Troubleshooting common issues

Most reports that Chartsy is showing the wrong number turn out to be a definition difference or a date range, not a fault. These are the situations that come up most often, in the order worth checking them.

The dashboard is empty

Work through these in order:

Is a data source connected? Nothing is calculated until one is. See Data sources.
Is the backfill still running? On an account with years of history the first read takes a while, and metrics fill in progressively rather than all at once.
Is the date range wrong? A range covering a quiet period looks identical to missing data. Widen it before investigating further.
Is a filter still applied? A dashboard filtered to a plan or metadata value with no members shows empty charts, not an error.

The numbers disagree with Stripe or Paddle

Nearly always a definitional difference rather than a sync failure. In order of likelihood:

Different metric. Your provider usually shows gross volume collected. MRR excludes one-off charges and normalises annual plans down to a monthly figure, so the two should not match.
Trials. An unpaid trial is not recurring revenue in Chartsy. If your provider counts trials as subscribers, its customer count will be higher.
Timezone and period edges. A renewal at midnight can fall in a different day's bucket on the two screens.
Refund timing. Chartsy applies a refund in the period it occurred rather than rewriting the original sale.
Multiple sources connected. A combined view exceeds any single provider dashboard by design.

The definitions are set out in full in Metrics and Customers, subscriptions and statuses.

Growth shows traffic but no revenue

Growth needs three things, and the dollar columns stay empty until all three exist:

The script tag, for visits.
The signup event, to tie a person to a channel. Without it, the chain from visit to subscription is broken in the middle - this is the most common cause.
A connected billing account, to tie that person to money.

Empty rather than estimated is deliberate

Growth never guesses at revenue it has not actually observed, so a missing piece shows up as a zero rather than a plausible-looking but invented figure.

Setup steps are in Set up Growth.

Every visitor shows as direct

A visit becomes direct when no UTM parameter, click ID, referral parameter, or usable referrer is present. Check:

Are your links actually tagged? A newsletter or social post shared without utm_source arrives with nothing to classify.
Does a redirect strip the query string before the page with the script tag loads? The parameters have to survive to the landing page.
Is the script tag on every entry page, not just the homepage? A visitor who lands on a blog post that lacks the tag is invisible until they reach a page that has it.

How classification works is covered in Sources, campaigns, launches and instances.

A metadata field will not appear

The key exists only on records created since you added it. Older records genuinely do not have it, which makes historical comparisons look partial.
Key names must match exactly. source, utm_source and acquisition_source are three dimensions, not one.
Values must match exactly too - Enterprise and enterprise will not group together.
The records carrying the field have to have synced. If you set it minutes ago, give the sync a moment.

See Metadata for naming conventions that avoid this.

Data has stopped updating

If figures were moving and then stopped, the connection is the place to look. Access revoked in your provider - or an API key rotated, or the authorising user removed from the account - stops the sync immediately. Reconnecting the data source restores it, and history is picked back up rather than lost.

If the connection looks healthy and data is still stale, email support@chartsy.app with the data source and roughly when you last saw a change.

Still stuck

Email support@chartsy.app. Including the metric, the date range, and the figure you expected makes it much faster to tell a definition difference from a real fault.