How do you analyze revenue and billing data in Metabase?
Billing tools like Stripe and Chargebee hold the record of every subscription, invoice, and payment your business runs on. To analyze them in Metabase, you sync the tool into a database, map its objects to a shared revenue model, and build dashboards on top. Metabase has no native connector for these tools, so the sync comes first.
Which tools does this cover?
This pattern applies to subscription billing and payment platforms, including:
- Stripe — subscriptions, invoices, charges, and payment intents
- Chargebee — subscriptions, plans, invoices, and dunning
- Paddle — merchant-of-record subscriptions and transactions, with tax handled for you
- Recurly — subscription management, billing, and dunning
- RevenueCat — mobile in-app subscriptions across the App Store, Google Play, and web
- Stigg — pricing, packaging, and entitlement data behind your plans
- Polar — merchant-of-record billing for developers: subscriptions and one-time products
- Alguna — CPQ and usage-based billing across the quote-to-cash lifecycle
- Zuora — enterprise subscriptions, rate plans, invoices, and revenue recognition
- Maxio — subscription billing plus SaaS metrics (Chargify + SaaSOptics)
- Lago — open-source metering and usage-based billing
- QuickBooks — the accounting system of record: invoices, payments, and AR
Most of these are subscription-billing tools that share an MRR-centric model. A second group are payment processors with a transaction-centric model — volume, success/authorization rate, refunds, disputes, and payouts: PayPal, Square, Adyen, Razorpay, and Dodo Payments. QuickBooks is the accounting layer — it answers invoiced revenue, accounts receivable, and cash-flow questions rather than MRR movement, and it often sits downstream of a billing tool.
What is the shared revenue data model?
Almost every subscription billing tool maps onto these entities. Model them as clean tables, not raw connector JSON:
| Concept | Stripe term | Chargebee term | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer | Customer | Customer | Accounts, LTV, ARPU |
| Subscription | Subscription | Subscription | MRR, active base |
| Plan / price | Price | Plan / item price | Normalizing to monthly |
| Invoice | Invoice | Invoice | Billed amounts, AR |
| Transaction / charge | Charge / payment intent | Transaction | Payments, failures |
| Adjustment | Refund / dispute | Credit note | Net revenue |
The single most important derived table is a monthly MRR model — one row per subscription per month with a normalized monthly amount. With it you can compute MRR movement, churn, retention, and cohorts consistently. Amounts and currencies are the usual traps: normalize the interval to monthly and convert to one reporting currency before anyone trusts a number.
How do you connect a billing tool to Metabase?
Metabase has no native connector for these tools, so the reliable path is a pipeline: sync the tool into a database with a managed connector, dlt, or the API on a schedule, then build durable MRR, churn, and retention dashboards on the modeled tables. See our guide to building a data pipeline for the full walkthrough — free or managed.
See the per-tool setup on the Stripe and Chargebee pages, or the revenue analytics overview for the full pattern.
What can you analyze across billing tools?
- Recurring revenue — MRR, ARR, and net new MRR
- Churn & retention — customer and revenue churn, net revenue retention
- Failed payments — declines, dunning recovery, involuntary churn
- Unit economics — LTV, ARPU, and payback
- Cohorts — revenue retention and expansion by signup cohort
Which dashboards should you build?
- MRR / ARR — recurring revenue and its monthly movement
- Churn & retention — gross/net retention and churn breakdown
- Subscriptions — active base, plan mix, trials, and conversion
- Failed payments / dunning — declines, recovery, and at-risk revenue
- Cohort revenue — retention and LTV by signup cohort