Glossary
Every term Chartsy uses, in one sentence each. Where a term deserves more than a sentence, the entry links to the page that gives it.
A
- Active customer
- A distinct customer with a live, paying subscription. Trials are reported separately.
- Allowed domains
- The domains registered for a tracked site. A visit from anywhere else is refused rather than counted.
- ARPU
- Average revenue per user: MRR divided by active customers.
- ARR
- Annual recurring revenue: MRR multiplied by twelve. A restatement, not a separate measurement.
- Attribution
- Assigning a customer, and the revenue they generate, to the marketing channel that produced them.
B
- Backfill
- The one-time initial read of your full history when a data source is first connected.
- Bot traffic
- Automated requests identifying as crawlers. Rejected before a visit is recorded, so it never consumes usage.
C
- Campaign
- An optional sub-label under a source, splitting one channel into more specific efforts.
- Chart
- One metric plotted against one dimension. A question with a picture attached.
- Churn rate
- The share of customers (customer churn) or of revenue (revenue churn) lost in a period.
- Churned MRR
- Recurring revenue lost from customers who left entirely during the period.
- Concentration risk
- The condition where an outsized share of net MRR depends on a single channel or customer.
- Contraction MRR
- Recurring revenue lost from customers who stayed - a downgrade or reduced quantity.
D
- Daily briefing
- The summary of today’s MRR, subscribers, churn, renewals and failed payments shown when you open the chatbot.
- Dashboard
- A saved arrangement of charts that recalculates on its own against fresh data.
- Data model
- One object type Chartsy copies from a data source - customers, subscriptions, invoices, charges.
- Data source
- The external account Chartsy reads from: Stripe, Paddle, Paddle Classic, or BigCommerce.
- Dimension
- The axis a metric is broken down by - time, plan, country, or a metadata field.
- Direct
- A visit with no identifiable channel. Counted honestly as direct rather than forced into a bucket.
E
- Event
- A tracked visit or a tracked signup on one of your sites. A visit is closer to a session than a pageview. The unit your usage is measured in.
- Expansion MRR
- Additional recurring revenue from existing customers - an upgrade, a seat added.
F
- First touch
- The very first source ever recorded for a visitor. Answers what made them aware of you.
- Funnel
- The Visits → Signups → Paid progression, and the conversion rate between each pair of stages.
G
- GDPR mode
- A connection mode where no personally identifying fields are sent to Chartsy servers, while every metric still works.
- Gross revenue
- All money collected in a period, recurring and one-off, before refunds.
- Growth
- The Chartsy feature that ties marketing channels to real Stripe or Paddle revenue.
I
- Instance
- One occurrence of a repeated channel under the same source and campaign - a single launch attempt or email batch.
- Involuntary churn
- Cancellation caused by a failed payment rather than a decision to leave. Often recoverable.
L
- Last touch
- The source credited with the visit immediately preceding an action. Answers what brought them back.
- Launch
- An optionally pre-registered record giving a source/campaign pair a friendly display name and a cost figure.
- Lifetime revenue
- The actual total a customer or channel has paid to date. Nothing projected.
- LTV
- Lifetime value: the revenue an average customer is expected to generate, estimated from ARPU and churn.
M
- Metadata
- Custom key/value fields on Stripe or Paddle objects, turned by Chartsy into filters and breakdowns.
- Metric
- A number produced by a formula over your records, rather than a field stored in your provider.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue: the normalised monthly value of all currently recurring subscriptions.
N
- Net MRR
- New + expansion − contraction − churned. Whether recurring revenue actually grew.
- Net revenue
- Gross revenue after refunds and chargebacks, applied in the period they occur.
- Net revenue retention
- What an existing cohort is worth now versus at the start, including expansion. Above 100% means it grows unaided.
- never_paid
- A Chartsy-specific status for a signup who never started a subscription at all.
- New MRR
- Recurring revenue from customers who had none in the previous period.
R
- Retention curve
- The share of a signup cohort still subscribed at each month afterwards.
S
- Signup event
- The call marking the moment a visitor becomes an account. It counts as one event, separately from the visit that preceded it.
- Source
- A traffic origin such as product_hunt, google or twitter, taken from UTM parameters or referrer data.
- Subscription
- A recurring agreement between a customer and a plan, with a status, interval, and amount.
- Subscription item
- One line within a subscription: a product, a price, and a quantity. Seat-based pricing lives here.
- Sync
- The ongoing process keeping Chartsy’s copy of your records in step with your provider.
T
- Template
- A pre-built dashboard laid out for a specific job, which fills with your own data immediately.
- Trial conversion rate
- The share of trials that become paying subscriptions.
V
- Verdict banner
- The auto-generated sentence at the top of the Growth overview summarising the period.
- Visit
- A tracked session on one of your sites, open for about 30 minutes and refreshed by each page load. One visit is one event.
Missing a term? Tell us and we will add it.


