Board meetings at Series A and B companies follow a predictable pattern. The founder spends a week pulling metrics from five different tools, reconciling numbers that don't match, building a deck, and hoping nobody asks a question that requires a live data pull. It doesn't have to be this way.
This guide covers the specific metrics your board wants to see, what "good" looks like at each stage, and how to produce them without a dedicated data team.
The Metrics That Matter at Series A
At Series A, your board is asking one core question: is this business ready to scale? They want proof that the engine works before pouring fuel into it.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and ARR
What it is: The predictable, recurring revenue your business generates monthly (MRR) and annually (ARR).
What boards want to see: Consistent month-over-month growth. At Series A, 10–15% MoM growth is strong. More importantly, they want to understand the composition — how much is new business, how much is expansion, and how much is lost to churn and contraction.
Where it breaks: Your billing system says one MRR number. Your CRM says another. The spreadsheet the CEO maintains says a third. This is the most common source of credibility damage in board meetings. The fix is reconciling billing and CRM data at the account level — not just matching totals, but ensuring every account agrees across both systems.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
What it is: How much revenue you retain and expand from existing customers over a period. The formula: (Starting MRR + Expansion − Churn − Contraction) ÷ Starting MRR × 100.
What boards want to see: 100%+ means your existing base is growing on its own. At Series A, 105–115% is solid. Above 120% gets investors excited because it signals strong expansion and low churn — the business compounds even without new logos.
Where it breaks: Accurately categorising each revenue change (expansion vs new business vs reactivation) requires business logic that's usually in someone's head, not in a system. Cohort definitions, mid-cycle changes, and merged accounts create edge cases that make manual NRR calculation unreliable.
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
What it is: Revenue retained before accounting for expansion. GRR only looks at churn and contraction. The formula: (Starting MRR − Churn − Contraction) ÷ Starting MRR × 100.
What boards want to see: GRR tells you how leaky the bucket is without the expansion hose filling it back up. At Series A, 85%+ is the floor. 90%+ is good. 95%+ is exceptional. If GRR is low, it doesn't matter how much expansion you're generating — you're running on a treadmill.
Where it breaks: Same data challenges as NRR, but GRR is particularly sensitive to how you categorise downgrades. A customer switching to a cheaper plan because you restructured pricing isn't the same as a dissatisfied downgrade, but both hit GRR the same way unless you track the reason.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and LTV:CAC
What it is: How much it costs to acquire a customer (CAC) and the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost (LTV:CAC).
What boards want to see: LTV:CAC above 3x is the standard benchmark. At Series A, the ratio might be lower because acquisition channels are still being optimised. The trend matters as much as the absolute number — improving LTV:CAC signals growing efficiency.
Where it breaks: CAC is straightforward if you track marketing and sales spend accurately. LTV is where it gets complicated — it requires churn rate (which requires the accurate billing/CRM data above) and average revenue per account (which requires the same). Garbage in, garbage out.
Churn Rate
What it is: The percentage of customers (logo churn) or revenue (revenue churn) lost in a period.
What boards want to see: Monthly revenue churn below 2% (annualised below 20%). For SaaS selling to mid-market and up, below 1% monthly is the target. Logo churn is interesting but revenue churn is what investors focus on — losing ten $100/month customers is different from losing one $50K/year customer.
Where it breaks: Defining what counts as churn seems simple until you hit edge cases. A customer who cancels and comes back in 60 days — churned or paused? An account that migrated to a different entity — churned or transferred? A customer moved to a custom contract not in your billing system — churned or just invisible? These edge cases matter more than you'd expect at scale.
Additional Metrics at Series B
At Series B, the board question shifts from "does this work?" to "how fast and how efficiently can this scale?" All the Series A metrics still matter, plus:
Burn Multiple
What it is: Net burn divided by net new ARR. It measures how efficiently you're converting cash into growth.
What boards want to see: Below 2x is good. Below 1.5x is great. Above 3x is a concern. This metric has become the default efficiency measure for growth-stage SaaS and most Series B investors will benchmark you against it.
Magic Number
What it is: Net new ARR divided by sales and marketing spend from the prior period. It measures go-to-market efficiency.
What boards want to see: Above 0.75 means your GTM engine is efficient enough to justify investing more. Below 0.5 suggests you need to fix unit economics before scaling spend. Between 0.5 and 0.75 is optimisation territory.
Expansion Revenue as a % of New ARR
What it is: How much of your new revenue comes from existing customers vs new logos.
What boards want to see: The best SaaS companies generate 30–50% of new ARR from expansion. A high expansion percentage means you're compounding growth from your installed base — the most capital-efficient growth engine there is. It also signals product-market fit depth: customers are finding more value over time.
Revenue Per Employee
What it is: Total ARR divided by headcount.
What boards want to see: This varies by stage, but $150K–$250K ARR per employee is typical for Series B SaaS. Investors use this to gauge operational efficiency and whether the team is appropriately sized for the revenue base. It's also why keeping headcount lean matters — every hire that doesn't directly contribute to revenue or product dilutes this metric.
Cohort Analysis
What it is: Revenue retention and expansion broken down by the month or quarter customers were acquired.
What boards want to see: Improving cohorts over time. If your Q1 2025 cohort retains better than your Q3 2024 cohort, it signals that your product, onboarding, or customer success is getting better. Flat or worsening cohorts are a red flag investors will catch immediately.
How to Produce These Metrics Without a Data Team
The dirty secret of board metrics is that most founders at Series A and B are producing them manually. Every quarter involves spreadsheet exports, manual reconciliation, and hours of work to produce numbers that might still be wrong.
There are three ways to fix this:
Option 1: Hire a data analyst
They build dashboards, maintain pipelines, and produce board reports. Cost: $150K–$220K/year. Timeline: 2–4 months before you get reliable reporting. Their time splits roughly 60% ad-hoc requests and 40% building systems.
Option 2: Use a metrics tool
Platforms like ChartMogul or Baremetrics connect to your billing system and calculate SaaS metrics. Good for billing-only analytics, but they only see one data source. They'll give you MRR and churn, but can't tell you why NRR changed, which accounts are at risk, or where expansion opportunities are hiding — because that context lives in your CRM, support, and product tools.
Option 3: Use Eru
Eru connects to your billing, CRM, support, product, and database systems. The AI agent reconciles data across tools and produces live revenue metrics — NRR, GRR, churn rate, LTV:CAC, MRR composition, and more — alongside the account-level detail behind every number.
When your board asks "why did NRR dip this month?", you can answer in real time: these three accounts contracted, here's why, and here are the five accounts showing expansion signals for next month.
That's the difference between a board slide and a command center.
A Better Board Prep Process
Instead of the quarterly fire drill:
Week of the board meeting: Log into Eru. Your metrics are already live — NRR, GRR, churn, expansion, MRR by cohort, revenue composition. Export or screenshot what you need.
During the meeting: If a board member asks a question — "What's our churn rate for enterprise accounts?" or "Which cohort is performing best?" — you answer it in real time from the live data.
After the meeting: Share access to the dashboard. Let investors see the metrics between meetings if they want to. Transparency builds trust, and trust makes fundraising easier.
No spreadsheets. No reconciliation week. No hoping the numbers hold up.
Related reading: ChartMogul vs Baremetrics vs ProfitWell vs Eru for Board Reporting & NRR Due Diligence — which SaaS metrics tools produce board-ready numbers that survive VC due diligence? A side-by-side comparison.
For Series B specifically: Series B Board Deck SaaS Metrics: How to Present NRR, Churn, and Customer Health to VCs — the retention metrics your Series B deck needs, what VCs actually scrutinise, and how to produce numbers from your RevOps stack.
Book a free churn audit — we'll show you what your board metrics look like when they're pulled from connected, reconciled data.
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