Business Context

FinPay is a B2B payments platform for small businesses. The CFO noticed that monthly revenue grew from $4.8M in January to $5.6M in April, then fell to $5.1M in June, while transaction volume continued rising from 1.2M to 1.5M transactions over the same period.

Metric Scenario

Leadership wants to know whether the revenue pattern reflects a real business trend, seasonality, pricing mix changes, or a short-term anomaly. They also want to understand which supporting metrics should be monitored to explain future revenue movement earlier. You are asked to define the right financial trend metric, explain how to measure it, and outline how you would diagnose the change.

Requirements

1. Define the primary metric you would use to identify trends in financial performance and explain why it is appropriate.
2. Show how you would calculate the metric and distinguish between absolute change, percentage growth, and trend direction.
3. Decompose the revenue movement into meaningful drivers such as customer growth, transaction frequency, and average revenue per transaction.
4. Identify leading and lagging indicators that would help explain why revenue rose through April and declined afterward.
5. Recommend specific follow-up analyses and business actions based on possible findings.

Data Available

• monthly_financials: month, gross_revenue, net_revenue, refunds, fees, active_customers
• transactions: transaction_id, customer_id, transaction_date, transaction_amount, fee_revenue, product_type, region
• customer_accounts: customer_id, signup_date, segment, pricing_plan, churn_date
• pricing_changes: effective_date, product_type, old_price, new_price
• sales_pipeline: lead_id, created_date, stage, expected_value, close_date