If you’re raising a SaaS round in Australia and you can’t explain your MRR, ARR and NRR clearly, you’re going to struggle. Not because investors are trying to trip you up, but because these three metrics tell them almost everything they need to know about the health, growth and predictability of your revenue.
The good news is they’re not complicated. Once you understand what each one measures and why it matters, you’ll walk into any investor meeting with confidence.
MRR – your month-to-month pulse
Monthly Recurring Revenue is exactly what it sounds like: the predictable revenue your business generates each month from active subscriptions or contracts.
The key word is “predictable.” MRR doesn’t include one-off payments, professional services fees or annual contracts paid upfront. It’s the revenue you can reliably count on each month, assuming no new customers, no churn and no expansions.
To calculate your MRR, multiply the number of active customers by their average monthly subscription value. Simple enough. But where MRR gets interesting is when you break it down. Investors don’t just want the top-line number – they want to understand what’s driving it.
New MRR is revenue from customers acquired that month. Expansion MRR is additional revenue from existing customers upgrading or adding seats. Churned MRR is revenue lost from cancellations, and contraction MRR is revenue lost from downgrades. These four components tell a story. A business with $100K MRR but high churn and low expansion is a very different beast to one with the same number but strong expansion and minimal losses.
ARR – zooming out
Annual Recurring Revenue is your MRR multiplied by 12. It’s the annualised view of your recurring revenue, useful for comparing against benchmarks, setting annual targets and communicating with investors who think in yearly terms.
One important thing: ARR is a projection, not a guarantee. It assumes your current MRR stays flat for the next 12 months, which is rarely the case. Investors know this, but they still use ARR as a baseline for valuation and growth conversations.
If you’re selling annual contracts, calculate ARR by dividing the total contract value by the contract length – don’t just multiply your MRR figure, as this can misrepresent the underlying revenue position.
NRR – the metric that separates great businesses from good ones
Net Revenue Retention (sometimes called Net Dollar Retention) is the most important of the three, and the one most founders underestimate.
NRR measures how much revenue you retain from your existing customer base over a period, after accounting for expansions, contractions and churn. It’s expressed as a percentage. Here’s the formula:
(Starting MRR + Expansion MRR – Contraction MRR – Churned MRR) / Starting MRR × 100
If your NRR is above 100%, your existing customers are generating more revenue this period than they were last period – even without acquiring a single new customer. That’s the power of net retention. Your revenue grows on its own.
If it’s below 100%, you’re losing ground from your existing base. No amount of new customer acquisition can fully compensate for a leaky bucket.
Investors in Australia increasingly benchmark NRR heavily. For early-stage SaaS, above 100% is strong. At Series A and beyond, investors expect to see 110-120%+ for a truly investor-grade business.
How investors use all three together
MRR, ARR and NRR aren’t standalone numbers – they work together to paint a complete picture of your business. An investor will typically look at your MRR growth rate to assess momentum, your ARR to size the business and benchmark valuation, and your NRR to understand retention and the underlying health of your customer relationships.
A business with fast MRR growth but poor NRR is spending to acquire customers it can’t keep. That’s a red flag. A business with strong NRR but slow new MRR growth might have a great product but a go-to-market problem. Either way, the combination of these metrics tells investors exactly where the risk sits.
The founders who walk into due diligence knowing these numbers cold – and can explain the story behind each one – are the ones who close rounds faster.
Know your numbers before you raise
At Standard Ledger, we work with SaaS startups across Australia to get their financials investor-ready – from clean MRR reporting to comprehensive CFO support for your raise. Get in touch to talk through your numbers.
