SaaS

Revenue leak · the findings queue

The Revenue leak tab lists the money your operation left on the table without noticing: unbilled usage, discount beyond authority, an active subscription with no invoice, an unapplied price step and a renewal with no uplift. Every finding has a Kind, Amount, Severity and Detected on, and the top of the screen shows how many are open and how much is at risk.

In a subscription business, revenue is rarely lost in one big visible event. It seeps out: the customer blew past what was included and nobody billed the overage, the rep gave a discount larger than they could, the subscription stayed active but never turned into an invoice, the price step agreed for year two never kicked in, the renewal went out without the uplift in the contract. Each of these is small enough to slip through and frequent enough to hurt.

The kinds of finding

Unbilled usage: the customer consumed more than the plan includes and the overage was never invoiced. The amount is the excess times the unit price.
Discount beyond authority: the discount granted exceeded the allowed limit. The amount is the part of the discount that went past the authority, not the whole discount.
Subscription with no invoice: there is an active subscription with no matching charge.
Price step not applied: an increase scheduled in the contract did not take effect on the agreed date.
Renewal with no uplift: the renewal went out without the expected uplift. The amount is the uplift that was never applied to the MRR.

Severity

Severity is assigned by the size of the leaked amount, so the queue orders itself and nobody has to decide line by line what is urgent. High severity findings appear highlighted in red in the table.

Low: below USD 1,000.
Medium: from USD 1,000.
High: from USD 10,000.
Critical: from USD 50,000.

How to use the tab

Open SaaS from the menu and go to the Revenue leak tab.
Read the two cards at the top: Open findings, which is the count, and Amount at risk, which is the sum of what is still leaking.
Work the table starting with the highest Severity. The columns are Kind, Amount, Severity and Detected on.
Watch Detected on: the older the finding, the smaller the chance of recovering it, because the billing period may already be closed.
Take each finding to whoever owns the subject: unbilled usage and subscriptions with no invoice go to finance, discount beyond authority and renewals with no uplift go to sales.

Example: The queue shows 7 open findings and USD 63,400 at risk. The first is Unbilled usage of USD 41,000, high severity, detected on March 12: the customer consumed 82,000 units above the 50,000 included and the overage was never invoiced. The second is Discount beyond authority of USD 2,200, medium severity: the discount was 25% when the authority allowed 18%, and the finding records only the 7 points of excess.

💡 A leak found in March is money. A leak found in the annual audit is a story. That is why this is a queue with an owner and not a report: the value of a finding falls with time, even though the number on screen stays the same.

Statuses and what happens to a finding

Every finding has a status. Open and confirmed mean the money is still leaking, and those are the ones that add up in Amount at risk. Resolved is what was recovered. False positive is a finding that was investigated and did not hold up. The screen lists open findings by default, which is the queue people actually work.

The same problem does not turn into two findings: each detection is recorded with its own key, so the same overage for the same customer in the same period does not duplicate the queue on every new sweep. That matters more than it seems, because a queue that duplicates itself stops being used within weeks.

Limits and common questions

The screen says No open leak: either nothing was detected, or everything that existed has been dealt with.
Amount at risk does not match the sum of the table: the cards count open and confirmed findings, while the table lists the open ones.
Each finding is shown in its own currency. Amounts in different currencies are not added together.
This tab is read only. Recording a finding, confirming it, marking it resolved or marking it a false positive are not done from this screen.
Findings are never deleted when resolved: they leave the open queue and stay on record, which is what makes it possible to measure how much was recovered.

Open this article inside the system →