SUMO Subscriptions models each subscription as a custom post type with status, next payment date, billing cycle and trial expiry stored as postmeta. SleekView already promotes those keys into a working grid. The dashboard layer reads the same data and answers the aggregate retention questions: how is the active versus paused versus cancelled mix shifting, how many trials are ending in 48 hours, which billing cycles dominate, what does cohort survival look like across the past year.

SleekView Charts groups by any SUMO meta key. A Donut splits status. A Bar ranks billing cycles by subscriber count. A Number pins the trial-ending queue. An Area tracks new subscriptions over time.

The grid handles the per-record retention work, including inline notes and dunning triage. The dashboard becomes the screen retention opens first, success opens for trial conversion and finance opens for renewal forecasting.

Subscription businesses live or die by retention, and retention is an aggregate problem before it is a per-customer problem. Trial conversion happens in the last 48 hours; failed-payment recovery has a window of days; plan-mix shifts after a pricing change surface across the whole base, not in any one record. The default WordPress CPT screen for any custom post type was built for blog posts, and SUMO uses it because that is what WordPress provides.

The result is that retention managers either run custom reports quarterly or operate from gut feel. A charts dashboard reading the same SUMO postmeta turns each retention play into a saved card and each operational rhythm into a real-time view. The grid handles the per-record notes and dunning.

The dashboard handles the read every retention conversation starts from. Together they make subscription operations scale past the founder-runs-everything stage.