PostHog Handbook Library / Onboarding

392 words. Estimated reading time: 2 min.

# Onboarding Data

### Data architecture overview

Data used by Onboarding Specialists comes from three main sources:

Billing Postgres _admin panel view_

- Customer account, subscription, and invoice type data
- Usage reports and consumption metrics
- Revenue amortization calculations
- Billing forecast / spike calculations

Production Postgres _admin panel view (US)_

- Organizations and projects configuration
- User accounts and permissions
- Product settings and feature flags
- Warehouse tables, pipeline source/destination info

ClickHouse

- Event and person data for all teams (projects)
- person to distinct_id mappings

#### Query capabilities

- Metabase queries production databases directly but cannot combine Postgres and ClickHouse in a single query
- PostHog analytics limited to Team 2 data, but can query across databases in a single query

- Cross-organization analysis requires Metabase for customer event analysis, including:
- Library usage breakdowns
- Event volume metrics
- Implementation diagnostics

### Vitally integration

We sync customer data between Vitally and PostHog bi-directionally

#### Data sync pipeline

To Vitally:

- Custom traits sync nightly from billing Postgres via SQL queries in Vitally
- Product engagement events sent through data pipelines using this action
- Billing spike detection from `billing_spike` table, defined in this PostHog function

From Vitally:

- All Vitally traits accessible as ``traits.`vitally.custom.traitNameFromVitally`` `in PostHog queries, eg see the` onboarding_accounts_timestamp_check` view)
- JSON storage format (requires cleaning for arrays/complex fields)
- Data syncs via data warehouse connection

#### Known limitations

- Conversations table lacks organization/user mapping
- Messages table implementation status unclear

### Onboarding pipeline tracking

#### Pipeline stages

We track customers through defined onboarding stages with automated timestamp capture:

1. Onboarding segment entry - Customer enters onboarding criteria
2. Outreach sent - Initial contact via email (manual update)
3. Customer engagement - Response received (manual update)
4. Nurture phase - Post-intro call follow-up (manual update)
5. Completion/churn - Final outcome tracking

Each stage transition is managed through Vitally playbooks with automatic timestamp updates.

#### Key data tables

For onboarding analysis, these tables provide essential data:

| Table | Purpose | Key fields | |-------|---------|------------| | `invoice_with_annual` | Billing data with revenue amortization | Revenue (mrr), billing period, type (annual, completed, upcoming, etc) | | `vitally_accounts` | Customer properties and traits | All Vitally custom traits, health scores, usage | | `posthog_organization` | Org-level configurations | Settings, feature access, creation date | | `posthog_project` | Project/team settings | Project configuration, team members | | `billing_spike` | Usage anomaly detection | Spike timestamps, magnitude, affected metrics |

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/onboarding/onboarding-data

GitHub source: contents/handbook/onboarding/onboarding-data.md

Content hash: `ce9005b069828e26`