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Last updated on Sep 13, 2026
The Advanced Subscription Momentum Report does a lot more than track new, expansion, and lost movement. Several of its sections exist to answer questions that a basic Momentum table can't: is my change real or just currency movement, is my customer acquisition spend paying off, which retention number should I actually be watching, what's already committed for next quarter, and are my "new" or "lost" numbers hiding customers who don't behave like the rest.
At its core, the report is a waterfall — some call this shape a "snowball" report — that walks your chosen metric from the start of a period to the end of it through every kind of movement in between: Opening + New + Expansion - Contraction - Lost = End of Period. MRR or ARR is the most common choice, since it's the closest proxy for revenue, but the same waterfall works just as well on Quantity or a custom numeric field, so the shape of the report doesn't depend on revenue at all. Run it across many periods back to back and you can watch the waterfall roll forward, period over period, compounding gains and losses as it goes.
Subscription Momentum™ is Maxio's trademarked name for this approach, and the movement is the point: rather than a single point-in-time balance, it's built to show how your business is evolving, so you can see whether growth is coming from new business, expansion, or just retention, and exactly where you're losing ground.
That waterfall is the foundation everything else in this article builds on. The rest of it moves quickly past the basics into five capabilities that go well beyond a standard Opening-to-End-of-Period view, with a grounded example for each so you know when to reach for them. For the full definition of any field or setting mentioned here, follow the link at the end of its section.
If your business reports in one home currency but sells to customers billed in others, a change in your Momentum numbers isn't always a change in your business.
Say you report in USD and have a book of EUR-denominated customers. If the dollar strengthens against the euro during a quarter, every one of those customers' contracts converts to fewer USD than the quarter before — even though not one of them changed their contract, added a seat, or churned. Without the FX Gain/Loss row, that whole dip reads as contraction. With it, you can see exactly how much of the change is a currency effect rather than a change in the underlying business, so you're not reacting to a swing in exchange rates as if it were a swing in customer behavior.
This is why the report gives you a choice of conversion strategy: Average Rate for Period exposes the FX Gain/Loss row so you can see that effect quarter over quarter, while Constant Currency holds the rate fixed so contract values stay comparable across periods regardless of what currency markets do. Which one you want depends on the question you're asking — see Report In in Configuring the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report for the full breakdown of both options.
Expansion and new revenue look good on their own, but they don't tell you whether what you spent to acquire that revenue was worth it. That's what CLV to CAC Ratio is for.
Suppose your Average Customer Lifetime Value comes out to $45,000 and your Customer Acquisition Cost Sets put CAC at $9,000. That's a CLV to CAC Ratio of 5:1 — for every dollar spent acquiring a customer, you're getting roughly five dollars back over that customer's lifetime. A ratio trending down toward 1:1 over successive periods is an early signal that acquisition costs are outpacing what customers are worth, well before it shows up as a cash problem.
See Customer Lifetime Value in Understanding the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report for how CLV, Weighted CLV, and the CLV to CAC Ratio are each calculated.
Retention isn't one number — it's at least two, and they're built to disagree with each other on purpose.
Consider 100 customers who each had $1,000 of MRR a year ago — a $100,000 book. Over the year, 10 of them churned outright, and the other 90 didn't just stay flat: collectively they expanded by $23,000 through upsells and added seats. Gross Revenue Retention only counts what was retained or lost, so it's unaffected by that expansion and lands at 90%. Net Dollar Retention counts the expansion on top of the same retained cohort, so it comes out to 113% — both numbers describe the exact same 100 customers, including the same 10 who left; they just answer different questions about them. (New customers added during the year don't factor into either calculation — both retention metrics are scoped to the cohort you already had.) A board deck typically wants Net Dollar Retention because it reflects the growth happening within your existing base. A retention or customer-success review usually wants Gross Revenue Retention, because it isolates how well you're holding onto revenue independent of any expansion.
Running both side by side on the same book of customers is often the fastest way to tell whether growth is covering up a churn problem. See Net Dollar Retention and Gross Revenue Retention in Understanding the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report for both calculations.
Momentum and Customer Count tell you what already happened. Committed Roll Forward tells you what's already locked in before it hits the topline.
If your sales team closes a batch of renewals in March with an April start date, those Transactions won't show up as New or Renewed in the Momentum section until April arrives. Committed Roll Forward uses the Transaction Order Date instead, so that same batch of renewals is visible as backlog the moment it's signed — a month before it converts. That gap is exactly what makes this section useful in forecasting conversations with sales or RevOps: you can see what's already committed for next period without waiting for it to start.
See Committed Roll Forward in Configuring the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report for how backlog and conversion are calculated.
New and Lost look like simple buckets, but two very different customers can land in the same one — and the report's segmentation settings exist to tell them apart.
By default, a customer who churns in January and signs again in April doesn't show up as Lost or New at all: the report reads that gap as ordinary usage fluctuation, a Contraction in January followed by an Expansion in April, indistinguishable from a customer who simply cut back and then grew again. Turning on Segmentation of "New"'s New and Win-Back option reclassifies that same gap as a Loss followed by a Win-Back instead, so you can see it was a customer who actually left and returned, not one who just dialed usage down and up. The same problem shows up on the other side: a customer who signs and cancels within the first month gets bucketed into Lost right alongside a five-year account that just didn't renew. Segmentation of "Lost"'s Short Loss option separates those early-exit customers out, so a handful of quick cancellations don't get read as a retention problem with your established base.
Turning these settings on doesn't change your underlying data — it just gives the same numbers more resolution, so New and Lost answer "new business or win-back?" and "long-tenured churn or early exit?" instead of one undifferentiated total. See Segmentation of "New" in Configuring the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report for both settings.
For the full definition of every category and metric in the report, see Understanding the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report. For every configuration option, see Configuring the Advanced Subscription Momentum Report.
To compare how different groups of customers retain over time, see What You Can Do with the Cohort Report.
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