How do marketing agencies track MRR, ARR, and churn?

Agencies track MRR by summing every client's normalized monthly recurring fee, derive ARR as MRR x 12, and measure churn as the recurring revenue (or clients) lost in a period divided by what they started with. The hard part is keeping it accurate as plans change, clients pause, and one-off project fees get mixed in. Doing it in a spreadsheet means re-tallying by hand every month; pulling it straight from your recurring subscriptions keeps the numbers honest without the manual rebuild.

MRR, ARR, and churn are the three numbers that tell a marketing agency whether its recurring revenue is actually growing. They sound simple, but most agencies get them wrong because the inputs live in scattered places — a card processor for some clients, QuickBooks for others, a spreadsheet for the retainers nobody migrated yet. Below is the operator-level version: what each metric means, exactly how to calculate it, the edge cases that quietly corrupt the math, and how HubWho is built to surface these from your recurring client subscriptions so you are reading numbers instead of rebuilding them.

Why the answer is what it is

MRR is the sum of normalized monthly recurring fees — not just cash collected

Monthly Recurring Revenue is every active client's recurring fee, normalized to a monthly figure. A $12,000 annual retainer counts as $1,000 of MRR, not a $12,000 spike in the month it was billed. Strip out one-time project fees, setup charges, and pass-through ad spend — those are not recurring and they inflate the number. The discipline is to track recurring subscription line items separately from everything else, then sum them. HubWho is built so each client's recurring subscription is the source of that figure, so MRR reflects contracted recurring revenue rather than whatever happened to hit the bank that month.

ARR is MRR x 12 — a run-rate, not last year's revenue

Annual Recurring Revenue is simply current MRR multiplied by twelve. It is a forward-looking run-rate: 'if nothing changed, this is what the next twelve months of recurring revenue would total.' It is not the sum of what you actually invoiced last year, which includes project work and churned accounts. Keeping ARR as a clean derivative of MRR means the moment a client upgrades, downgrades, or cancels, your annual run-rate moves with it instead of lagging a year behind.

Churn measures what you lost — by revenue and by logo

Revenue churn is the recurring revenue lost in a period (cancellations plus downgrades) divided by the MRR you started the period with. Logo churn is the count of clients lost divided by basethe count you started with. They tell different stories: losing one $5,000 client and one $500 client is the same logo churn but ten times the revenue churn. Agencies that only count logos miss when a few large accounts quietly shrink. Track both, and track them on the same recurring-revenue base you use for MRR.

The inputs have to stay clean as plans change

The math is easy; keeping the inputs honest is the work. Mid-month upgrades, paused clients, annual-to-monthly switches, and discounts all distort MRR if you are hand-tallying a spreadsheet. That is exactly where monthly tracking breaks down and numbers drift. HubWho is built to surface MRR, ARR, and churn from the recurring subscriptions you manage in the platform, and can pull additional KPI and reporting signals from tools you already connect — like GoHighLevel, HubSpot, BirdEye, or Yext — so the revenue picture stays current as your book of business changes.

What to look for

  • Normalize every recurring fee to a monthly figure and sum them for MRR — exclude one-time project, setup, and pass-through ad-spend charges
  • Calculate ARR as current MRR x 12 and treat it as a run-rate, not last year's invoiced total
  • Measure both revenue churn (lost recurring revenue / starting MRR) and logo churn (lost clients / starting clients)
  • Pick a fixed period (usually monthly) and a consistent starting base so the numbers are comparable over time
  • Keep recurring subscriptions as the single source for these metrics so plan changes update the numbers automatically
  • Connect existing tools (GoHighLevel, HubSpot, BirdEye, Yext) for added KPI and reporting context alongside revenue

Related questions

What is a healthy churn rate for a marketing agency?

There is no single benchmark that fits every agency, and we will not invent one. What matters more than a target number is measuring churn consistently — same period, same starting base — and watching the trend over time. Tracking both revenue churn and logo churn tells you whether you are losing many small clients or a few large ones, which points to very different fixes.

How is MRR different from the revenue I actually collected this month?

Collected revenue includes one-time project fees, setup charges, annual payments billed in a lump, and pass-through costs like ad spend — all of which spike a single month and distort the trend. MRR is only the normalized recurring portion. An agency can collect a big annual prepayment and still have flat MRR. Tracking them separately keeps your run-rate honest.

Does HubWho calculate these metrics automatically?

HubWho is built to surface MRR, ARR, and churn from the recurring client subscriptions you manage in the platform, and can pull additional KPI signals from connected tools like GoHighLevel, HubSpot, BirdEye, and Yext. It is a pre-launch platform opening to a founding cohort of agencies — request early access to see how it fits your billing setup. Questions go to info@roffik.com.

How Roffik addresses this

Billing, ACH and card payments, recurring subscriptions, per-client margin tracking, and branded client portals for marketing agencies — built on Midnight + cyan. Learn more about HubWho.

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