These are step-by-step how-to guides for the actual mechanics of SaaS revenue diligence: how to calculate the metrics that matter, how to evaluate a SaaS business before you commit to buying it, and how to reduce churn in a business you already own. Each guide is written for a reader who has the revenue ledger open in one window and a deadline in the other — so the focus is on the exact inputs, the exact formula, and the exact interpretation, not on theory.
SaaS due diligence dies in the gap between a framework and a spreadsheet. 'Check the net revenue retention' is a framework; 'reconstruct NRR from monthly MRR by customer, exclude true-ups, separate expansion from price increase, and compare the result to the number on the seller's pitch deck' is a mechanic. The frameworks are freely available everywhere; the mechanics are not, because they live in the tribal knowledge of people who have done fifty deals. The guides below try to close that gap — each one walks through the calculation at the level of detail you would need to reproduce it on a real revenue ledger tonight.
The intervention playbook: annual-plan restructuring, usage re-engagement, and concentration de-risking.
The full pre-LOI evaluation checklist, from revenue reconstruction to concentration stress-testing.
NRR computed from first principles: exact inputs, formula, and how sellers massage it.
With the revenue ledger in hand, the core reconstruction — gross logo churn, gross revenue churn, NRR, cohort retention, zombie MRR flagging, and renewal-cliff detection — should take under two hours end-to-end with ChurnLens, or one to two days in a spreadsheet if you are doing it manually. The bottleneck is never the math; it is getting a clean enough export from the seller. Request the monthly MRR-by-customer ledger with plan type and contract dates as the first data-room ask, not the last.
Reconciling reported net revenue retention against the cohort-implied NRR. Reported NRR is the number the seller gives you; cohort-implied NRR is what you compute by tracking each acquisition cohort's revenue over time. When reported NRR is 112% but cohort-implied NRR is 96%, you have found the gap between the story and the ledger — and that gap is the most common source of SaaS acquisition overpayment we see.
Yes, but only after you have measured it honestly. Post-acquisition churn reduction starts with the same reconstruction: you cannot fix zombie MRR you have not identified, and you cannot intervene on a renewal cliff you have not mapped. The reduce-saas-churn guide below covers the intervention playbook — annual-plan restructuring, usage-based re-engagement, and concentration de-risking — but every intervention assumes you have already done the diagnostic work ChurnLens automates.
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