Most founders build their first one wrong. They track vanity metrics (total signups, page views, social followers) instead of the numbers investors ask about in term sheets. By the time they realize the gap, they're scrambling to reconstruct historical data from three different tools 48 hours before a board meeting.
This is what to track, how to structure it, and how to stop rebuilding it from scratch every month.
The Metrics That Actually Belong in the Dashboard
The Y Combinator standard application asks for MRR, growth rate, and active users. Sequoia's internal due diligence template adds CAC, LTV, and net revenue retention. Those are the right filters. If a metric isn't being asked for in a funding conversation or a board deck, it probably belongs in an operational report—not the executive dashboard.
Revenue metrics form the core. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) are the primary signals for any subscription business. Break MRR into its components: new MRR (from new customers), expansion MRR (upsells), contraction MRR (downgrades), and churned MRR. The net number is what investors see. The breakdown is what tells you why it moved.
Efficiency metrics tell you whether growth is sustainable. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers acquired in a period—typically monthly or quarterly. LTV (lifetime value) is average revenue per account divided by your monthly churn rate. The LTV:CAC ratio should be at least 3:1 for a healthy SaaS business; anything below 2:1 is a warning sign most dashboards don't surface clearly enough.
Health metrics cover burn rate, runway, and churn. Monthly burn is your net cash outflow. Runway is current cash divided by monthly burn—expressed in months, not dollars, because months is what investors hear. Gross revenue churn (percentage of MRR lost to cancellations) and net revenue churn (which accounts for expansion revenue) are different numbers that tell different stories; many dashboards show only one.
How to Structure It in Google Sheets
The cleanest structure for a Google Sheets dashboard is a 3-tab model: a Raw Data tab where you paste or import monthly figures, a Calculations tab where every formula lives, and a Dashboard tab that reads from Calculations and displays nothing but formatted output.
Never put calculations directly in your dashboard tab. When you do, you end up with a sheet where some cells are hardcoded, some are formulas, and nobody—including you—can tell which is which six months later.
A realistic column layout in the Raw Data tab looks like this:
| Month | New Customers | Churned Customers | MRR | S&M Spend | Cash Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-01 | 47 | 3 | 41200 | 18500 | 380000 |
| 2026-02 | 52 | 5 | 45800 | 21000 | 362000 |
| 2026-03 | 61 | 4 | 51300 | 24000 | 341000 |
From there, your Calculations tab derives everything else. CAC for February is =B3/(B3+C3)*E3/B3 isn't right—CAC is simply =E3/B3 (S&M spend divided by new customers). LTV requires knowing your average contract value and churn rate. If you're pulling MRR from a billing system like Stripe, the Stripe Dashboard exports monthly summaries as CSV; paste those directly into Raw Data.
The formulas for burn rate and runway:
=D3-D2 // Monthly burn (negative = burn, positive = growth)
=F3/ABS(G3) // Runway in months (Cash / Monthly Burn)
=(D3-D2)/D2 // MoM MRR growth rate
=(C3/D2)*100 // Gross churn rate %
As of March 2026, Google Sheets supports ARRAYFORMULA for applying these across entire columns without dragging formulas down—useful when your Raw Data tab grows month over month without requiring formula maintenance.
The Columns Most Dashboards Skip
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the metric that separates good SaaS businesses from great ones. An NRR above 100% means existing customers are expanding faster than they're churning—you'd grow even if you acquired zero new customers. The formula: (Starting MRR + Expansion MRR - Contraction MRR - Churned MRR) / Starting MRR. According to Bessemer Venture Partners' State of the Cloud report, top-quartile public SaaS companies have NRR above 120%.
Months to Recover CAC is rarely shown but always calculated by investors. It's simply CAC / (ARPU * Gross Margin %). If it takes you 18 months to recover the cost of acquiring a customer, and your average contract is month-to-month, that's a structural problem. Showing this metric proactively—alongside a plan to improve it—demonstrates financial literacy.
Cohort retention doesn't fit neatly in a single-number dashboard, but a 6-column cohort table (Month 0 through Month 5 retention rates for each acquisition cohort) fits in 10 rows and tells a story no single churn number can.
Building a Dashboard That Updates Itself
The friction in most startup dashboards isn't the formulas—it's the monthly ritual of exporting data from five tools, reformatting it, and pasting it into the right cells. That process takes 2-3 hours a month at minimum, and it introduces errors every time someone pastes into the wrong row.
ModelMonkey connects Google Sheets to external data sources directly. Ask it to "pull last month's revenue and new customer count from Stripe" or "import this month's S&M spend from our QuickBooks export," and it creates a refreshable data connection inside the sheet. The dashboard stops being a monthly project and starts being a live view.
If you're working from CSV exports rather than live connections, the faster fix is getting the Raw Data tab structure right once—clean column headers, consistent date formats, no merged cells—so that pasting new data in is a 30-second operation rather than a formatting exercise.
What a Good Dashboard Actually Looks Like
The Dashboard tab should show exactly this, formatted for a founder's Monday morning review:
- Current month MRR and MoM % change
- ARR (MRR × 12)
- Cash balance and runway in months
- Gross and net churn rates
- CAC (trailing 3-month average)
- LTV and LTV:CAC ratio
- NRR (trailing 12 months)
- MoM growth rate (and a 6-month sparkline)
That's 10 numbers and 1 chart. Anything more and it stops being a dashboard and becomes a report.
Color-code the health indicators: green when LTV:CAC is above 3, yellow between 2-3, red below 2. Same for runway (green > 18 months, yellow 12-18, red < 12). Conditional formatting in Sheets handles this in 3 clicks per cell.
The Google Sheets for Startups piece covers the broader model structure for financial projections if you need to connect this dashboard to a full operating model.