Memberships - Retention by Cohort Report

The Membership Retention by Cohort report groups every membership sale into a monthly cohort and tracks what share of each cohort stays active over the following months — so you can see whether members are staying longer, where you lose them, and how much each is worth. 

How to find it

Step 1: Navigate to the Analytics Feature

Log in to your Pabau account, and in the left sidebar menu, go to Analytics, then click on the "Reports" button.

Step 2: Access the reports banner

On the "Try our new suite of reports" banner, click Try it now.

Once you're in the new reports view, go to the Memberships section then scroll to the "Growth & Lifecycle'' group and click on Retention by cohort to open the report.

Toolbar controls

Filters

• Signup date – A date-range picker that decides which signup months appear as rows. It filters on the date each membership was sold, not on later activity. Quick presets are available (Last 12 months, Last 18 months, Last 24 months), the report shows a maximum of 36 months of cohorts (a wider range is trimmed to the most recent 36), and it defaults to the last 18 months. Dates snap to whole calendar months, so cohorts always line up cleanly.
• Locations – A multi-select with an "All locations" master option. Restricts the report to members whose original sale invoice belongs to the chosen location(s). Note: if you pick specific locations, a member whose original invoice carries no location is excluded.
• Plan – A multi-select with an "All plans" master option. Restricts to specific membership plans — handy for comparing one plan's retention shape against another.

After changing any filter, click Refresh to apply it.

Understanding the report

The KPI strip

Five headline cards summarise the whole selected range:

The view toggle and legend

Directly under the cards is a toggle that changes what the coloured grid below displays, along with a colour legend (light to dark, marked 0% / 50% / 100%):

The shading is relative within each view, so "darker = higher" always holds.

The cohort matrix

This is the heart of the report: one row per signup month, and columns that step through each month of that cohort's life.

The summary column headers on the left — Signup cohort, Members, Still active, Avg lifetime, Avg LTV — are frozen and stay put as you scroll the month columns sideways. To the right, the month columns run M0, M1, M2, and so on. Any column can be clicked to sort the rows by that value.

Reading one cohort row, left to right:

The "All cohorts" row

The final, bold row at the bottom of the grid is a single blended curve, read left to right, representing your whole business. At each month, it pools every cohort old enough to have reached that age — total members still retained ÷ their combined signups. It's not a simple average of the rows above; pooling weights every member equally, so a tiny cohort can't distort it, and the row reconciles to your true overall retention. Read across it to see the "typical" member lifecycle.

Behind the numbers

• Retention % at a given age = members still active ÷ the original signup count. Because the denominator is locked at signup, a row can only stay level or fall.
• What counts as "retained": Active and Frozen (paused) both count as retained — pausing isn't the same as leaving. Terminated/cancelled, Expired, Suspended, and Refunded all count as ended.
• When a membership ends, it drops out of the cohort from the month it ended, so the curve steps down at that point.
• Upgrades & downgrades: a member who changes plan stays in their original signup cohort as a single member — the membership is followed through the change, so plan changes never double-count a member or artificially break their retention line.
• Avg lifetime = the sum of the retention percentages across the row — the area under the curve. Because it only measures up to today, newer cohorts naturally read lower until they mature, so always compare cohorts at the same age, not across different ages.
• Avg LTV = the total recurring revenue the cohort has generated ÷ the number of members. It reflects both price and how long members stay. Annual plans are converted to a monthly figure (annual price ÷ 12), and one-off purchases outside the membership aren't included.

A worked example

Say 100 members signed up in January, and it's now 4 months later:

• Avg lifetime = 1.00 + 0.92 + 0.85 + 0.80 = 3.57 months so far, and it keeps growing as the cohort ages.
• Avg LTV ≈ each member's monthly price × the months they stayed, summed across the cohort, ÷ 100 members — members who stay longer or pay more push it up.
• Still active = the 80 members whose membership hasn't ended.

With this understanding, you can confidently use the Retention by Cohort report to see how long your members are staying, where you're losing them, and how much each cohort is worth over time.