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What it is

net_revenue_retention is the share of recurring revenue kept from the customers you already had at the start of a period, after expansion, contraction and churn within that group. Revenue from customers won or won back during the period is excluded. It is a ratio rather than a percentage: 1.08 means the group holds 8% more recurring revenue than it started the period with, and Beacon publishes 1.08, not 108. A result above 1.0 means expansion within the existing base outweighed what was lost. It is one value read over more than one population. On the company-and-period object it reads your whole customer base over the period you ask for; on an account it reads that account. The definition, the formula and the exclusions below are the same in both cases — what changes is who is in the group. It is not two different figures with one name.

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How it is calculated

Measured.
Only recurring lines count. One-off charges — onboarding, professional services, training, setup, milestone payments — are excluded. The period can be a month, a quarter, a fiscal year, or the trailing twelve months. The four terms are the movements published in their own right on the company-and-period object: new and reactivation are the two left out, and expansion, contraction and churn are the three inside the calculation.

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Where it comes from

Billing invoice lines. Each line becomes a monthly recurring figure by dividing its total across its service period, so a line without a service period is raised as a data issue rather than counted. Values typed into a CRM or a billing tool as a monthly or annual figure are not used. Identity resolution matters to this figure more than to most: where a subsidiary is not resolved to its parent, its growth counts as a new customer rather than as expansion, and expansion is inside the calculation while new business is outside 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.

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How fresh it is

Republished continuously, within 60 minutes of a change at source, and sealed at each monthly close. The quarterly close seals the three monthly seals together. Monthly close runs in a 5-business-day window, quarterly in 10. A correction arriving after a seal — a backdated invoice, a retroactive amendment, a late-recorded churn — is recorded as a named adjustment in the current period. A sealed figure is never quietly restated. This is the one retention figure with a declared refresh cadence. Gross revenue retention does not have one yet, and its article says so rather than borrowing this one.

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Currency and rounding

Each company reports in one currency. Transactions in other currencies are converted at their own rate before any total is formed, and both the original and the converted value are kept. Net revenue retention is a ratio of two revenue figures, so it carries no currency of its own. 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 figures, compare them at the precision you received them.

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What changes it

Expansion, contraction and churn among the customers who were active at the start of the period. New and returning customers do not change it. A resolved identity can change it by reclassifying a subsidiary’s growth from new business to expansion. A post-close correction changes the current period rather than the sealed one.

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What it is not

  • Not gross revenue retention. That is the same calculation without the expansion term, and it cannot exceed 1.0. The gap between the two is what expansion contributed.
  • Not cohort net revenue retention. That reads one cohort, month by month from the month it opened. This reads every customer who was active at the start of a period.
  • Not logo churn. That counts customers lost against customers held, not revenue.
  • Not a forecast. This is the figure for a period that has been measured; the forecast of it is a separate value.
  • Not a measure of growth. New business is excluded by construction.