At a glance
The total amount that flowed through Recharge subscription rebills + checkout in the period, gross of refunds, gross of payment-processor fees, gross of disputes. This is “subscription billing volume orchestrated by Recharge”, not “money the bank deposited”. Crucially: Recharge is a subscription-billing layer that sits on top of Shopify, it is NOT a payment processor. Recharge tells Shopify Payments / Stripe / Authorize.Net / Braintree to charge the customer’s saved token; the actual money movement happens on the underlying processor.
| What it counts | Every successful charge in the Recharge /charges API where status = SUCCESS, summed by total_price (in currency). Includes: scheduled subscription rebills (the bulk of Recharge volume), one-time products bundled into a subscription order, prepaid plan upfront charges, and Recharge Checkout one-time purchases (where Checkout is enabled). |
| Platform binding | Shopify-native only. Recharge does not run on BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, custom carts. If the merchant is not on Shopify (or Shopify Plus), Recharge does not exist for them. This is the single most important context for reconciliation. |
| API endpoint | GET /charges on the Recharge Admin API (2021-11 or later). API key authentication via X-Recharge-Access-Token. Cross-referenced with /orders (the resulting Shopify order) and /subscriptions (the parent contract). |
| VAT / tax treatment | Inclusive. Recharge inherits whatever tax inclusivity Shopify computed at the time of subscription creation. Tax is part of total_price, not a separate line. The figure is the customer-charged amount. Tax handling is upstream in Shopify Tax / Avalara / TaxJar. |
| Currency | Multi-currency where Shopify Markets is enabled. Each charge sums in its own currency (USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD primarily). Recharge supports Shopify’s presentment currencies. No FX is applied here, GBP and EUR rebills sit alongside each other arithmetically. |
| Fees / processing cost | Gross. Two fee layers are NOT deducted: (1) Recharge platform fee (typically 1.0% + USD 0.10 per transaction on Standard, 0.5% + USD 0.07 on Pro), and (2) the underlying processor fee (Shopify Payments 2.9% + 30c, Stripe 2.9% + 30c). See rec_refund_volume and net cards for post-fee views. |
| Refunds | NOT deducted. Refunds initiated via Recharge or via Shopify Admin are tracked separately on /charges/{id}/refunds and counted in rec_refund_volume. A fully refunded USD 50 rebill still contributes USD 50 here. |
| Disputes / chargebacks | NOT deducted. Disputes happen on the underlying processor (Shopify Payments / Stripe), not on Recharge. They surface back to Recharge as chargeback events on the charge but are tracked separately in rec_chargeback_rate. |
| Failed / declined payments | Excluded. Only status = SUCCESS charges are summed. status IN (ERROR, CHARGEBACK, REFUNDED, PARTIALLY_REFUNDED) retried by Recharge dunning; failed-final attempts feed rec_decline_rate and Recharge’s involuntary churn metrics. |
| Subscription vs one-time mix | Both included. The bulk (typically 80, 95% by revenue) is recurring subscription rebills via charge_type = recurring; the rest is checkout (Recharge Checkout one-time / first-order) and child_swap (mid-cycle plan changes). |
| Payout timing | Per charge created date (when Recharge processed the rebill), NOT per Shopify payout. Recharge does not handle settlement, the underlying processor does, and settlement timing depends on Shopify Payments / Stripe rules. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (default 30D vs the prior 30D). |
| Alert trigger | drop >15% vsP, driven by sentiment_key: revenue_trend. Most subscription-volume drops are dunning waves, plan-switch cliffs, or Black-Friday signup-cohort billing on a single day. |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Recharge data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US-headquartered DTC supplement brand (“Daily Greens Co”) runs an Athletic Greens-style monthly subscription on Shopify Plus + Recharge Pro. Single SKU at USD 79/month, 14% annual prepaid plan tier at USD 790/year, build-a-box add-ons for collagen and vitamin D. The 30-day window covers 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26.| Charge cohort | Charges | Avg total_price | Currency | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly rebills, US customers | 18,420 | USD 79.00 | USD | SUCCESS | Core volume, 76% of total |
| Monthly rebills, UK customers (Shopify Markets) | 2,140 | GBP 65.00 | GBP | SUCCESS | UK Shopify Markets storefront |
| Annual prepaid renewals | 312 | USD 790.00 | USD | SUCCESS | One-shot upfront, prepays 12 deliveries |
| Build-a-box add-ons (one-time on rebill) | 4,210 | USD 18.00 | USD | SUCCESS | Collagen, vitamin D adds inside the subscription order |
| Recharge Checkout first-orders (free shipping promo) | 1,840 | USD 79.00 | USD | SUCCESS | New subscriber acquisitions on the period |
| Failed / dunning-in-progress | 1,210 | - | USD | ERROR | Insufficient funds, expired card, retried over 7 days |
| Refunded rebills | 280 | USD 79.00 | USD | REFUNDED | Customer cancellation refunds |
| Chargeback cases | 18 | USD 79.00 | USD | CHARGEBACK | Friendly-fraud disputes on Shopify Payments |
- The prepaid annual cohort skews monthly volume. The 312 prepaid renewals (USD 246k) all hit on the customer’s annual anniversary, so a month with a heavy launch-anniversary cohort can read 15, 25% higher than a “normal” month. Daily Greens launched in April 23 with a big push, so April every year carries the prepaid bulge. Use the trend card with year-over-year overlay to see the cohort shape.
- Build-a-box adds inflate transaction count without inflating subscriber count. 4,210 collagen / vitamin D adds across 18,420 monthly subscribers means ~23% attach rate. Recharge counts each add-on line as part of the parent charge, not as a separate charge, so this card’s charge count reflects subscribers, but
total_pricereflects (subscription + adds). - Recharge Checkout first-orders count here. New subscriber acquisition through Recharge Checkout (where the merchant routes the first purchase via Recharge to capture the subscription contract on the same checkout) contributes 1,840 charges of USD 79. On Athletic Greens-style funnels with high paid acquisition this can be 5, 15% of monthly volume; on subscription-renewals-only setups it’s near zero.
- GBP and USD sit side by side. Daily Greens’ UK Shopify Markets storefront takes GBP from UK buyers. This card sums GBP separately, no FX. If the merchant wants a single USD-equivalent rolled-up number, the FX-converted view is in the trend / rolled-up dashboard cards using daily mid-market rates; this card preserves the per-currency truth.
- Refunds (USD 22.1k) are NOT subtracted here. Customer cancellations refunded in the same period still contribute to gross volume. The “net volume” math above is what most CFOs actually want; this card is gross by design so you can see the raw billing engine throughput separately.
- The 1,210 failed charges are NOT here, but Recharge dunning will recover ~30, 50% over 3, 7 days. Recovered ones flip to
SUCCESSon retry and start counting in the next refresh. The recovery rate is on the involuntary-churn / decline-recovery cards.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why merchants reach for it next to Total Volume |
|---|---|
rec_volume_trend | This metric trended daily; lets you spot the prepaid-anniversary cohort bulge versus a structural drop. |
rec_avg_transaction | Volume divided by charges, the AOV view. Important for catching plan-mix shifts (annual vs monthly). |
rec_total_transactions | The denominator-aware reading. Subscriber count proxy if subscription-only. |
rec_refund_volume | The USD figure to subtract for net-of-refunds. Cancellation refunds dominate. |
rec_decline_rate | The complement of success: what got rejected by the underlying processor and entered dunning. |
rec_chargeback_rate | The friendly-fraud signal on subscription rebills. Recharge sees these as CHARGEBACK events. |
Shopify total_revenue | The upstream commerce view. Recharge volume should be a subset; non-subscription Shopify orders sit outside Recharge. |
| Stripe / Shopify Payments total volume | The processor-side reading. Recharge is the orchestrator, the processor sees the same charges plus all non-Recharge Shopify orders. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Recharge merchant portal: Sign in at admin.rechargepayments.com and the closest comparable view is:Recharge Admin → Analytics → Revenue (filter by date range; “Charge status: Success”)The headline tile on the Analytics overview also shows period revenue. For the per-source split (recurring vs Checkout vs prepaid), use Analytics → Subscriptions → Revenue by source. The legacy reporting view at
/dashboard on older accounts shows the same numbers under “Total processed”.
Other Recharge views that look similar but answer different questions:
- Subscriptions → All (the contract list). This is active subscription contracts, NOT charges processed; counts contracts, not money.
- Customers → MRR view. Recurring revenue normalised to monthly run-rate, NOT the period’s actual volume. Use this card for what was charged; use MRR for what’s contracted.
- Orders → All. The Shopify-order view of each charge. One-to-one with charges except where multiple charges merge into a single Shopify order (rare, edge case for build-a-box).
- Bundles → Reporting. Volume from Recharge Bundles only, a subset of this card.
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Recharge admin renders in your store’s configured timezone (usually US/Pacific or US/Eastern for US merchants, Europe/London for UK). Vortex IQ uses UTC for period boundaries. For a 30-day window the gap averages out; for “today” / “yesterday” the offset matters. |
| Failed-then-recovered charges | Theirs may show recovered, ours snapshot at sync time | A failed charge that Recharge dunning retries successfully on day 4 will eventually show as a SUCCESS, but if our sync ran on day 2 it will be excluded then included on next sync. Catches up within 24, 48 hours. |
| Refund timing | Theirs may net retroactively | Recharge admin sometimes shows post-refund net by default on certain analytics tiles; this card is gross by definition. Toggle the “Gross” view in Recharge analytics to match. |
| Multi-currency presentation | Ours stacks per-currency, theirs offers a USD-rolled view | Recharge admin offers a “Convert to store currency” toggle using daily FX. This card preserves native-currency arithmetic. |
| API rate limits + pagination | Ours marginally lower for very high-volume merchants | Recharge API caps at 40 requests/second on the Pro plan; the engine paginates 250 charges per page. Sub-2-minute lag at the freshest edge. |
| Refresh lag | Ours lower for “today” | Sync is periodic; the most recent ~5-15 min of charges may not be in yet. Yesterday and earlier are caught up. |
| Comparison | Expected relationship | When divergence is legitimate |
|---|---|---|
rec_total_volume ↔ shopify.total_revenue | recharge ≤ shopify | Shopify total includes non-subscription orders (one-time storefront purchases, gift cards, manual orders). For a subscription-first brand expect Recharge to be 60, 90% of Shopify total; for a hybrid brand 20, 50%. |
rec_total_volume ↔ Shopify Payments / Stripe gross volume | recharge ≤ processor_volume | The underlying processor sees Recharge charges plus all non-subscription Shopify orders. A pure subscription brand’s Recharge ÷ processor ratio is a useful health check. |
rec_total_volume ↔ bigcommerce.total_revenue / adobe_commerce.total_revenue | N/A | Not applicable. Recharge is Shopify-only. If a merchant somehow has both a Recharge account and a non-Shopify storefront, the two are entirely separate businesses on different stacks. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Reconciliation questions (“why doesn’t this match Recharge Admin / my bank?”) are answered in the Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard section above. Below are the questions that aren’t reconciliation.“Is Recharge a payment processor?” No, and this is the single most common merchant misconception. Recharge is a subscription billing layer that sits on top of Shopify. It tells the underlying processor (Shopify Payments, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Braintree, Mollie depending on store config) to charge the customer’s saved token on a schedule. Recharge handles: subscription contract state, dunning logic, customer portal, plan changes, swaps, prepaid plans, build-a-box, bundles, gift subscriptions, churn analytics. The actual money movement happens on the processor. Practically: declines come from the processor; settlement timing comes from the processor; chargebacks come from the processor. Recharge orchestrates. “Can we use Recharge with BigCommerce / Adobe Commerce / WooCommerce?” No. Recharge is exclusively Shopify and Shopify Plus. There is no BigCommerce installation, no Adobe Commerce module, no WooCommerce plugin. If you’re considering migrating off Shopify, you cannot bring Recharge with you, you would need to re-platform to a Shopify-agnostic subscription billing layer (Recurly, Chargebee, Stripe Billing, Bold Subscriptions). The Shopify-native nature is Recharge’s biggest competitive moat AND the biggest lock-in concern for merchants. “Why did monthly volume drop suddenly when nothing else changed?” Three usual suspects on Recharge specifically. (1) Plan-mix shift. A campaign that converted 1,000 subscribers to annual prepaid pulled 12 months of revenue forward; volume in subsequent months will drop because those subscribers are now silent for 11 months. (2) Dunning wave. A wave of expired cards (often Q1 after the calendar year-end card refreshes) puts a chunk of charges into ERROR status until customers update card-on-file. (3) Cohort billing day. If you launched the brand on a single day historically, all those subscribers’ anniversaries fall on roughly the same day each month; a single-day outage on that day reads as a daily volume cliff. “What’s the difference between Recharge Pro and Recharge Standard for this metric?” The metric definition is identical. The fee structure differs (Pro: 0.5% + USD 0.07 per transaction with a higher monthly minimum; Standard: 1.0% + USD 0.10). For volume reading you don’t see this on this card because the figure is gross of Recharge fees. You only feel it in net-of-fee cards. “My subscriber count went up but volume went down, what gives?” Almost always plan-mix. Check the average transaction card. If new subscribers are coming in on a smaller “starter” SKU or on a discounted promotional first-rebill, AOV drops faster than subscriber count rises. Build-a-box and bundle merchants see this often when a new lower-priced bundle outsells the flagship. “Recharge Checkout vs upstream Shopify Checkout, which charges count?” Both, if both are routed through Recharge. Recharge Checkout (the merchant routes the first checkout through Recharge to capture the subscription contract on the same purchase) shows up as
charge_type = checkout. Subsequent rebills are charge_type = recurring. If the merchant uses Shopify Checkout for the first order (Recharge “post-purchase upsell” or “checkout-from-Shopify” flow) the first order doesn’t appear here; only the resulting Shopify subscription rebill shows up next month. Confusingly, both are valid Shopify-Recharge integration patterns, the merchant should know which one their store uses.
“Build-a-box add-ons, how are those counted?”
Add-ons (e.g. a vitamin D bottle attached to a monthly Greens subscription) are counted as part of the parent charge’s total_price, not as separate charges. So they inflate total_price but not the charge count. AOV cards reflect this: AOV rises proportionally as add-on attach rate rises.
“Prepaid annual plans, when do they count?”
On the day the upfront annual charge processes. A USD 790 annual prepaid plan contributes USD 790 on day 1, then USD 0 for the next 11 months. The customer receives 12 product shipments but only one charge. For run-rate calculations this distorts month-over-month comparisons; check the trend card with year-over-year overlay (anniversary cohorts smooth over 12 months).
“Gift subscriptions, do they count?”
Yes, on the gifter’s payment instrument at gift-purchase time. Recharge processes the gift as a one-time charge with charge_type = checkout (or as a series of prepaid scheduled charges if the gift is recurring). The recipient’s eventual conversion to paid subscriber after the gift expires shows up as new recurring charges from then on.