Read your book health
See whether your book of merchants is growing or shrinking, how fast you are losing merchants, what that costs in monthly revenue, how old the book is, and which merchants are worth a call this week.
Statements tell you what you paid this month. Book health tells you where the book is heading: is it growing, how fast is it losing merchants, what are those losses worth each month, and who is worth a call before the money is gone. Admins only.
Book health is reporting only. Nothing on it changes a commission, a statement or a balance.
Where
Go to Book health, under Your data in the sidebar. The Dashboard's concentration card also links to it.
It fills in from the processor reports you already upload. Nothing to set up, but two optional columns make it much better: see Open and close dates below.
How SplitRun sorts each merchant
Every merchant is in one of four states. The same words appear on the page, on the Merchants list and on each merchant's page.
| State | What it means | In the book? |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Earning. | Yes |
| Closing | The processor sent a close date, but the merchant is still earning. The money is about to go. | Yes |
| Dormant | No earnings for 3 months, and no close date. Often recoverable, so worth a call. | No, counts as lost |
| Lost | The processor sent a close date and earnings stopped. | No |
A dormant merchant that earns again goes straight back into the book. A merchant that has never earned anything is left out, unless it opened in the last 3 months and simply has not started yet.
Each data source is judged against its own latest report. If one processor's August report has not arrived yet, its merchants are not counted as lost for August. A note at the top of the page names any source that is behind.
The four cards
Each card is one number, one line explaining it, and a 12-month chart. Hover over the i beside a title for its definition, and over any month on a chart for its figures.
Active merchants
How many merchants are in the book today (active plus closing), how that changed since the first month on the chart, and how many were added and lost. On the chart, the line is the book; the bars above the line are new merchants and the bars below are lost ones.
Yearly attrition
The share of the book you lost over the last 12 months: merchants lost in those 12 months, divided by the book 12 months earlier. Closed and dormant both count. The dotted line is the same figure a year earlier, so you can see whether attrition is getting better or worse.
It needs 12 months of history. Until then the card says n/a and when your history starts.
Monthly gross revenue
Your book's monthly revenue now, against the first month on the chart, and why it moved:
- New merchants: what the merchants added since then earn a month now.
- Lost merchants: what the merchants lost since then were earning a month when they left.
- The rest of the change is your existing merchants growing or shrinking.
Each merchant's month is averaged over its last 3 months with earnings, so one unusual month does not swing it. If you have renamed revenue under Settings → Terminology, the card uses your name for it.
Book age
How long your active merchants have been open, on average, from the processor's open date. The donut splits today's monthly revenue by years open: under 1 year, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5, and 5 years or more. Unknown is merchants with no open date.
Older merchants rarely leave. A book whose revenue rests on young merchants is riskier than its size suggests.
Merchants to watch
Below the cards, the ten merchants most worth a call, largest monthly revenue first:
- Closing: closed by the processor but still earning, so the revenue is about to stop. A call may save it or move it.
- Dormant: stopped earning in the last 12 months, with no close date from the processor. Worth finding out why while it can still be won back.
Click a name to open the merchant. To see everyone, use See all closing or dormant under the list. That opens Merchants filtered by Activity (see Manage your accounts).
Reading the charts
- The latest month is provisional. It is drawn dashed, with faded bars. A merchant counts as lost only once a later report shows its earnings stopped, so the latest month's losses can still grow, and a dormant merchant that earns again comes back.
- Months before your first upload can still show merchant counts, worked out from the processors' open and close dates. Revenue starts with your first upload, so the revenue chart can be shorter than the others.
- The axes are zoomed to the data, not started at zero, so a small change in a large book is still visible. Read the axis labels before judging the size of a move.
Open and close dates
Book health is most accurate when your processor reports include each merchant's open and close dates. Many do (First Data, Fiserv, Elavon, Nuvei, Payarc and others).
- Without close dates, a merchant that leaves is only noticed after 3 silent months, as dormant, and never shows as Closing. The page says so at the top, naming the sources.
- Without open dates, the Book age card has nothing to show.
To add them, open the data source's column mapping and set Open date and Close date. See Map report columns. Dates are read from every upload after that.
What agents see
In the agent portal, My Accounts opens with Your book: the same view for the agent's own merchants, over their last 12 published months.
- Your active merchants: their book, with added and lost.
- Your monthly commission: their commission now, with what new merchants added and lost ones took away.
- Merchants to call: their own closing and dormant merchants, ranked by what each earned them a month.
Agents only ever see their own commission here, never your revenue, so their rate cannot be worked out from it. They do not see the Book health page itself.
Good to know
- Nothing to show yet? Book health starts with your first processor report.
- A merchant reads "closed, still earning" on its page: the processor closed the account, but money is still coming in. It counts as Closing until earnings stop.