modeling-revenue-metrics

Turns payments and subscriptions — from Stripe or from purchase events your product sends — into the revenue numbers a business runs on, such as monthly recurring revenue and revenue per customer, built on the revenue tables PostHog already keeps.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

Chart monthly recurring revenue month by month, not just today's snapshot.
Report gross revenue by month, product or customer in a single currency.
Tie revenue to individual people or customer accounts by linking Stripe customers to PostHog users.
Explain why recurring revenue shows empty while gross revenue is filled in for event-based revenue.
Keep test accounts and internal purchases out of the revenue totals.
Build the same revenue tables in dbt, supplying your own exchange rates.

NOT FOR

Recomputing revenue from raw Stripe tables — the managed revenue views already handle that correctly.
Building on the standalone Revenue dashboard — work from PostHog's managed revenue tables instead.

This is a saved copy of the skill's SKILL.md instructions. It may differ from the upstream file or the version you install.

In this document (7)

Modeling revenue metrics

Turn payment/subscription data into durable revenue models. Read modeling-warehouse-foundations first for the view-vs-dbt decision, the view-* workflow, and convertCurrency(); this skill is the revenue-specific layer on top. Metric definitions live in references/revenue-metric-definitions.md; copy-paste recipes in references/posthog/ and references/dbt/.

Step 1 — find where revenue lives

Revenue reaches PostHog two ways; both feed the same managed revenue_analytics_* views:

A payment platform as a warehouse source — Stripe today (Chargebee/Polar/RevenueCat coming). Best when the business runs on a billing platform. Connect via setting-up-a-data-warehouse-source.
Custom revenue events — you send events (e.g. purchase_completed) with a revenue property. Best when there's no supported platform or you already track revenue in-product.

If neither exists yet, use suggesting-data-imports to recommend a source. In dbt, the equivalent is staging whichever billing tables landed in the warehouse.

Step 2 — model on the managed views, not raw tables

PostHog auto-generates a curated set of views per source. Do not re-derive revenue from raw Stripe tables — the managed views already handle deferred-revenue recognition, currency, and a stable schema.

Discover the exact names (they're prefixed by source, e.g. stripe.<prefix>.…, plus a cross-source revenue_analytics.all.…):

SELECT table_name FROM system.information_schema.tables WHERE table_name ILIKE '%revenue_analytics%'

Managed view	Grain	Use for
`revenue_item` (start here)	1 / invoice line item	Gross revenue, monthly recurring revenue, revenue by product/customer/period. Implements deferred revenue + currency.
`mrr`	1 / (customer, subscription)	Live snapshot of current MRR — not a time series.
`customer`	1 / customer	`dim_customer`: email, country, cohort, metadata.
`subscription`	1 / subscription	Subscription state for churn/expansion logic.
`charge`	1 / charge	Raw charges; prefer `revenue_item` unless you specifically need charges.
`product`	1 / product	Product dimension.

Key revenue_item columns: amount (already converted to the project base currency), currency (that base currency), original_amount / original_currency (as charged), is_recurring, customer_id, subscription_id, product_id, group_0_key…group_4_key (B2B account keys), timestamp.

Rules before you model (revenue gotchas)

MRR is empty without a subscription config. For event-based revenue, MRR only populates when a subscription property is configured. Empty MRR + populated gross revenue is expected behaviour, not a bug — say so instead of "fixing" it.
The mrr managed view is a current snapshot, not history ("MRR at the current time"). For MRR over time, sum recurring amount per month from revenue_item (see the recipe), or materialize a monthly snapshot of the mrr view on a schedule.
amount is already in base currency. Use it directly for reporting. Only call convertCurrency(original_currency, 'XXX', original_amount, timestamp) when you need a different target currency, or when working from raw events.
Link revenue to people via metadata. Person/group-level revenue needs posthog_person_distinct_id metadata on the Stripe customer (or the person join). Without it, revenue is customer-level only.
Don't build on the Revenue dashboard — it's being retired (~2026-06-30). Model against the revenue_analytics_* views and the person/group revenue properties.
Exclude test accounts. Confirm filter_test_accounts behaviour so QA/internal charges don't inflate revenue.

Step 3 — build the model

PostHog: write the HogQL (alias every column), view-create, verify with view-get, then view-materialize the expensive monthly rollups (a daily sync_frequency is usually right for revenue). Recipes: references/posthog/ — mrr_and_arr.sql, gross_revenue_by_month.sql, revenue_by_customer.sql.

dbt: stage the billing source → fct_revenue_item, fct_mrr, dim_customer marts with tests. Recipes: references/dbt/. Note dbt has no convertCurrency() — supply a rate seed.

Then register the model (references/governance.md in foundations): annotate columns and, if MRR/ARR is a headline number, propose it to the semantic layer.

File map

File	Read when
`references/revenue-metric-definitions.md`	Precise definitions: MRR, ARR, gross, new/expansion/contraction/churn, ARPU, LTV.
`references/posthog/`	HogQL view recipes on the managed views.
`references/dbt/`	dbt staging + `fct_`/`dim_` marts + `schema.yml` tests.

Companions

modeling-warehouse-foundations (mechanics), setting-up-a-data-warehouse-source + suggesting-data-imports (get Stripe/revenue data in), modeling-dimension-tables (currency/plan dimensions), querying-posthog-data (HogQL + the semantic-layer metric check).

This skill ships inside the PostHog AI Plugin. Listed package contents include 3 slash commands, 1 agent, hooks and an MCP server. Installed components and skill versions may vary by AI tool.

Install the whole plugin

This route installs the posthog plugin package selected for your AI tool.

Claude Code

Add PostHog's marketplace, then install the plugin

Run both lines in a terminal. They install PostHog's posthog plugin: this skill, PostHog's other skills, and a connection to PostHog's hosted MCP server.

claude plugin marketplace add PostHog/ai-plugin

02
```
claude plugin install posthog@posthog
```

Installation and loading

The plugin installs for you in every project and loads the next time you start Claude Code, or after /reload-plugins in an open session.
To connect your PostHog account, start claude, type /mcp, select plugin:posthog:posthog and follow the browser prompts.

Good to know

The plugin includes PostHog's session-capture hook; PostHog's README says it sends sessions to LLM Analytics only when POSTHOG_LLMA_CC_ENABLED=true and POSTHOG_API_KEY are both set.
If you use the separate posthog-telemetry plugin, PostHog says to keep only one of the two, because both register the same hook.
On a self-hosted PostHog, this route's MCP connection won't reach your instance: the plugin's config is fixed to https://mcp.posthog.com/mcp, which routes to PostHog's US or EU region. POSTHOG_MCP_URL works only for the Gemini CLI extension.

Install without the plugin (incomplete)

What's missing

Installing just this skill adds only its own folder. Its instructions also call for other plugin components, such as shared scripts, reference files or other skills, which aren't included. Installing the whole plugin avoids this gap.

Run this outside your AI tool, using Node.js 22.20.0 or newer. Skills CLI 1.7.2 skips skill selection; prompts cancel installation without an interactive terminal. If choosing Project when asked about installation scope, open your project's folder before running this.

Install checklist

Check selected tools if a picker appears; Claude Code may be unchecked under Additional agents. ↑/↓ moves, Space toggles selections, Enter confirms.
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If asked, choose Symlink (Recommended) for shared files or Copy to all agents for separate copies; review the summary before confirming installation.
Install the find-skills skill? defaults to Yes, adding another skill for all projects. Choose No if you don't want that extra installation.

Skills CLI 1.7.2 sends install data to skills.sh by default, including the source, skill names, target tools and file details; GitHub sources are reported only when GitHub confirms the repository is public, while other remote sources can also be reported. Confirmed-public GitHub sources also trigger a security-audit request. Before installing, set the environment variable DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to disable both.

npx skills add posthog/ai-plugin --skill "modeling-revenue-metrics" --full-depth

After installing for Claude Code, open it in the installation project if you chose Project; Global makes the skill available across projects on this computer. Once Claude Code loads the skill, its description helps Claude decide when to use it.

If installation created a top-level skills folder that did not exist when your Claude Code session started, run /reload-skills in that session. Run it again after later changes in that folder.

View on GitHub

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