Connect Skio to Tatheon and subscription revenue is reported as what it is, recurring and predictable, rather than being flattened into the order total alongside one off purchases. This guide is for whoever administers Skio. It covers the connection, what changes on the board once it is in place, and why subscription revenue needs separating at all.
Why subscriptions need separating
A subscription order and a one off order look identical in Shopify. Both are orders with a value and a customer.
They are not the same thing commercially. A one off order is revenue you earned and now have to earn again. A subscription order is revenue you already earned and are collecting on, and next month’s is close to guaranteed. Reporting them together produces a revenue figure that mixes what you have with what you have to go and win, which makes forecasting harder than it needs to be.
Once Skio is connected, Tatheon separates locked subscription revenue from revenue you still have to acquire, and the forecast becomes considerably more honest as a result.
Before you start
You need access to your Skio API key. In most cases this already exists, because it was created when Skio was first set up.
The wizard reuses the key already stored in Tatheon where one is present, so for many stores this is a registration step rather than a fresh credential step.
Register the account
Open the source wizard and choose Skio. Register the existing key against the source account. Tatheon then runs syncs against that registered account, which means subscription history backfills and then keeps current nightly like every other source.
If no key is stored yet, create one in Skio with read access and paste it into the wizard. As with every other source, Tatheon reads and never writes, so write scopes are unnecessary.
What arrives
Active subscriptions, plan mix, subscription revenue, churn and cancellation reasons where Skio captures them.
The number worth understanding first is net revenue retention. It compares what a cohort of subscribers is worth now against what the same cohort was worth when it started, so it captures upgrades, downgrades and churn in one figure. Above one hundred per cent means your existing subscribers are growing in value without you acquiring anyone, which is the strongest position a subscription business can be in and is invisible if you only watch new subscriber counts.
Confirm it is working
Compare active subscription count in Tatheon against Skio for the same day. These should match closely.
Revenue may differ slightly, and the usual reason is timing. Skio reports against the billing attempt and Tatheon reports against the order that successfully settled in Shopify, so a failed payment that retried the next day appears on different dates in each system. Over a month those differences cancel out.
Common problems
Subscriptions appearing with no revenue attached usually means the Shopify connection is not yet backfilled far enough to include the orders those subscriptions generated. The two sources join on the order, so Skio can only be as complete as Shopify is.
Churn that looks impossibly low in the first weeks is normal rather than wrong. Churn is measured against subscribers who reached a renewal date, and a backfill that has not yet covered a full billing cycle has few of those.
Next
With subscriptions separated, the retention section becomes meaningful, and the forecast can distinguish revenue you have already locked from revenue you still need to win.