11 March 2026 · Helen Crowe
Tenure bands that still mean something after a pause
A pause is not a leave. Treating it as one will make a magazine or club look sicker than it is — and hide the people who quietly resume.
A pause is an administrative state. A leave is a commercial one. When a magazine or a yarn club dumps both into “inactive”, the tenure chart will show a cliff that never happened. People resume after Christmas. People pause when they move house and come back on the old plan.
In a Pathbase report we keep pause as its own band for as long as the extract allows. If the fulfilment house only stored pause as a note in a comment field, we say the band is incomplete. Inventing a pause rate from that comment field is worse than leaving a hole in the chart.
For British annuals, the interesting pause is often the one that sits across a renewal invoice. If you treat that pause as churn, you will brief a room to “win back” people who still consider themselves members. If you ignore pause entirely, you will miss the group that never returns after the second pause.
Ask your export person for a pause-start and pause-end, not a single status. If they cannot give you dates, the honest chart is a count of currently paused relationships on the last day of each month — a stock, not a flow.