I was on the fence with working out annualized churn as we have...

I was on the fence with working out annualized churn as we have a 50/50 split on whether monthly translates to annual or not in this thread, ChatGPT & Gemini both produced comparable results when asked (see the image at the bottom).

I understand total subscribers are still growing but based on the data they are becoming less efficient in managing total subscriber growth versus the number of customers being lost in the process. It is becoming a very pivotal point in Xero's growth journey and their execution on where they choose to gain revenues from.

Increase in revenue can either come from margin expansion e.g. price rises, additional offerings, chasing higher revenue users, or come from the global growth story, expansion into North America and the rest of world. The margin expansion route has greater limitations and will start to affect churn rates as pricing pressure starts to test how sticky Xero's products really are, which is why the global growth story was a better, higher quality form of topline growth as it is much more scalable and doesn't result in churn increasing.

Based on the data from the last 5 years' worth of FY financial reports, total subscriber growth has been slowly dropping off while churn is sitting in a tighter range (0.90-1.13%). This is an item to watch moving forward, we need to either see the churn rate lessen or the total subscriber growth return to higher figures than this fiscal year. It is obvious that profitability comes at a price, the current CEO is doing well at executing as per her plan, but it still has the potential to cause Xero to re-rate if the top line growth of customers can't outpace the churn, especially in the growth areas (North America & rest of world).

FY20 monthly group churn = 1.13%
*FY20 annualised churn = 12.74%
FY20 total subscriber growth YoY = 26%
Total subscriber growth after churn = 13.26% gain

FY21 monthly group churn = 1.01%
*FY21 annualised churn = 11.47%
FY21 total subscriber growth YoY = 20%
Total subscriber growth after churn = 8.53% gain

FY22 monthly group churn = 0.90%
*FY22 annualised churn = 10.28%
FY22 total subscriber growth YoY = 19%
Total subscriber growth after churn = 8.72% gain

FY23 monthly group churn = 0.90%
*FY23 annualised churn = 10.28%
FY23 total subscriber growth YoY = 14%
Total subscriber growth after churn = 3.72% gain

FY24 monthly group churn = 0.99%
*FY24 annualised churn = 11.25%
FY24 total subscriber growth YoY = 11%
Total subscriber growth after churn = -0.25% loss