The Top Customers report ranks every customer who bought in your selected window using RFM scoring — a marketing standard that captures three dimensions of customer value.
What RFM measures
Three independent scores, each 1 to 5 (5 best, 1 worst):
- R = Recency — how recently did they buy? Closer to today = higher score.
- F = Frequency — how often did they buy in the window? More invoices = higher score.
- M = Monetary — how much did they spend? Higher Total Spend = higher score.
Each customer is bucketed by quintile on each dimension. So an “R5” is in your top 20% by recency, an “F1” is in your bottom 20% by purchase count, and so on.
Reading the combined RFM code
The 3-digit code (e.g., 5-5-5 or 4-2-3) is a shorthand:
- 5-5-5 — your VIPs. Recent, frequent, high-spend. Treat them well.
- 5-1-X — recent but rare. New customers worth nurturing.
- 1-X-X — lapsed. Haven’t bought in a while regardless of past behavior.
- X-X-5 — high spenders. The X-X-5s with low R or F have whales to re-engage.
- 1-1-1 — gone. Don’t waste outreach budget unless you have a reactivation play.
The cell color in Summary signals overall strength: green (sum ≥ 13), blue (≥ 10), amber (≥ 7), rose (under 7).
The supporting columns
- Last Purchase + Days Since — the raw recency, in case you want to filter to “haven’t bought in 60 days”
- Orders — invoice count in the window
- Total Spend — sum of invoice totals (post-discount, including tax + freight + CC fee)
- Avg Sale — Total Spend ÷ Orders, useful for comparing whales vs many-small-purchases
Min Orders filter
Set Min Orders to 2+ to filter out one-time buyers. RFM scoring on a population that includes one-and-dones distorts the F dimension because most customers bunch at F1.
Summary vs Detail
- Summary — one row per customer with their R/F/M scores, sorted by Total Spend DESC.
- Detail — one row per invoice that contributed to a customer’s totals (only customers above the Min Orders threshold are eligible). Sorted newest-first.
Click any customer name in Summary to drill into their per-invoice list — a quick way to verify “is this customer’s score high because of one big sale or sustained activity?”
Removable Customer pill in Detail; × to widen.
Tips
- Reactivation campaign — sort the Summary CSV export by R ascending, filter to F ≥ 3 and M ≥ 3. That’s your “lapsed but historically valuable” list.
- VIP list — filter to RFM ≥ 4-4-4. A few dozen names. These get the holiday gifts.
- Wholesale customers are flagged with (W) in the customer name. Their RFM tends to skew M5 / F5 even at moderate volume because B2B order sizes are larger — score them in their own window if needed (use Min Orders to separate retail from wholesale roughly).
- The
As-Ofdate defaults to today — set it to a month-end to see what the rankings looked like at that snapshot. - For just “biggest spenders,” use the M score alone. R and F are about engagement pattern, not just spend.