Every SaaS board meeting I've sat in eventually lands on the same question, usually from the investor who has seen the most decks: how much of this revenue is under contract? It's a fair question, and in a usage-priced business it's a hard one to answer from the P&L, because the P&L adds the subscription and the meter together and calls the total revenue.
So here's how I'd walk a CEO through it the week before the meeting, using a working sample dashboard we built for a fictional hospitality-software company called Halvanta. Every number in it is invented, but the shape of the business is real: four product lines, five ways of pricing a contract, and 135 hotel-group customers who each pay a little differently. Open it in another tab and follow along.
The scorecard opens with run-rate revenue of $4.09M, which is October annualized and up 47.7% on a trailing-twelve-month basis. The card right next to it says contracted ARR is $2.74M, or 66.9% of that run rate.
That gap is the conversation. $1.75M of the run rate is usage, overage and success fees – real revenue, collected in cash, but none of it under contract. A buyer or a growth investor will price those two layers differently, and if your monthly reporting doesn't separate them, someone in diligence will do it for you, on their terms and on their timeline.
The card I'd point to last is the one most CEOs skip: 42.3% of trailing revenue, $1.34M, is calculated in spreadsheets every month and then journaled into the books. That's the number that caps the multiple, and the good news is that the fix is a reporting change that leaves the business itself alone.
The contracted ARR bridge walks from $1.84M on November 1 last year to $2.74M at October 31. New logos added $618K across 46 contracts, expansion inside the base added $512K, and contraction and churn took out $234K between them.
The board will want net revenue retention, and the dashboard measures it the way an investor will: on the base that existed a year ago, nothing added since. That comes to 111.6%, with gross revenue retention at 87.3% and 11 of 100 logos lost. A base that expands that reliably carries real weight in a capital conversation, and the cohort table further down shows each year's customers getting more valuable as they age, which is the land-and-expand story told with evidence.
This is the chart I'd spend the most time on with a CEO who came up through sales. Bars are what was invoiced, the violet line is revenue earned under ASC 606, and the teal line is cash in the door. Same twelve months, three different shapes.
For the full year, cash tracked revenue to within 0.6%. In any single month the gap ran from 14.4% behind to 26.2% ahead. The early months ran cash-ahead on annual prepays, and the recent ones run cash-behind because usage and success fees are earned before they can be invoiced. My read: the fastest-growing revenue is quietly consuming working capital, and that's exactly why a cash forecast built off the P&L has never held for this company.
The reconciliation under the chart walks invoicing to revenue to cash, and the deferred revenue rollforward proves all four figures tie in every month. When a board member asks whether the deferred balance is real, you can show them the check column.
Every board pack gets the "what if" question, and most answer it with a second spreadsheet that nobody can reconcile back to the first. The scenario drivers on the left of the dashboard move the six-month forecast directly, and the twelve closed months never move with them.
Say the board wants to see churn at twice today's rate. Slide monthly logo churn from 0.9% to 1.8% and the summary updates on the spot: the April 2027 run rate drops $213K to $4.94M, exit contracted ARR falls $151K to $2.90M, six-month revenue is $60K lighter, and adjusted EBITDA gives up $37K. Gross margin doesn't move, because churn changes volume and leaves the cost of delivering each dollar where it was.
The revenue chart redraws the forecast with the base case dotted above it, so the distance between the two lines is the cost of the scenario. Reset to base case and you're back where you started, with nothing to undo in a spreadsheet.
Here's the part CEOs tend to like most. Every KPI card, chart, table and callout on the page has a small + Deck button in its corner. Click it on the pieces you want in front of the board, open the board deck tray in the top bar, put them in the order you'll present them, and download.
If you don't want to pick, Use the board pack loads the eleven elements a board usually asks for, which comes out to about ten slides. What you get is an editable PowerPoint file:
So if the CEO wants the board to see the churn case, move the lever before you download. Every chart in the deck then shows that scenario, and the speaker notes record that a scenario was in effect.
Nothing on this page needs special software on your side. In a real engagement we connect read-only to QuickBooks Online (or your ERP), the billing system and the CRM, rebuild the last twelve months on one consistent basis, and put each contract's rate card in one table that billing and the revenue schedule both read from. That last step is the one that matters most for Halvanta, because it's where most of the 19-day close and most of the 247 manual touches each month come from.
After that the dashboard refreshes after every close, the board deck comes out of the same numbers the CFO signs off on, and the question about contracted revenue has an answer before anyone asks it.
If you'd like to see what this looks like on your own books, schedule a call with our team. You can also browse the other demos in our showcase.
Halvanta is a fictional company and every figure in the dashboard and in this post is invented for illustration. Nothing here is drawn from any client's books.