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Reference / Metrics

Every number has a fork in it.

Revenue is four numbers. A no-show rate counts three different things. Retention measured on records is a measurement of your data entry. These pages are about the choice, not the formula.
Metrics
13
With a worked figure
13
Taken from
finished projects

Metric

Average order value

The easiest metric in ecommerce to calculate and one of the easiest to calculate four different ways without noticing.

$45.71

Metric

Repeat purchase rate

The metric that decides whether you have a business or a customer acquisition habit, and the one most often computed on a window too short to show it.

24.2%

Metric

Days sales outstanding

How long your money takes to arrive, expressed as a single number that no individual client matches.

46.00

Metric

Cash runway

How long you last at the current rate, and the reason the honest version of this number is so much shorter than the flattering one.

45.00

Metric

Donor retention rate

The sector's headline health metric, and the one most distorted by the duplicate records nobody has time to merge.

58.1%

Metric

Revenue concentration

A year that grew while becoming dependent on eleven households is a worse year than it looks.

52.0%

Metric

No-show rate

A rate that counts three different events, costing a session, a phone call and nothing respectively.

11.4%

Metric

Utilization rate

The metric that decides whether you need more hours or the same hours somewhere else, and the one most often computed against a denominator that guarantees a flattering answer.

78.0%

Metric

Contribution margin

The number that decides whether a product can afford to be advertised, and the reason a 59% gross margin can be negative.

214

Metric

Dead stock share

The share of your stock value that has stopped moving, computed from when things actually last sold rather than from what the stock sheet claims.

31.0%

Metric

Survey completion rate

Reported as a health metric, and actually the single best predictor of whether your headline finding will survive contact with reality.

71.2%

Metric

Customer acquisition cost

Every ad platform reports a version of this, and the versions sum to more customers than exist.

$117

Metric

Gross margin

The margin most systems report, and the one that hides every variable cost of actually selling something.

54.0%

Each figure above is read out of one of the worked examples on this site rather than typed into this page, so opening one shows you the calculation, its filters and the rows behind it. The examples are demonstration data we built, not customer work. A metric with no worked example does not get a page.