New Contracted ARR
Annualized recurring revenue from contracts you signed this period, counted when signed whether or not the customer has gone live yet.
◆ Currency
Formula
Built from
What it measures
The annualized value of new logos and net-new contracts you locked in contractually during the period. It captures bookings momentum — revenue you have committed in writing — before the customer goes live, gets invoiced, or pays a dollar. Renewals, upsells on existing contracts, and one-time fees are excluded; only the recurring rate of genuinely new contracts counts.
Why it matters
New CARR is the earliest hard signal that your go-to-market engine is working. A signature commits the customer before any of the lag of implementation or billing, which makes it a stronger forward indicator than cash. You use it to read sales productivity and quota attainment in real time, well ahead of the revenue it becomes. Investors watch it because accelerating bookings is what precedes accelerating ARR — it shows the growth in next year's P&L is already being built today.
How to read it
Read New CARR as a flow over time, never as a single number. Compare each period to the prior period and to your bookings plan — rising New CARR means you are signing bigger deals, more of them, or both; flat or falling means the pipeline is stalling or deal sizes are shrinking. Plot it monthly or quarterly to expose your natural closing cycle and end-of-quarter sandbagging. But never read it as revenue: a booking is a promise, not an invoice. A strong New CARR quarter only pays off if those contracts actually go live, so always pair it with conversion-to-live and time-to-go-live.
What good looks like
Good
New CARR grows period-over-period in line with or ahead of your bookings plan, and the booked contracts reliably convert to live revenue within your expected onboarding window.
Watch
New CARR is flat or lumpy, leaning on a few large deals, or signed contracts are taking longer than usual to go live — momentum or implementation capacity may be slipping.
Bad
New CARR is shrinking period-over-period, or bookings hold up but a growing share never converts to live revenue — signaling pipeline weakness or implementation and customer-health risk.
Watch-outs
- Treating New CARR as cash. A $100K booking may carry net-30, net-60, or annual-upfront terms — the signature tells you nothing about when money arrives. Never staff or spend against New CARR as if it were collected revenue.
- Adding New CARR across periods to forecast revenue. New CARR is gross new bookings, not the full picture — to project where the book is heading, run the CARR waterfall (starting CARR + New CARR + upsell - downsell - churn).
- Ignoring booking-to-live lag. If sales signs deals right before quarter-end but customers don't go live until next quarter, New CARR is booked while revenue and cash are not — track conversion-to-live so a strong bookings quarter isn't mistaken for landed revenue.
- Netting churn or downsell into New CARR. It is gross bookings of new contracts only; folding in losses from the existing base hides whether new sales are actually accelerating.
Worked example
Hypothetical
You close three new-logo deals in Q2: one at $50K/year, one at $120K/year, and one at $30K/year. None go live until July. Your Q2 New CARR is $200K — booked the moment the contracts were signed, even though no invoice went out and no cash arrived. That $200K rolls into Q3 starting CARR and anchors your forward revenue forecast.
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 ARR above.
- T12M New CARR Trailing 12-month
- T3M New CARR Trailing 3-month