New Contracted Users
Count of new user seats or licenses added through new contracts (legally binding agreements) signed in a period.
◆ Count
Formula
What it measures
A raw count of user seats or licenses added through new contracts signed in the period. It is a pure volume metric measured at the seat level, independent of contract value, price, or duration — 200 cheap seats and 200 premium seats are both 200 New Seats.
Why it matters
New Seats is how you see customer acquisition at the seat layer, before any dollar figure smooths it over. It tells you breadth: two new logos buying 5 seats each is 10 New Seats, signaling far deeper penetration than two single-seat deals. Sales uses it to gauge whether the machine is winning seats; finance uses it to forecast the installed base and the support, onboarding, and infrastructure load that follows. Because it moves at the moment of booking, it leads the revenue metrics built on top of it (New CARR, New ARR).
How to read it
Read New Seats as a trend, not a snapshot — compare this period to the prior period and to plan. Rising New Seats means your sales motion is scaling or landing bigger seat counts; falling New Seats is an early warning of pipeline weakness or competitive losses, visible before the revenue numbers move. Always pair it with New CARR and New ACV to know what kind of seats you won: high New Seats with low New CARR means lots of small, cheap seats; lower New Seats with high New CARR means fewer, premium customers. And check concentration — strong New Seats carried by one giant deal is fragile, not durable.
What good looks like
Good
New Seats grows consistently period-over-period, or accelerates after a product launch or sales hire, with wins spread across multiple logos — repeatable acquisition, not luck.
Watch
New Seats plateaus or slips period-to-period with no planned cause, or a single large deal carries the period; check pipeline quality and concentration.
Bad
New Seats declines sharply year-over-year, or collapses to one or two deals — a fragile, lumpy pipeline that will not survive a single lost account.
Watch-outs
- Double-counting seats. Only count seats first contracted in the period — seats a customer adds later mid-contract belong to upsell expansion, not New Seats.
- Confusing New Seats with Net New Users. New Seats counts only seats from new contracts; Net New Users nets all seat movement including upsells and churn. New Seats is a gross inflow, not a net figure.
- Tracking logos instead of seats. A $50K deal for 10 seats is 10 New Seats, not 1 — count at the seat level or you lose all volume signal and can't separate breadth from price.
- Treating New Seats as recognized revenue or activation. It is a booking — seats from a signed contract count even if billing hasn't started or the user never logs in; track activation separately.
Worked example
Hypothetical
In Q2 your sales team closes three new customers: Acme Corp (50 seats, $75K ACV), TechStart (15 seats, $30K ACV), and Global Inc (200 seats, $400K ACV). New Seats for Q2 is 50 + 15 + 200 = 265 new contracted users across 3 logos, with New CARR of $505K — an average seat value of roughly $1,900/year.
Variants & windows
The same metric re-expressed by a mechanical transform — a trailing window, a growth rate, a per-unit scaling, or a book/segment cut. Each is computed from New Contracted Users above.
- New Contracted Users New · Contracted book