The Payment Proof Tracking Spreadsheet
Type: template
Stage: Stage 5: Payment Proof
Difficulty: beginner
A simple weekly tracking system for the five Stage 5 metrics that matter before you have a dedicated analytics tool: payment page visitors, completed transactions, month-1 renewals, refund requests, and notes. Update every Monday morning. The discipline of weekly tracking is more valuable than the precision of the numbers in the first month.
Overview
This template gives you a simple, manual tracking system for the five Stage 5 metrics that matter before you have a dedicated analytics tool. It creates a weekly snapshot that tells you whether your unit economics are moving in the right direction.
The structure
Create a spreadsheet with six columns and one row per week:
| Week | Payment page visitors | Completed transactions | Month-1 renewals (prior cohort) | Refund requests | Notes |
**Week:** The date range (e.g., May 5–11).
**Payment page visitors:** How many unique people saw your payment link or landing page. Track this from your Stripe dashboard (link views) or from your page analytics if you have them.
**Completed transactions:** How many people completed a purchase. This is your conversion denominator. Calculate conversion rate: transactions ÷ visitors × 100.
**Month-1 renewals:** Of the customers who paid last month, how many have been charged for a second month without cancelling? This is your early retention signal. Calculate: renewals ÷ prior month customers × 100.
**Refund requests:** How many customers asked for a refund. A refund rate above 5% signals a gap between what you promised and what you delivered.
**Notes:** Anything that changed this week — a price change, a new traffic source, a product update — that might explain movement in any of the numbers.
How to fill it in
Update it every Monday morning. Pull the numbers from Stripe. It takes under ten minutes. The discipline of weekly tracking is more valuable than the precision of the numbers in the first month.
What the output tells you
After four weeks, you'll see whether your conversion rate is stable, improving, or declining. You'll see your first cohort's month-one renewal rate. You'll have a baseline to compare against when you make changes. This is the minimum viable analytics system for Stage 5. Use it until you have enough MRR to justify a dedicated tool.