shown — the same limit set out under cohort dimension.

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Where it comes from

Billing invoice lines, through the customers who belong to the cohort. Billing is the required connection: with no billing there is no revenue on any account, so there is no curve to draw. The value sits on the cohort’s retention curve, in the same monthly entry as cohort net revenue retention — the two are published together and are meant to be read together. Identity resolution decides which accounts belong to the cohort in the first place. Where a subsidiary is not resolved to its parent, it is counted as a separate customer, and the opening figure this curve is measured against changes with it.
No read interface or MCP tool serves this value yet — the table above publishes the shape ahead of the doors.
Where the choice is made. This value is not open by default on any door. The choice happens when a reader grant that reaches it is issued or widened, when you subscribe to events, or when you turn the CRM property on. Whoever makes it is shown who becomes able to see the value, and their yes is recorded — holding a grant is no longer enough on its own. That is a rule about where the value may travel, not about who inside your company may look at it.

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How fresh it is

A cohort’s curve grows by one point for each month the cohort has lived, so its length is the cohort’s age. How much of it exists depends on where the cohort stands: open and still accumulating, where the curve is a partial reading; closing at 18 months, where enough of the life has happened to be read seriously; and closed at 24 months, where the population and its history are complete and the curve is that cohort’s record. A point already struck is not restruck to reflect what the cohort went on to do.

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Currency and rounding

Neither applies in the ordinary way. This is a ratio of two revenue figures, so it carries no currency of its own. The money behind it is in your single reporting currency, converted where it is recorded under the rules set out in currency; no second conversion happens when the ratio is struck. No rounding rule is set for this value. Beacon applies none of its own and does not fix a number of decimal places to hold it at. A screen or an export may round it for display, so where you compare two points — or compare this figure against the net one — compare them at the precision you received them. And it is a ratio. 0.92 means the cohort still holds 92% of the revenue it opened with, once contraction and churn are taken off.

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What changes it

Contraction and churn among the customers in the cohort. Expansion does not: a cohort whose customers double their spend shows the same gross curve as one whose customers held steady, and the difference between them appears only in the net figure. Once the cohort is closed, nothing changes it.

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What it is not

  • Not a percentage. 0.92, never 92.
  • Not one number for the cohort. It is a value per month, and the curve is the figure.
  • Not cohort_net_revenue_retention, and the difference is the reason both exist. Same customers, same months, same opening figure — but the net one counts expansion and can therefore rise above 1.0, while this one cannot. Read together, the gap between them is what expansion contributed; read alone, either one is half an answer. A cohort at 0.85 gross and 1.10 net is losing revenue and more than replacing it from within; a cohort at 0.85 gross and 0.86 net is losing revenue with almost nothing growing behind it. The two look very different and the net figure alone does not tell them apart.
  • Not net_revenue_retention. That reads your whole customer base over a period you choose; this reads one vintage across its own life, without expansion.
  • Not a forecast. This is what the cohort did.
  • Not a count of customers kept. That counts logos; this weighs revenue, so a cohort can keep most of its customers and still show a weak curve if the ones that left were large.