The SaaS Revenue Waterfall: A Complete Guide

August 28, 2025
Jason Berwanger
Finance

Get a clear, actionable breakdown of the revenue waterfall for SaaS. Learn key metrics, common mistakes, and top tools to improve your financial reporting.

SaaS revenue waterfall visualized as a cascading waterfall.

Your financial reports shouldn't just tell you where you've been; they should help you decide where you're going. For many business leaders, however, connecting the dots between raw financial data and smart strategic decisions can be difficult. A revenue waterfall bridges that gap. It moves beyond a simple final number to show the complete story of your revenue's journey over a period. By breaking down what’s driving growth and what’s causing leaks, it provides the critical insights needed for effective planning. This detailed view helps you allocate resources confidently, set realistic goals, and build a strategy based on a true understanding of your company's financial momentum.

HubiFi CTA Button

Key Takeaways

  • Translate Contracts into Recognized Revenue: A revenue waterfall shows how booked contract value becomes earned revenue over time. It visualizes the impact of every customer change—from new deals to churn—giving you an accurate picture of your financial health beyond just cash collected.
  • Measure What Matters for Retention: Your waterfall isn't just about new business; it's a tool for understanding customer health. By tracking expansion, contraction, and churn, you can calculate key metrics like Net Revenue Retention (NRR) to see if you're building a sustainable business on a happy customer base.
  • Use Your Waterfall for Strategic Decisions: An accurate, automated revenue waterfall is a strategic asset. It helps you create reliable financial forecasts, align your teams around clear performance data, and spot risks like rising churn before they become critical problems.

What is a Revenue Waterfall?

Think of a revenue waterfall as a visual story of your company's earnings over time. It’s a financial model that shows how the money you’ve secured in contracts—known as "booked" revenue—officially becomes recognized revenue as you deliver your service. For a SaaS business, a signed annual contract doesn't mean you've earned all that cash on day one. Accounting principles, specifically ASC 606, require you to recognize that revenue incrementally over the life of the contract. This is where things can get complicated, but a waterfall model brings clarity to the complexity.

A revenue waterfall chart breaks down this process month by month. It starts with your revenue at the beginning of a period, then shows all the additions (like new sales and upgrades) and subtractions (like downgrades and cancellations) that happen along the way. The final result is your ending revenue for that period. This model is more than just a report; it’s a critical tool for understanding your company's financial health. It provides a clear, step-by-step view of how your revenue streams are changing, making it easier to spot trends and forecast accurately. With automated revenue recognition, you can ensure this model is always up-to-date, giving you a reliable foundation for strategic planning.

What Are the Core Components?

To build a reliable SaaS revenue waterfall, you need to gather three key pieces of information. First is a solid forecast of your new sales, often referred to as ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) bookings. This is the total value of new contracts signed within a period. Second, you need to account for changes within your existing customer base. This includes renewals, upgrades (expansion), downgrades (contraction), and cancellations (churn). These factors directly impact how much revenue you retain and grow over time. Finally, you need a clear revenue recognition schedule that outlines how you will earn the revenue from each contract over its term, ensuring you stay compliant with accounting standards.

What Does a Revenue Waterfall Look Like?

The model gets its name because the chart often looks like a cascade, with bars showing how an initial value changes through a series of positive and negative steps. It starts with your opening revenue balance for a period. From there, you’ll see bars representing additions like new business and expansion revenue, which increase the total. Then, you’ll see bars for deductions like contraction and churn, which decrease it. The final bar shows your closing revenue balance. This visual flow makes it incredibly easy to see exactly where your revenue is coming from and where you’re losing it, offering a clear picture of your company’s financial momentum.

Common Types of Revenue Waterfalls

Many businesses, especially in the early stages, build their revenue waterfalls in spreadsheets. It’s a straightforward way to get started and track basic revenue flows. However, as your company grows and you handle more contracts with varying terms, spreadsheets can quickly become complex, unwieldy, and prone to manual errors. This is where specialized financial software comes in. These tools are designed to automate the creation of complex waterfall models, making the process faster and far more accurate. They can handle sophisticated revenue recognition scenarios and provide seamless integrations with your accounting software and other systems, giving you a reliable, single source of truth for your financial data.

Why SaaS Revenue Recognition is Tricky

For a SaaS company, a sale isn't just a sale. Unlike selling a physical product, revenue from a subscription isn't earned the moment a customer pays. Instead, it's recognized over the entire life of the contract as you deliver your service. This fundamental difference between cash collected and revenue earned creates a layer of complexity that touches every part of your financial operations.

Getting it right is about more than just bookkeeping; it’s about accurately representing your company's financial health. Missteps can lead to compliance issues, flawed financial forecasts, and poor strategic decisions. From handling mid-contract upgrades to meeting strict accounting standards, SaaS revenue recognition has several moving parts that can easily trip up even the most careful finance teams. Understanding these challenges is the first step toward building a scalable and accurate financial process.

Handling Complex Recognition Patterns

The core challenge for any SaaS business is spreading a single payment across multiple months or even years. This is where a SaaS revenue waterfall comes in—it’s a model that shows how your booked contract value methodically converts into recognized revenue over time. But it’s rarely a simple straight line. What happens when a customer upgrades their plan halfway through the month? Or adds five new users? Or downgrades their subscription?

Each of these events creates a new, complex recognition pattern that has to be calculated and tracked accurately. Manually managing these changes in a spreadsheet is not only tedious but also highly susceptible to errors that can have a significant impact on your financial statements.

Meeting Compliance Requirements

Your revenue recognition process isn't just an internal concern—it has to follow strict accounting rules. Standards like ASC 606 and IFRS 15 were created to standardize how companies report revenue, and they are particularly relevant for subscription-based businesses. These regulations require you to recognize revenue as you fulfill your performance obligations, which for a SaaS company, means providing continuous access to your software.

Ensuring every contract is compliant requires careful allocation of revenue and adjustments for any changes. This is why many SaaS businesses rely on automated accounting software to manage these complexities and guarantee they meet regulatory standards without manual oversight.

The Impact on Financial Planning

Your revenue recognition schedule directly influences your company’s financial planning and analysis (FP&A). If you don’t have a clear and accurate picture of your recognized revenue, you can't build reliable financial forecasts. Key metrics like Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) all depend on proper revenue recognition.

When your financial planning mirrors your revenue recognition, you can make much smarter decisions about your budget, hiring plans, and growth strategies. Automated tools that adjust revenue in real time provide the data visibility needed to keep your financial plans aligned with your actual performance, preventing you from making commitments based on misleading cash-based figures.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Many SaaS companies stumble when it comes to revenue recognition, often due to a few common mistakes. Relying on manual spreadsheets is a major one; they can’t scale with your business and are filled with opportunities for human error. Another frequent issue is the improper handling of one-time fees, like implementation or setup charges, which have specific recognition rules under ASC 606.

Furthermore, a messy customer implementation process can create financial headaches. An ill-defined plan that leaves customers unhappy can lead to requests for credits or early contract terminations, both of which complicate your revenue waterfall. Avoiding these pitfalls requires a clear process and the right systems to support your integrations and financial workflows.

The Key Pieces of a Revenue Waterfall

A revenue waterfall chart does more than just show your final revenue number; it tells the story of how you got there. Think of it as a financial narrative that breaks down all the changes in your revenue over a specific period, like a month or a quarter. It starts with your opening balance and then clearly illustrates every addition and subtraction, giving you a transparent view of your company’s financial health.

For a SaaS business, this level of detail is essential. Your revenue isn’t static—it’s constantly shifting as new customers sign up, existing ones upgrade, and others, unfortunately, leave. By breaking the waterfall down into its core components, you can pinpoint exactly what’s driving growth and what’s causing leaks. This insight is the first step toward making smarter, data-driven decisions for your business. Let’s walk through each piece of the puzzle.

Starting Revenue

Your starting revenue is the baseline for your waterfall chart. It’s the amount of recurring revenue you have from existing contracts at the very beginning of the period you're measuring. This isn't a projection or a new sale; it's the committed revenue you already have on the books. Consider it the foundation upon which all other changes for the month or quarter will be built. Getting this number right is critical because every other component of the waterfall—from new sales to churn—will be measured against it. It’s your financial starting line, and its accuracy sets the stage for everything that follows.

New Business Revenue

This is the exciting part—the growth. New business revenue is the additional recurring revenue you gain from acquiring brand-new customers during the period. When your sales team closes a deal, that contract value gets added to your waterfall. For SaaS companies, this isn't just a one-time cash injection. Following proper revenue recognition principles, this "booked" revenue is recognized over the life of the contract. Tracking this component shows you how effective your sales and marketing efforts are at bringing fresh revenue into the business and is a key indicator of market traction and growth momentum.

Expansion Revenue

Expansion revenue is proof that you’ve built a product your customers love and want more of. This is the additional revenue generated from your existing customer base through upgrades, cross-sells, or add-ons. For example, a customer might move to a higher-tiered plan or add more user seats. This is one of the healthiest forms of growth because it’s far more cost-effective to retain and grow an existing customer than to acquire a new one. A steady stream of expansion revenue signals a strong product-market fit and happy, successful customers who see increasing value in your service over time.

Contraction Revenue

Contraction revenue is the opposite of expansion. It represents the revenue you lose when existing customers downgrade to a cheaper plan, remove user seats, or reduce their usage of your service. While no one likes to see revenue decrease, tracking contraction is incredibly important. It often serves as an early warning sign that a customer is unhappy or that your pricing or feature tiers may need adjustment. By monitoring contraction closely, you can proactively address issues before a customer decides to churn completely, giving you a chance to save the relationship and gather valuable feedback.

The Impact of Churn

Churn is the revenue you lose entirely when a customer cancels their subscription and leaves. It’s a direct hit to your top line and a critical metric for any subscription-based business. Every waterfall model must account for churn to present an accurate picture of revenue health. While a zero-churn rate is unrealistic, a high or rising churn rate can signal serious issues with your product, customer service, or overall value proposition. Understanding the impact of churn helps you focus on retention strategies and build a more sustainable business model for the long term.

Your Revenue Recognition Timeline

The real power of the revenue waterfall is seeing how all these pieces—starting revenue, new business, expansion, contraction, and churn—flow together over time. The waterfall chart maps these changes chronologically, giving you a dynamic view of your revenue’s journey. This timeline helps you spot trends, forecast future performance more accurately, and understand the momentum of your business. To build this timeline effectively, your data needs to be consistent and reliable, which is why having seamless integrations between your CRM, billing, and accounting systems is so important for maintaining a single source of truth.

Metrics That Matter in Your Waterfall

Your revenue waterfall tells a story about your business's financial health, but you need to know which characters to follow. Tracking the right metrics within your waterfall model gives you the full picture—not just where your revenue ends up, but how it got there. These key performance indicators (KPIs) help you understand customer behavior, measure the effectiveness of your strategies, and make smarter decisions for future growth. Think of them as the vital signs of your SaaS business; monitoring them closely allows you to diagnose issues before they become critical and identify what’s working so you can do more of it. When you have a clear view of these numbers, you can move from simply reporting on the past to strategically planning for a more profitable future.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

For any subscription business, Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the North Star. It represents the predictable revenue you can expect from your customers over a 12-month period. Unlike total revenue, which can fluctuate with one-time sales or professional services, ARR provides a stable baseline for growth. As DealHub notes, "Investors like ARR because it helps them guess future earnings better." This predictability is exactly why it’s the starting point for most revenue waterfalls. It’s the foundation upon which all changes—new sales, expansions, contractions, and churn—are built, giving you a clear and consistent measure of your company’s scale and momentum.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is arguably one of the most important indicators of a healthy SaaS business. This metric shows you how much of your recurring revenue you’ve retained from your existing customer base over time. Crucially, the NRR calculation includes revenue from upgrades and expansions while also accounting for downgrades and churn. A high NRR (ideally over 100%) means your existing customers are, on average, spending more with you over time. This signals a strong product-market fit, high customer satisfaction, and an effective growth strategy that doesn't rely solely on acquiring new customers. It’s a powerful measure of your company’s long-term viability and a testament to the value you provide.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

While it’s exciting to see new business revenue flowing into your waterfall, it’s critical to know what it cost to get there. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) measures the total expense of acquiring a new customer, factoring in everything from marketing campaigns to sales team salaries. Understanding your CAC provides essential context for your growth. If your CAC is too high compared to the lifetime value of your customers, your business model might not be sustainable. By tracking this metric alongside your waterfall, you can ensure your growth is not just fast, but also profitable and efficient. It helps you answer the crucial question: are we spending our acquisition dollars wisely?

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) tells you how much revenue you’re generating from a single customer, on average, within a specific timeframe. This metric is a fantastic way to gauge how effectively you’re monetizing your user base. When you see ARPU increasing, it’s often a sign that your customers are finding more value in your product, leading them to upgrade to higher-tiered plans or purchase add-ons. Tracking ARPU within your waterfall helps you understand the impact of pricing changes, upselling efforts, and product improvements on your overall revenue picture. It’s a direct reflection of the value you deliver to each customer.

Analyzing Your Churn Rate

Churn is the unavoidable antagonist in every SaaS revenue story. Your churn rate is simply the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions during a specific period. It’s the primary driver of contraction revenue in your waterfall and can quickly erode your growth if left unchecked. Analyzing churn is about more than just watching a number; it’s about understanding why customers are leaving. Are they unhappy with the product? Did a competitor lure them away? By digging into the reasons behind your churn rate, you can identify weaknesses in your service and take action to improve customer retention, turning a potential tragedy into a story of resilience and improvement.

How to Build Your Revenue Waterfall Model

Building a revenue waterfall model might sound intimidating, but it's really about organizing your financial data in a way that tells a clear story. When you break it down into steps, you can create a powerful tool for understanding your business's health and planning for the future. It’s all about starting with the right inputs and following a logical flow. Let's walk through how to construct your own model, piece by piece, so you can get a clear view of your revenue streams. This process will help you move from simply tracking sales to truly understanding your financial performance over time.

Gathering the Right Data

To get started, you’ll need three key types of information. First, a solid forecast of your new sales, often tracked as Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) bookings. Second, you need data on customer changes—think renewals, upgrades, downgrades, and churn. This shows how your existing revenue base is evolving. Finally, you need a clear plan for how you'll recognize revenue over the contract period. Having these three components ready will give you a strong foundation for your model and ensure your calculations are accurate from the very beginning.

Choosing Your Calculation Methods

The main job of a revenue waterfall is to show how your booked revenue (the total value of a new contract) turns into recognized revenue according to accounting principles like GAAP. For example, if a customer signs a $12,000 annual contract, you don't recognize all $12,000 at once. Instead, you recognize $1,000 each month. Your waterfall model will map this out for all your contracts, creating a clear picture of your monthly revenue stream based on established accounting rules. This methodical approach is what makes the waterfall so valuable for accurate financial reporting.

Best Practices for Reporting

A revenue waterfall is more than just a spreadsheet; it’s a communication tool. Your report should clearly show where your revenue is coming from and how it’s changing over time. This visibility helps everyone from your finance team to your executive leadership understand the company's financial health. When your reporting is clear and consistent, you can make smarter, data-driven decisions about where to invest resources and how to plan for growth. It transforms raw numbers into actionable insights that can guide your entire business strategy.

What to Consider for Integration

Your revenue data often lives in different places—your CRM, your billing platform, and your accounting software. Getting these systems to talk to each other can be a real challenge, but it's essential for an accurate waterfall. Manual data entry is prone to errors and takes up valuable time. A key consideration is how you’ll pull all this information together reliably. Planning for smooth integrations from the start will save you countless headaches and ensure your model is built on trustworthy, up-to-date data.

Finding Opportunities to Automate

Manually updating a revenue waterfall every month is tedious and risky. This is where automation comes in. Using automated accounting software helps you allocate revenue correctly, adjust for contract changes, and maintain compliance with standards like ASC 606 without the manual effort. By automating the process, you not only reduce the risk of human error but also free up your team to focus on strategic analysis instead of data entry. If you're ready to see how automation can transform your financial operations, you can schedule a demo to explore a tailored solution.

Top Software for Revenue Waterfalls

Building a revenue waterfall model from scratch in a spreadsheet is possible, but it can quickly become a tangled mess of formulas and manual data entry. As your business grows, managing complex subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades, and compliance standards like ASC 606 manually is not just time-consuming—it’s risky. One broken formula can throw off your entire financial forecast. This is where dedicated software comes in to save the day (and your sanity).

The right tool automates the heavy lifting, pulling data from your billing and payment systems to create accurate, compliant, and real-time revenue waterfalls. This frees up your finance team to focus on analysis and strategy instead of tedious data wrangling. The market offers a range of solutions, from specialized revenue recognition platforms to comprehensive subscription management suites and full-blown ERP systems. The best choice for you will depend on your business size, the complexity of your revenue streams, and the other tools in your tech stack. Let’s look at some of the top contenders that can help you get a clear picture of your revenue.

HubiFi

If your business handles a high volume of transactions and deals with data from multiple sources, HubiFi is designed for you. It specializes in automated revenue recognition, pulling together disparate data to give you a single source of truth. This is a huge advantage for ensuring ASC 606 compliance and closing your books quickly and accurately. HubiFi provides real-time analytics and dynamic segmentation, which helps you move beyond just reporting the numbers to actually understanding them. By connecting with your existing accounting software, ERPs, and CRMs, it streamlines your entire financial workflow. If you’re looking for a solution that can handle complexity and provide deep data visibility for strategic decisions, it’s worth scheduling a demo to see it in action.

Zuora

You’ve likely heard of Zuora, as it’s a major player in the subscription economy. It’s a comprehensive subscription management platform that aims to automate the entire customer lifecycle, from billing and payments to revenue recognition. Because it handles everything end-to-end, it’s a powerful choice for businesses that want a single system to manage their recurring revenue streams. Zuora is built to handle complex subscription models and provides the analytics you need to track key metrics and make informed decisions. It’s a robust solution for companies looking to scale their subscription offerings without getting bogged down in manual processes.

SaaSOptics

As the name suggests, SaaSOptics is built specifically with the needs of SaaS businesses in mind. It offers a complete subscription management solution that automates everything from revenue recognition and invoicing to financial reporting and analytics. The platform is designed to streamline your financial operations, helping you maintain GAAP compliance while giving you a clear view of crucial SaaS metrics like ARR, churn, and customer lifetime value. For many subscription-based companies, SaaSOptics provides the financial clarity needed to manage day-to-day operations and plan for future growth effectively.

ProfitWell

If you’re looking for a tool that excels at analytics, ProfitWell is a fantastic option. While it offers revenue recognition features, its core strength lies in its powerful suite of tools for subscription analytics. ProfitWell helps you dig deep into your metrics to understand exactly what’s driving growth and where you’re losing revenue. It provides incredible insights into churn, customer lifetime value, and pricing optimization. For businesses that want to go beyond simple reporting and truly understand the story behind their numbers, ProfitWell delivers the data-driven insights needed to make smarter decisions and optimize revenue streams.

ChartMogul

ChartMogul is another subscription analytics platform that helps businesses get a firm handle on their revenue data. It integrates with a wide variety of billing systems, like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal, to pull all your subscription data into one place. This gives you a single, unified dashboard for tracking your most important metrics in real-time, including MRR, ARR, churn rate, and net revenue retention. ChartMogul is excellent for businesses that want a clear, immediate, and accurate view of their revenue performance without having to piece together data from different sources.

Chargebee

Chargebee is a subscription management platform that focuses on automating the entire revenue lifecycle, from billing and invoicing to revenue recognition. It’s known for its flexibility, supporting a wide range of pricing models and helping companies manage their subscription operations efficiently. Chargebee ensures you can recognize revenue accurately according to accounting standards while simplifying the complexities of proration, credits, and refunds. It’s a solid, all-around solution for SaaS and subscription businesses that need a reliable system to manage their revenue operations as they scale.

Stripe Revenue Recognition

For businesses already using Stripe to process payments, adding Stripe Revenue Recognition is a natural and seamless choice. This tool automates the revenue recognition process directly within the Stripe ecosystem, ensuring you stay compliant with accounting standards like ASC 606 and IFRS 15. It’s designed to handle the nuances of subscription businesses, automatically adjusting for things like upgrades, downgrades, and prorated charges. It generates downloadable reports and provides a clear audit trail, making it much easier to close your books and prepare for audits.

NetSuite

NetSuite is a cloud-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution, which means it’s much more than just a revenue recognition tool. It’s a comprehensive platform for managing your entire business, including financials, inventory, HR, and CRM. Its revenue recognition capabilities are robust and designed to help businesses with complex needs automate their financial processes and ensure compliance. NetSuite is typically a fit for larger, more established companies that are looking for a single, integrated system to run all of their core business operations, with revenue management being a key component of that system.

Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is a powerful financial management solution that’s particularly well-suited for companies with complex billing and revenue models. It provides advanced revenue recognition features that help automate the entire process, from contract to close. Sage Intacct is designed to give you deep insights into your financial performance with customizable dashboards and real-time reporting. It’s a great choice for businesses that have outgrown basic accounting software like QuickBooks and need a more sophisticated system to handle complex revenue streams and maintain compliance as they scale.

How to Use Your Waterfall to Make Better Decisions

A revenue waterfall is more than just a financial report; it’s a powerful tool for making smarter business decisions. When you understand the story your waterfall is telling, you can move from simply reporting on the past to strategically shaping your future. It provides a clear picture of how your revenue changes over time, showing the impact of new sales, renewals, and churn. This visibility is key to guiding your company toward stable, predictable growth. By using your waterfall effectively, you can align your teams, fine-tune your forecasts, and allocate your resources where they’ll make the biggest impact.

Ensuring Data Accuracy

The insights you pull from your revenue waterfall are only as good as the data you put in. If your inputs are messy or incomplete, your waterfall will give you a distorted view of your financial health. The first step is to establish a single source of truth. This means pulling consistent, accurate information from all your systems—your CRM, billing platform, and accounting software. Using automated tools to gather this data and update your waterfall in real time is the best way to maintain accuracy and avoid manual errors. This ensures your financial picture is always up-to-date and reliable.

Aligning Your Teams

A clear revenue waterfall gets everyone on the same page. When your sales, marketing, and finance teams are all looking at the same data, they can work together more effectively. The waterfall clearly shows where growth is coming from—and where you’re facing challenges. This shared understanding helps financial experts identify growth opportunities and risks, making it easier to set unified goals. For example, if the waterfall shows high churn, your customer success team knows to focus on retention. If expansion revenue is strong, your sales team can double down on upselling. It creates a common language for discussing performance and strategy.

Improving Your Forecasts

Guessing what your future revenue will look like is always a challenge, but a waterfall model makes your predictions much more accurate. It shows you exactly how today's sales growth will translate into recognized revenue in the coming months and years. By breaking down revenue streams into cohorts, you can see patterns in customer behavior and make more informed projections. While building these detailed financial models can be complex, the payoff is huge. You gain a clearer view of your future cash flow, which is essential for making sound financial plans and securing investor confidence.

Managing Financial Risks

Your revenue waterfall is an early warning system for potential financial trouble. Because it tracks downgrades, churn, and contractions alongside new business and expansions, you can spot negative trends before they become major problems. Getting accurate information from many different places can be difficult, which is why having seamless integrations between your financial tools is so important. When your data flows automatically, you can trust that your waterfall is flagging real risks, like a sudden spike in customer churn. This allows you to investigate the cause and take corrective action right away, rather than waiting for the end-of-quarter scramble.

Planning for Sustainable Growth

Sustainable growth isn't just about acquiring new customers; it's about retaining and growing the ones you have. A revenue waterfall is perfect for showing how your Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is affected by new customers, upgrades, downgrades, and churn. This detailed view helps you build a growth strategy that’s balanced and durable. You can see whether your growth is primarily driven by new sales or by expanding existing accounts. This insight helps you set realistic targets and develop initiatives that support long-term health, not just a temporary spike in numbers.

Allocating Resources Effectively

Knowing where to invest your time and money is one of the toughest parts of running a business. A revenue waterfall provides the data you need to make those decisions confidently. To build an effective waterfall, you need a solid forecast of new sales, data on customer renewals and churn, and a clear revenue recognition schedule. With this information, you can see which areas are performing well and which need more support. For instance, if you notice a high contraction rate, you might allocate more resources to your customer success team to prevent further downgrades. You can find more insights on our blog about making data-driven decisions.

Related Articles

HubiFi CTA Button

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the real difference between the revenue I book and the revenue I recognize? Think of it this way: booked revenue is the total value of a contract you just signed. It’s the promise of future income. Recognized revenue is the portion of that contract you’ve actually earned by delivering your service over a specific period. For a one-year, $1,200 contract, you book $1,200 upfront, but you only recognize $100 each month. A revenue waterfall is the tool that visually maps out this crucial process of turning promises into earned income over time.

Can I just build my revenue waterfall in a spreadsheet? You absolutely can, and many businesses start this way. A spreadsheet is a great tool for getting a basic handle on your revenue flow when you have a small number of straightforward contracts. The trouble starts as you grow. With more customers, mid-contract upgrades, and different billing cycles, spreadsheets become complex, fragile, and highly susceptible to manual errors. Automated software is designed to handle this complexity, ensuring your data is always accurate and saving you from hours of tedious work.

How does a revenue waterfall actually help with financial forecasting? A waterfall gives your forecasts a solid foundation in reality. Instead of just projecting future sales, it shows you the predictable revenue you already have locked in from existing contracts for the months ahead. By layering your sales forecasts on top of this known revenue base, you can build a much more accurate and reliable picture of your company's future financial performance. This allows you to make smarter decisions about hiring, spending, and strategic planning.

What's the most common mistake companies make when managing their revenue waterfalls? The biggest pitfall is working with unreliable data. A revenue waterfall is only as trustworthy as the information you feed it. Often, data lives in separate systems—like a CRM for sales and a billing platform for payments—that don't communicate well. When you have to manually pull and reconcile this information, errors are almost inevitable. The most effective waterfalls are built on a single source of truth, where integrated systems ensure the data is consistent and accurate from the start.

Besides tracking churn, what’s a key indicator of customer health in a waterfall? While churn tells you who is leaving, expansion revenue tells you who is staying and growing with you. This component of the waterfall tracks the additional revenue from existing customers who upgrade their plans, add more users, or buy new features. A healthy stream of expansion revenue is a powerful sign that your customers are successful and see increasing value in your service over time. It’s one of the most efficient ways to grow your business.

Jason Berwanger

Former Root, EVP of Finance/Data at multiple FinTech startups

Jason Kyle Berwanger: An accomplished two-time entrepreneur, polyglot in finance, data & tech with 15 years of expertise. Builder, practitioner, leader—pioneering multiple ERP implementations and data solutions. Catalyst behind a 6% gross margin improvement with a sub-90-day IPO at Root insurance, powered by his vision & platform. Having held virtually every role from accountant to finance systems to finance exec, he brings a rare and noteworthy perspective in rethinking the finance tooling landscape.