At a glance
The day-by-day shape of Recharge subscription billing volume across the period, with vsP (versus prior period) overlay. This is the time-series view of rec_total_volume, used to spot single-day cliffs (cohort billing day outage), week-over-week drift (dunning waves), and structural trends (subscriber growth, plan-mix migration to annual prepaid). Recharge volume has a unique shape because it is heavily concentrated on cohort billing days (the day-of-month each cohort signed up), so daily volatility is much higher than a typical Shopify storefront and needs different reading.
| What it counts | A daily series of SUM(total_price) WHERE status = SUCCESS from the Recharge /charges API, bucketed by processed_at date in the merchant’s configured timezone. Each day in the window is one data point; the prior-period overlay compares to the same day-of-week in the preceding window. |
| Why daily granularity matters on Recharge specifically | Cohort billing concentration. A merchant who launched on the 15th of the month sees a billing peak on the 15th (and minor peaks on subsequent monthly anniversaries from later cohorts). Hourly granularity within the day is also concentrated, Recharge typically batches scheduled rebills in the early-morning UTC window (00:00, 04:00 UTC) for merchants on US/Pacific timezone. |
| Currency | Per-currency series. Multi-currency Shopify Markets stores see one trend line per currency (USD primary, GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD secondary). No FX is applied; each currency trends on its own axis. |
| Fees / processing cost | Gross. Same scope as rec_total_volume. |
| Refunds | NOT deducted on the trend. A refund issued on day 18 against a charge on day 12 does not retroactively dip day 12; refunds carry their own trend. |
| Disputes / chargebacks | NOT deducted. Same as Total Volume. |
| Failed / declined payments | Excluded. A failed-then-recovered charge appears on the recovery date, not the original failure date. This can introduce a small backward-fill in the most recent 3, 7 days as dunning resolves. |
| Time window | 30D vsP default; selectable 7D, 30D, 90D, 12M. The 12M view is the workhorse for spotting prepaid-anniversary bulges and structural growth. |
| Alert trigger | Two: (1) single-day drop >25% vs same day-of-week in prior period, (2) trailing 7-day drop >15% vsP. sentiment_key: revenue_trend. |
| Recharge-specific reading hints | Look for: monthly anniversary spikes (cohort billing), Q1 dunning trough (post-holiday card-on-file expiries), prepaid anniversary cliffs (annual cohorts that all renewed once). |
| 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
“Daily Greens Co” (the same Athletic Greens-style supplement brand fromrec_total_volume) on Shopify Plus + Recharge Pro. Daily volume across April 26 (30D window from 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26):
| Date | USD volume | GBP volume | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 03 Apr 26 (Fri) | USD 38,200 | GBP 4,100 | Quiet Friday |
| 06 Apr 26 (Mon) | USD 42,100 | GBP 4,800 | Monday refresh wave |
| 12 Apr 26 (Sun) | USD 81,400 | GBP 8,200 | Cohort billing day (12th of month) |
| 15 Apr 26 (Wed) | USD 124,800 | GBP 13,100 | Largest cohort day, original launch anniversary |
| 18 Apr 26 (Sat) | USD 32,400 | GBP 3,400 | Off-cohort low |
| 22 Apr 26 (Wed) | USD 89,300 | GBP 9,200 | Secondary cohort (paid acquisition wave from May 23) |
| 30 Apr 26 (Wed) | USD 68,200 | GBP 7,100 | End-of-month skew |
| (other days) | USD 25, 45k | GBP 2, 5k | ”Background” rebills from spread-out signup days |
- 15 Apr is the anchor cohort billing day. Daily Greens launched on 15 Mar 23 with a paid-media push that converted ~6,500 monthly subscribers in the first week. Three years later, 60% of those original subscribers are still active on monthly billing, all anchored to 15-of-month. This is why 15 Apr 26 reads USD 124,800, roughly 3x a “background” day.
- 12 Apr secondary peak corresponds to a smaller but still meaningful Q1 24 paid acquisition wave (Black History Month influencer push on 12 Feb 24). Two-year-old cohort, ~2,400 subscribers, anchored to 12-of-month, contributing the USD 81,400 spike.
- Background rebills (USD 25, 45k off-peak days) are post-launch organic signups across hundreds of micro-cohorts, each on different anchor days. As the brand matures and acquisition smooths over many days, the cohort-day spike-to-trough ratio narrows; very young brands have huge spikes.
- vs Prior 30D (Mar 26) showed +8% trailing growth, healthy. The vsP overlay should sit slightly below the current line for a growing brand. If it sits above, the brand is shrinking (involuntary churn outpacing acquisition).
- Single-day cliff alert sensitivity. Because cohort-anchor days are 3, 5x background days, a daily alert threshold of “drop > 25%” is meaningless on a non-anchor day (the natural variation is already 50%+ down from the cohort peak). Use the same day-of-week vs prior period comparison, NOT raw daily.
- Dunning trough at month-end is structural. Day 28, 30 of April shows secondary spikes because a separate cohort signed up at month-end-23. Late-month dunning waves (cards that expired earlier and finally got resolved) also resolve into late-month volume. Reading the trend without understanding cohort anchoring leads to misdiagnosis.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Volume Trend |
|---|---|
rec_total_volume | The aggregate over the same window; the trend’s integrated total. |
rec_total_transactions | Transaction-count trend; pair to spot AOV shifts (volume up but txn count flat means AOV rose). |
rec_avg_transaction | The AOV that explains volume changes when count is steady. |
rec_decline_rate | Decline-rate spikes often precede or coincide with volume troughs. |
rec_refund_volume | High-cancellation days correlate with cohort-anchor days (subscribers cancel right after the rebill hits). |
Shopify revenue_trend | The upstream commerce trend for the same store. Recharge subset. |
| Stripe / Shopify Payments daily volume | Processor-side trend; should bracket Recharge from above. |
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 → daily / weekly toggle with the same date window.The cohort view at Analytics → Cohorts is essential context for reading the daily trend; it shows which signup-month each subscriber belongs to and explains the cohort-anchor spikes on this card. Other Recharge views to be aware of:
- Subscriptions → Upcoming charges view. Forward-looking, shows what’s about to bill on each upcoming day, not the historical trend.
- Customers → MRR trend. Smoothed monthly run-rate, NOT actual daily billing volume; will not show cohort-day spikes.
- Bundles → Reporting → daily. A subset of this card if Bundles is a meaningful share.
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone bucketing | Boundary-day shifts | Recharge admin renders daily buckets in store timezone (US/Pacific by default for US merchants). Vortex IQ uses UTC for daily bucketing. A US/Pacific midnight is 08:00 UTC, so the early-morning UTC batch of scheduled rebills (00, 04 UTC = 16, 20 PT prior day) bucket to a different day in our view than in Recharge admin. For trend-shape this is mostly invisible; for “today” cards it can shift one day. |
| Failed-then-recovered | Theirs may show on retry day, ours may briefly miss | A charge failed on 12 Apr that Recharge dunning recovered on 15 Apr appears on 15 Apr in both Recharge admin and this card, BUT if our snapshot ran between days 12 and 14 the charge briefly appears nowhere. Catches up automatically. |
| Multi-currency | Ours shows separate lines, theirs may roll up to USD | The “Convert to store currency” toggle in Recharge admin produces a single FX-rolled trend line; this card shows native currencies separately. |
| Comparison | Expected relationship | When divergence is legitimate |
|---|---|---|
rec_volume_trend daily totals ↔ shopify.revenue_trend daily totals | recharge ≤ shopify each day | Shopify total includes non-Recharge orders. The non-Recharge slice should be relatively stable day-to-day; if it spikes, a Shopify-storefront promo ran outside Recharge. |
rec_volume_trend daily peaks vs Stripe / Shopify Payments daily peaks | Recharge peaks should be visible in processor data on the same day | If the processor doesn’t see the peak, charges are routing to a different processor (e.g. Authorize.Net for legacy card-on-file customers) than the integration covers. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
“Why do I see big peaks every month on roughly the same day?” Cohort billing concentration. If your subscribers signed up heavily in a short period (a launch week, a single influencer drop, a Black Friday acquisition wave), all those subscribers are anchored to the same day-of-month for monthly rebills. Each anchor day reads as a peak. This is normal and healthy; flat distribution only happens for very mature brands with many years of smoothed acquisition. “My trend dipped sharply for one day, what should I check first?” Check (1) was that day a non-anchor day relative to your dominant cohorts? (Probably normal, ignore.) (2) If it was an anchor day, did the underlying processor (Shopify Payments / Stripe) have an outage or elevated decline rate that day? Cross-reference withrec_decline_rate. (3) If processor was clean, check the Recharge status page: Recharge schedules rebills in batches; a delayed batch shifts the volume to the next day.
“Why doesn’t this match my MRR trend exactly?”
MRR is normalised: an annual prepaid subscriber contributes 1/12 of their annual price to MRR each month, smoothing the cliff. This card is actual daily billing, so the same annual prepaid customer contributes the full year of revenue on a single day. MRR is the smoothed P&L view; this is the cash-collection view.
“Q1 always trends down, why?”
Card-on-file expiry seasonality. Many issuing banks reissue cards with new expiry dates in batches around year-end. Subscribers whose cards expire in December / January enter dunning; some recover (with updated card details), some churn involuntarily. The trough typically resolves by mid-February as recovery completes; structural churn shows up as a permanent step-down. Compare year-over-year to separate seasonal from structural.
“Black Friday spike, do I see it here?”
Only the signup / first-charge revenue, not subsequent rebills. Recharge Checkout first-orders and one-time-add-on charges hit on signup day, contributing to that day’s trend. The downstream rebill stream from a BFCM cohort builds gradually month-over-month and shows up as a new anchor-day peak from December onward.
“Refunds, do they show as negative bars on the trend?”
No, refunds are excluded from this card. Refunds carry their own trend; pair the two visually if you need a “net” trend reading. The merchant-facing reading: this is what was charged, not what was kept.
“Trend shows growth but my bank deposits are flat, why?”
Three possibilities. (1) Refunds are growing in proportion. (2) Recharge platform fees + processor fees are eating margin (these scale with transaction count, so a plan-mix shift to smaller-AOV plans hurts net even at flat gross). (3) Settlement timing across the period boundary, charges late in the period settle in the next period.
“Single-day cliff alert fired, but my Recharge admin looks fine, what now?”
Ours bucket on UTC, Recharge admin buckets on store timezone (often US/Pacific, 7, 8 hours behind UTC). The cliff may simply be the boundary between two days getting drawn differently. Compare same day-of-week vs same day-of-week instead of yesterday vs today.
“Why is my cohort-anchor day three days off from when I expected it?”
Recharge shifts scheduled charges off weekends and certain holidays by default (“skip non-business days” setting). A subscriber with a Saturday anchor sees the rebill processed on the following Monday. The trend shows the actual processed date, not the schedule date.