How many customers did I lose this month?

Bottomline compares your active customer list month over month and tells you exactly who stopped buying.

What's my monthly churn rate?

Bottomline calculates your churn rate automatically by comparing active customers at the start and end of each month.

Is revenue from existing customers growing or shrinking?

Your monthly report breaks down revenue from new vs. returning customers so you can see whether your base is expanding or contracting.

Are my repeat customers actually coming back?

Bottomline tracks repeat purchase rates and flags customers whose buying frequency is declining.

How much is a customer worth over their full relationship?

Bottomline calculates customer lifetime value from your transaction history so you know what each customer relationship is actually worth.

How many customers did I gain this month?

Growth feels good, but if you can't count new customers with confidence, you don't actually know if you're growing. Here's how to get the real number from your accounting software and CRM.

6 min read

The short answer

A new customer is someone who made their first purchase this month. To count them, you need a list of every customer who paid you this month, filtered to only those who have never paid you before. Your accounting software and CRM can get you there, but neither makes it easy.

Why counting new customers matters more than counting revenue

You had a great month. Revenue was up 18%. But here's the question nobody asked: did that revenue come from new customers or from one existing client placing a bigger order?

If you gained 12 new customers, that's momentum. Your marketing is working, your pipeline is converting, and your base is expanding. If you gained zero new customers and your revenue bump came from one large project, you're more concentrated and more fragile than you were last month.

Customer acquisition is the leading indicator. Revenue is the lagging one. By the time revenue starts declining because you stopped acquiring customers, you're already months behind.

What “new customer” actually means in your data

It sounds simple, but defining “new customer” gets messy fast. A customer who bought from you two years ago, disappeared, and just came back: are they new? Most businesses count them as reactivated, not new. For this metric, you want first-time buyers only.

The formula is straightforward:

New customers this month = Customers who paid in [month] whose first-ever transaction date is also in [month]

The tricky part is knowing each customer's first transaction date. That requires looking across your full history, not just the current month.

How to count new customers in QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks doesn't have a “new customers this month” report. You have to work around it:

1
Go to Reports → Sales by Customer Summary
Set the date range to the current month. This gives you every customer who had a transaction this month.
2
Export to Excel or Google Sheets
Click the Export button (top right of the report) and choose Excel or CSV. Open it in a spreadsheet.
3
Run Sales by Customer Summary again for all time
Change the date range to “All Dates” and export that too. This is your full customer list.
4
Run it one more time for everything before this month
Set the date range to the start of your business through the last day of last month. Export.
5
Compare the two lists
Any customer who appears in this month's report but NOT in the “before this month” report is a new customer. Use VLOOKUP or a simple filter to find the difference.

Total time: 15-25 minutes. Three report exports and a spreadsheet comparison. And you need to do this every month to track the trend.

How to count new customers in Xero

Xero's approach is similar but uses different reports:

1
Go to Business → Invoices
Filter by date to the current month. This shows all invoiced customers for the period.
2
Export the invoice list
Use Export to download a CSV. Pull the unique customer names into a spreadsheet column.
3
Go to Contacts → Customers
Xero tracks when contacts were created. Sort by date added. Any contact created this month who also appears on your invoice list is a new customer.
4
Cross-reference creation date with invoice date
A contact created this month but not invoiced is a lead, not a customer. A contact invoiced this month but created last year is a returning customer. You need both filters.

Total time: 15-20 minutes. The Contacts creation date helps, but you still need to cross-reference with actual invoices manually.

What it takes to track new customers every month

The manual process works, but it has real friction:

15-25 minutes of spreadsheet work each month. Exporting reports, comparing lists, counting the difference. Not hard, but tedious enough that it gets skipped.
Your definition of “new” can drift. Did you count that reactivated customer last month? Did your bookkeeper create the contact record on a different date than the first invoice? Small inconsistencies compound over time.
You only get a count, not context.Knowing you gained 8 new customers is useful. Knowing that 5 came from referrals, 2 from Google Ads, and 1 from a cold email is actionable. Your accounting software can't tell you that.

Or get your new customer count automatically, every month

Bottomline connects to your accounting software and CRM, identifies first-time buyers each month, and shows you the number with full context: who they are, how they found you, and how they compare to previous months.

Customer acquisition

+12

New customers

148

Total active

+8.8%

Growth rate

vs. 9 new customers last month (+33% improvement)

From a real Bottomline report. New customer counts are calculated automatically from your transaction history.

No spreadsheet exports. No VLOOKUP formulas. No wondering whether you're counting reactivations as new. Bottomline applies the same definition every month and shows you the trend so you can see whether acquisition is accelerating or stalling.