Revenue leakage is money you've already earned that slips through the cracks. It's not churn — those customers haven't decided to leave. It's not contraction — they haven't actively downgraded. It's revenue that disappears because your systems don't talk to each other, and nobody catches the gaps.
At most SaaS scale-ups between $3M and $10M ARR, revenue leakage accounts for 5–15% of total ARR. On a $5M base, that's $250K–$750K silently vanishing every year. Not because of product problems or competitive losses — because of data gaps.
The Five Types of Revenue Leakage
1. Billing and CRM Discrepancies
Your billing system (Stripe, Chargebee) says a customer is paying $2,400/month. Your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot) says the deal is worth $1,800/month. Which is right?
Both might be. A mid-cycle upgrade was processed in billing but nobody updated the CRM. Or a discount was applied in the CRM but never configured in billing, so the customer is being undercharged. Or a pricing change went into effect in billing while the CRM still shows the old rate.
These discrepancies are small individually — $200 here, $600 there. But across 200+ accounts, they add up. And the problem compounds: every discrepancy that goes unnoticed for a month is harder to fix the next month, because now there's a longer history of mismatched data.
Revenue at stake: Scale-ups typically find $10K–$50K in billing/CRM discrepancies the first time they reconcile properly. Monthly, undetected drift usually runs 1–3% of MRR.
2. Orphaned Accounts
A customer signed up through your self-serve flow, entered their credit card in Stripe, and started paying. But nobody created a record in the CRM. Or the CRM record was created but later deleted during a cleanup. Or two accounts were merged and the billing link broke.
The result: a paying customer that your commercial team doesn't know exists. No CS check-ins. No renewal conversations. No expansion outreach. No relationship at all.
Orphaned accounts churn at 2–3x the rate of managed accounts. They're paying you, getting diminishing value because nobody's ensuring they succeed, and eventually cancelling — and nobody notices until the revenue disappears from the billing report.
Revenue at stake: Most scale-ups discover 5–15% of their paying accounts are orphaned. On a $5M ARR base, that's $250K–$750K in unmanaged revenue.
3. Failed Payments That Nobody Follows Up On
A customer's credit card expires. The charge fails. Your billing system retries automatically — maybe 3 times over 10 days. All retries fail. After the final retry, the subscription is cancelled.
This is called involuntary churn, and it accounts for 20–40% of all SaaS churn. The customer didn't choose to leave. Their card just expired, and nobody reached out.
The failure notification went to your billing system's dashboard, where nobody checks it daily. Your CRM still shows the account as active. Your CS team has no idea. By the time the subscription is cancelled, the customer has moved on.
Revenue at stake: Industry data suggests failed payments cause 2–5% of MRR loss annually. Most of it is recoverable with timely outreach — a simple email or call within 48 hours recovers 50–70% of failed payments.
4. Missed Renewal Conversations
A customer's annual contract comes up for renewal in 30 days. The renewal date lives in your billing system. Your CS team works in the CRM. Nobody flagged it.
The contract auto-renews at the existing rate — which means you missed the opportunity to expand the account. Or worse, the contract lapses because it required a signature, and the customer uses the gap as an excuse to evaluate alternatives.
Revenue at stake: Missed renewal conversations don't always cause direct leakage, but they consistently cost expansion revenue. Proactively engaging accounts 60–90 days before renewal typically increases expansion rates by 15–25%.
5. Pricing and Discount Drift
Over time, discounts accumulate. A customer got 20% off during an early sales negotiation. Another got a free month credited during a support escalation. A third is on a legacy pricing tier that no longer exists.
None of these are tracked consistently. The original discount is in a closed-won opportunity note. The credit is in a support ticket. The legacy pricing is in a billing configuration nobody remembers setting up.
The result is that a meaningful percentage of your customer base is paying less than they should, and nobody has a clear picture of total discount exposure.
Revenue at stake: Varies widely, but scale-ups that audit their discount exposure typically find 3–8% of revenue affected by undocumented or forgotten discounts.
Why Leakage Goes Undetected
Revenue leakage is uniquely hard to spot because no single system sees the full picture.
Your billing system doesn't know about your CRM records. Your CRM doesn't know about failed payments. Your CS team doesn't know about orphaned accounts. Your finance team sees aggregate MRR but not the account-level gaps underneath it.
Each system is correct within its own context. The leakage lives in the gaps between them. You can only see it when you connect the data across systems and look at each account from every angle simultaneously.
Most scale-ups don't discover their leakage until a specific event forces them to look: a fundraise due diligence process, a board member asking hard questions about unit economics, or a new VP of Finance who reconciles everything for the first time and finds the numbers don't add up.
How to Find and Fix Your Revenue Leakage
Step 1: Billing/CRM Reconciliation
Compare MRR by account between your billing system and CRM. Every account should match. Flag every discrepancy above $100/month. This single exercise typically surfaces $10K–$50K in revenue gaps at a scale-up.
Step 2: Orphan Audit
Pull every active subscription from billing. Match each one to a CRM account. Any paying customer without a CRM record is an orphaned account. Create CRM records immediately and assign a CS rep.
Step 3: Failed Payment Recovery
Review your billing system's failed payment logs for the last 90 days. Identify every involuntary cancellation. For recent ones (last 30 days), reach out directly — a significant percentage will reactivate with a simple card update.
Going forward, set up alerts for failed payments and assign someone to follow up within 48 hours.
Step 4: Renewal Calendar
Export every contract renewal date from your billing system. Cross-reference with your CRM. Flag every renewal in the next 90 days that doesn't have a CS touch scheduled. Assign proactive outreach for each one.
Step 5: Discount Audit
Review your pricing across all accounts. Identify every account paying below list price. Document the reason. Decide which discounts should be honoured and which should be renegotiated at next renewal.
Doing This Manually vs Automatically
Every step above can be done manually. Export spreadsheets from each system, spend days cross-referencing, flag the gaps, fix them, and repeat monthly. At 100+ accounts, this is a part-time job for someone.
The alternative is to connect your systems so the reconciliation happens automatically and continuously.
Eru connects to your billing, CRM, support, and product systems through read-only integrations (5-minute setup each). The AI agent matches accounts across systems, flags discrepancies, identifies orphaned accounts, alerts on failed payments, and tracks renewal timing — all in real time.
Instead of discovering leakage during a quarterly fire drill, you catch it on day one. The $12K billing discrepancy gets flagged the moment it happens. The orphaned account gets surfaced immediately. The failed payment triggers an alert within hours, not weeks.
Revenue leakage is a solvable problem. The only question is whether you find it before it compounds.
Book a free churn audit — we'll show you exactly how much revenue is leaking between your systems right now.
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