Jump to a chapter: MRR cohort report · NRR cohort report · MRR by product · Why we show previews · NetSuite · MCP server · MCP security · Questions from the chat
At the Drilldown on October 29, Keith Palmer, our CTO and co-founder, asked Claude for one customer's balance, lifetime value, and a link to update their payment method. Claude pulled all three out of a ChargeOver account. That was an early version of an MCP server, one of two previews Keith showed. The other was a NetSuite integration that syncs customers, subscriptions, invoices, and payments as they happen.
Chris Dub hosted and opened with three reports that are already in your account: MRR cohort, NRR cohort, and MRR by product. The Drilldown is a monthly hour for customers, and the previews are there on purpose. A NetSuite sync looks different after the people who would run it have watched it work and said what's missing, and it costs far less to change before launch. The three reports started the same way, with customers writing in to ask for them.
Below is each piece with the reason behind it, followed by the questions from the chat. The full recording is at the top of the page.
MRR cohort report
Total MRR tells you where you are. It doesn't tell you whether the customers you signed in March are still paying what they started at, or when a group starts to slip. The MRR cohort report does: it groups customers by the month they started and shows each group's MRR month by month from there.
Chris walked through how to read it, since the shape looks odd at first. The left column is each group's starting month. Read a row from left to right: the first cell is the starting month, the next is one month later, then two, and so on. The table narrows into a staircase because a group that started in October 2025 has a year of cells and a group that started last month has one.
NRR cohort report
A good month of new sales can hide customers shrinking underneath it. Net revenue retention (NRR) looks only at customers you already had. Each group starts at 100%, upgrades and usage push it up, and downgrades and cancellations pull it down. For example, a group that started at $10,000 a month, added $2,500 through upgrades and metered usage, and lost $1,500 to downgrades and cancellations is at $11,000, or 110%. Anything over 100% means the group is paying you more than when it started.
The NRR cohort report gives each signup period its own row, so you can see which months' customers have held up and which haven't. In Chris's demo account, June and August are empty because nobody signed up in those months. The September customer is the pattern to hope for: a flat rate at signup, then metered usage billed on top, so their NRR climbs well past 100%.
MRR by product
When MRR moves, the next question is which plan moved it. The product MRR drill-down answers that for any month. Pick a month, filter to a single product, and you see every customer, subscription, invoice, and billing cycle behind that product's MRR, along with the total.
Chris uses it to find which plans contribute the most MRR and whether that revenue comes from flat fees or metered usage. The Columns button in the top right adds a meter column, and it can also show subscription custom fields, such as a PO number or a gate code.
Why we show previews before they're finished
Keith described the loop he has tried to keep since the first version of ChargeOver: collect feedback from the people using it, then build what helps them grow their own businesses. The reports above came out of that loop. Customers asked for better MRR reporting, for NRR and MRR cohorts, and for MRR by product, and those became the three Chris showed. Over the last few months the same loop produced faster search and a run of updates to our Salesforce and HubSpot integrations.
The previews that follow are the next batch. If you have a request of your own, such as a missing metric, a dashboard that doesn't exist, late payments that take up too much of your week, or reconciliation that eats an afternoon, the most useful version includes what it would do for your business. "We need this because it takes us from Y dollars to Z over the next six months" tells us what to build and in what order.
NetSuite integration preview
QuickBooks fits most small and mid-sized businesses, and ChargeOver has synced with it for years. Companies that keep growing eventually reach the point where they need a larger accounting system, and for many of them that's NetSuite. We're building the integration so that move doesn't also mean leaving your billing system.
Keith showed an early version. It works like our QuickBooks and Xero integrations, and the goal is real time. He created a customer and a contact in ChargeOver, switched to NetSuite, and both were already there. Subscriptions, invoices, payments, write-offs, credits, and refunds follow the same path, with nobody re-entering anything. It makes no difference whether a sales rep creates the customer, they sign up through a hosted signup page, or an AI agent creates them.
Keith warned there may be kinks, since it's an early demo. We're aiming to ship before the end of the year, and we want to talk to two groups: companies that use NetSuite today and can help us test it, and QuickBooks customers who can see the day they'll need to move.
MCP server preview
MCP is the standard that lets AI tools such as Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Cursor connect to other software. Our MCP server is how they connect to ChargeOver, so you can ask the agent you already use about your billing data instead of building a report or exporting a CSV.
Keith's demo ran in Claude. He asked for customer 4 with their balance, lifetime value, and payment-method update link, and Claude retrieved all three from ChargeOver. He then asked how many invoices had been issued that day for one product and got the count along with the invoice. A question like "what was this product's MRR this month compared with the same month last year" is the obvious next use.
Customers have asked us for two things. One is reporting and analysis on billing data. The other is for an agent to do something: create an invoice, retry a payment, or email a customer a request to update their payment method. Keith also described a support chatbot that answers billing questions without a person involved. We're targeting the first two, with the same end-of-year aim as NetSuite. If your team already uses agents, tell us what you'd hand to one.
MCP server security
Once an agent can retry payments or create invoices, the question becomes what it's allowed to touch. Someone in the chat asked about security, and Keith walked through how the server will handle it.
MCP will be a setting your administrator can switch off, in which case no agent can connect to your account. When it's on, you choose which users may connect an agent. Whoever connects one picks its permissions from a fine-grained list, similar to ChargeOver roles, so an agent that only needs to read customer data can be limited to that, with no access to invoices, subscriptions, or actions. An agent never gets more permission than the person who connected it, and it can get less. These controls will be in place at launch, and we'll document them.
Questions from the chat
The chat filled up during the demos. These are the questions that weren't tied to one account, with what we answered.
Getting more customers onto ACH
A customer wanted more people paying by ACH instead of card, because card fees add up. With Stripe, a customer has to verify their bank account before the first ACH payment, and plenty of people add a bank account, never finish verifying, and pay by card instead. It also stretches out closing a sale, since the customer can't pay until verification is done.
Of the roughly 60 payment gateways ChargeOver connects to, Stripe is the only one that makes the customer do this. The rest verify in the background. Customers who want ACH without that step usually keep Stripe for cards and connect a second gateway for ACH. Plaid and Stripe's newer verification options could remove the step inside Stripe too, and we expect to build something around them.
Customizable dashboards
A customer asked whether the dashboard will become customizable. It's a common request, and some work on it is already done, but we can't give a date. You can also build the dashboard you want today: AI-enabled dashboard tools connect to ChargeOver and can combine it with Asana, Notion, and other tools on one page, and the MCP server should make that easier. If you tell Chris or Keith which numbers you'd put on yours, that shapes what we build.
Dunning by decline reason and date
Two people asked for smarter dunning, meaning retries on a chosen weekday and different handling depending on why a payment was declined. A closed account and a gateway error shouldn't get the same retry schedule.
Some of that exists today. A hard decline such as a closed account can be set to stop retrying, while a soft decline keeps retrying on a schedule, and other actions can fire based on the result. Chris and Keith agreed the setup is hard to find, so we're improving the documentation, and our success team will configure it with anyone who asks. Chris also suggested varying who gets notified by decline type, including by text message.
Next is the ability to set a specific retry date. A tool or an AI agent could then read a customer's payment history and the decline reason and pick the date. Retrying on a fixed weekday needs more design work on our end.
Reconciling payments across gateways
Keith asked the audience a question. If you reconcile payments from several gateways (NMI, Authorize.net, Stripe, QuickBooks Payments) against ChargeOver and your bank, you know the pattern: the processor's batch says one amount, the bank deposit says another, and someone spends an afternoon finding the difference. One attendee said they do this by hand today. We'd like to talk with anyone who does, especially accountants and bookkeepers, about what would make it faster.
Send us your use cases
If you use NetSuite, if your team already works with AI agents and your billing data, or if reconciliation takes too long, write to support@chargeover.com or use the live chat. Say what you need and what it would change for your business.
We'd also like a customer-led segment in a future Drilldown, where a customer shows how they run a specific part of ChargeOver. Tell us if that's you. We'll send the date for the next Drilldown once it's set.
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