Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue

What CMRR adds to MRR

MRR is a snapshot of what is active right now. It is deliberately backward-safe: nothing enters until it is real. CMRR trades some of that safety for foresight by folding in movement that is already contractually settled — a customer who gave notice last week is gone, whatever the subscription table says until the term ends.

For a monthly, self-serve business the two figures are nearly identical, because there is rarely a gap between a decision and its effect. For an annual-contract business with notice periods and future start dates, the gap can be several percent of the book, and it is precisely the part a planner most needs to know about.

Where it earns its place

CMRR is a planning number. It is the right input for a hiring plan, a runway model or a capacity forecast, because those decisions are made about a future in which the notified churn has already happened. Using current MRR for those purposes plans against a book you know you will not have.

It is the wrong number for measuring what happened. Historical performance, growth rate series and cohort work should all run on realised MRR, because a series that includes commitments is partly a forecast and cannot be reconciled against anything.

The discipline problem

CMRR is only as good as the rule for what counts as committed, and that rule is easy to loosen. A signed contract with a start date is committed. A verbal agreement is not. A renewal a customer said they were "probably" not continuing is not — but it is exactly the sort of thing that gets excluded from CMRR by an optimistic sales team and included by a cautious finance one.

The workable convention is narrow and written down: only movement evidenced by a signature or a written notice, only within a stated horizon — one or two quarters — and never a probability-weighted pipeline figure. The moment CMRR starts including weighted pipeline it has become a forecast wearing a metric's name, and it will be reported as though it were contracted.

CMRR is not a bookings number

It is close to one and should not be confused with it. Bookings count what was sold in a period, including one-off fees and the whole multi-year value. CMRR is a point-in-time run-rate figure, recurring only, covering just the contracted changes to today's book. A three-year deal signed today is one bookings event of its full total contract value and, in CMRR, a monthly-normalised addition of one twelfth of its first-year ACV.

Reporting it without confusing anyone

Publish both, always labelled, and never let CMRR silently replace MRR in a chart that also contains history. The clearest presentation is a realised MRR series with committed movement shown as a forward extension in a visibly different treatment — the reader can see immediately where measurement stops and commitment begins. And state the horizon: CMRR that reaches two quarters ahead is a different claim from CMRR that reaches one month ahead.