Total Recurring Contracts
The number of active subscription contracts on a recurring revenue model as of your reporting date.
◆ Count
Formula
What it measures
A point-in-time headcount of your live, paying recurring relationships — the denominator of your subscription base. It excludes one-time, perpetual, and usage-only deals, and pairs with total-recurring-revenue to derive revenue per contract, i.e. Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL).
Why it matters
Contract count and revenue move at different rates, and the gap between them is the story. A business growing Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL) while shedding contracts looks healthy on a revenue chart but is quietly hollowing out its base. Finance uses the count to model churn risk and set retention targets; Sales uses it to compare cohorts; Product uses it to tell whether growth comes from acquisition or upsell.
How to read it
Read the count alongside Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL), never alone. Compare this period to the last to see whether you're adding net-new contracts or losing them to churn. Then divide total-recurring-revenue by this count to get ARPL: if the count falls while ARPL rises, you're upselling survivors and your base is narrowing; if both fall, churn is winning on every front. A flat count can hide heavy churn offset by equal acquisition — pair it with customer-churn-rate to see the real motion underneath.
What good looks like
Good
Contract count growing sequentially while Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL) holds or rises — healthy, profitable expansion of the base.
Watch
Flat or slipping count with rising ARPL — expansion may be masking churn; check customer-churn-rate in parallel.
Bad
Count and ARPL falling together — acquisition is failing while churn outpaces upsell, a compounding loss.
Watch-outs
- Counting expired or churned contracts. Only in-force contracts as of the measurement date count — a deal that ended on the 30th is out of a period-end snapshot.
- Including one-time or perpetual deals. Anything with RevenueModel ≠ RECURRING belongs in total-contracts, not here; mixing them inflates the base and breaks Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL).
- Double-counting multi-year or multi-invoice deals. Each contract is one row no matter how many invoices it generates; a 36-month deal recognized monthly is one contract, not 36.
- Counting SKUs or line items instead of contracts. One customer with five add-ons is one contract unless each add-on is genuinely modeled as a separate contract — count agreements, not billing lines.
Worked example
Hypothetical
On March 31 you hold 127 active recurring subscription contracts: seven renewed mid-month, three churned, and two new ones onboarded. With total-recurring-revenue of $1,066,800, your Average Revenue Per Logo (ARPL) is $8,400. You report 127 recurring contracts for the period.