Contracted CAC per User

What it measures

CCACU divides your period's sales and marketing spend — excluding implementation, onboarding, and customer-success costs incurred after contract — by the count of new customers who signed a contract that period but have not yet been marked live. It isolates the cost to close a deal from the cost to launch the customer.

Why it matters

You calculate CCACU to track the efficiency of your sales engine on a booked basis, separate from the live business. Deals close before customers go live, and that lag hides the truth: CCACU tells you whether S&M is landing new logos efficiently, independent of how fast implementation runs. CFOs and boards want the cost to book revenue, not just the cost to recognize it, and sales leaders use CCACU to judge closing productivity at the signature stage before onboarding variables blur the picture. When CCACU sits well below CACU (live cost per user), your implementation is efficient; when they converge or CCACU exceeds CACU, you have implementation friction or a high no-go rate between contract and live.

How to read it

Read CCACU as your S&M cost per booked customer — lower is generally better, because it means you are closing deals efficiently. But never read it alone: pair it with your contracted-to-live conversion rate. A CCACU of $50K with only 60% of booked customers going live implies a true cost per live customer of $50K ÷ 0.6 = $83K, worse than a CCACU of $75K with 95% conversion (true cost $79K). Track CCACU against CACU each quarter: if they trend apart (CCACU dropping, CACU stable or rising), you are closing faster but onboarding slower; if both drop with stable conversion, you have genuinely improved sales efficiency. Always tie swings back to deal velocity, deal size, and channel mix — large deals take longer to close and can spike CCACU in one month, then go live in the next.

What good looks like

Watch-outs

• Confusing contracted with live. CCACU measures booked customers (signed, not yet live); count live customers by accident and you are calculating CACU, not CCACU. Keep your status definitions explicit — implementation, onboarding, or live.
• Ignoring contracted-to-live conversion. A low CCACU is misleading if half of booked customers never go live. Always report CCACU alongside the percentage of contracted customers who convert to live, usually measured 60–90 days out.
• Misaligning spend and close timing. Sales cycles vary, so pair each period's S&M spend with that period's closes, not the next period's. Use cohort analysis and allocate spend to the close month, not the recognition month.
• Mislabeling setup fees. A $20K upfront setup billed at contract close is part of the acquisition motion — include it in S&M for CCACU, but exclude it from ACV or ARR so you do not inflate recurring revenue.

Worked example