Handoff builds its B2B analytics on raw subscription data

THE CHALLENGE

Store analytics are built for B2C; Handoff needed B2B

Handoff takes care to make sure every customer has the right plan: an account management team works directly with customers, even after they sign up via the app stores. That care added a layer of complexity most consumer-app analytics don't have, for two reasons.

The first came from Handoff's own sales motion: a customer might sign up on mobile and later move to a custom plan paid via the web. When Handoff's sales team made that switch manually, the app-store subscription was canceled and logged as churn, while the new web plan logged as a new customer.

The second came from something simpler: Handoff is a B2B business, and one business can hold many subscriptions at once. Store reporting is built around the individual: one person, one subscription. But a five-person crew might start on a plan sized for five seats, then add three more seats a few months later as it hires. To an app store, that looks like new sign-ups. To Handoff, it's the same customer growing.

The result was that MRR didn't match reality: it looked like customers were leaving and being replaced by new customers, when Handoff was actually growing by improving upselling to existing customers.

THE SOLUTION

Handoff built its own B2B analytics on RevenueCat data

"Instead of trying to glue everything together from different stores, RevenueCat maps all subscriptions from different sources onto the same customer. That's our source of truth, and we go from there."
— Felipe Miquelim, Data Engineer, Handoff

RevenueCat already resolves subscriber identity across platforms, so purchases on the App Store, Google Play and Stripe all attach to the same subscriber. Grouping those subscribers into businesses was something Handoff had to add. So Handoff built its own logic on RevenueCat's Scheduled Data Exports, a full record of every transaction, to map subscribers to businesses and apply its own rules on top. That logic does four things:

1. Tie every payment to one business, even when Stripe, Apple and Google each issue their own IDs for individual subscribers.
2. Label a plan change as an upgrade, not a churn followed by a new customer.
3. Convert prices from three different currencies into one MRR figure.
4. Reduce a business's full subscription history down to whichever plan is currently active.

Handoff also uses Entitlements to keep plan changes simple. "In RevenueCat, adding a new pricing plan is like a one-minute job. We create the new entitlement, detail the permissions, and then it will just appear in our pricing list or on our website in real time," says Pablo Santos, Head of Engineering.

THE IMPACT

Every finance number at Handoff starts with RevenueCat

Handoff's sales motion is more complex than that of most consumer apps, and RevenueCat was flexible enough to handle it. This means:

• Months of misclassified MRR fixed in a day. A pricing edge case had been miscounting subscriptions for months. Because Handoff owns the logic behind every number, it fixed the rule once and reran it across its whole history in a day.
• Daily analytics teams can plan against. Handoff checks its ARR, reactivations and churn daily, and every team in the company makes decisions on those numbers. Pablo credits RevenueCat with making both those decisions and the engineering behind them faster: "We're a data-driven company, and RevenueCat helps us make daily business decisions on our key KPIs: ARR, reactivations, or churn."
• Unified numbers the support team can trust. Customer support turns to RevenueCat as the go-to place for subscription questions, expirations, or anything that looks off on an account, since everything lives in one place. They can still check Stripe or the app store directly when they need to see a raw payment itself.

"All of our finance dashboards and KPIs are data from RevenueCat. We don't consume any other sources."
— Felipe Miquelim, Data Engineer, Handoff