Retention tells you whether the customers you already had are staying and growing. A general ledger was never built to answer that, so AI.FO labels the read a proxy and says so.
AI.FO team / 2026-08-10
For the customer cohort a business already had at the start of a period, is its recurring revenue growing or leaking? Customers won during the period are excluded on purpose, because new logos cannot repair an installed base that leaks.
That framing is the whole point of a retention read: it isolates the health of the base you already earned from the growth you added on top of it.
Net and gross retention need recurring revenue attributed to individual customers over time, which a general ledger does not record. Where the ingestion cannot attribute revenue per customer, the signal is reported as not applicable rather than estimated.
That is what a labeled proxy means here: the read is a stand-in for something the source data does not carry directly, and the label is not cosmetic. When the attribution is not there, the signal says so instead of dressing an estimate up as a measurement.
A book can post healthy net revenue retention while its gross retention leaks, because upsell to a handful of accounts masks churn across the rest of the base. Gross retention counts only what the business kept, never what it grew, so it exposes the leak that net can hide. Reading both, and labeling both as proxies, is how the library keeps an honest read from turning into an overconfident one.