The Burncast Blog

BILL is shutting down Finmark on April 1, 2026. If you’re one of the thousands of founders who used it to build their financial model, you need a migration plan in the next two months. But the bigger story isn’t about one product. It’s about what’s happening to an entire category of tools that startups depend on. What Finmark was Finmark was one of the few financial modeling tools built specifically for startups and priced so early-stage companies could actually afford it. At $50/month, it gave founders a structured way to build projections, model revenue, and track burn rate without wrestling with spreadsheet formulas. ...

Board meetings happen every quarter. The projections prep shouldn’t consume half your week. But for most founders and CFOs, it does. You open the spreadsheet, realize three months of actual numbers need to be entered, discover that someone’s formula changes broke the summary tab, and spend two days getting the model back to a state where you trust it. Then you duplicate it three times for different scenarios, manually build comparison charts, and paste everything into slides at midnight before the meeting. ...

Your financial model is only as good as the assumptions behind it. Get them right and you have a tool for making decisions. Get them wrong and you have a spreadsheet full of fiction. After watching hundreds of startup models, the same five assumptions trip up founders over and over. Here’s what they are, why they matter, and how to get them closer to reality. 1. Fully-loaded cost per employee Most founders model headcount using base salary alone. That’s a problem. Salary is typically only 60-70% of what an employee actually costs you. ...

You run an accelerator. Twelve companies in the new cohort. Week two, you ask each founder to walk you through their financial model during office hours. Three have Google Sheets — different structures, different assumptions. Two have pitch deck slides with projections but no underlying model. Four have nothing. Three built something in Excel that they can’t explain because an advisor made it for them. You spend the next hour helping one founder fix a circular reference instead of talking about whether their hiring plan supports their growth target. ...

Most founders build one financial model. They spend weeks getting the numbers right, defend it to their board, and treat it as a plan to execute. This is exactly backwards. A financial model isn’t a prediction. It’s a tool for thinking through possibilities. And the most useful part of it isn’t the base case you built first. It’s the scenarios you run after. The anchoring problem Daniel Kahneman’s research on cognitive bias identified something called anchoring: once you see a number, it distorts your judgment about what the right number should be. The first estimate you encounter becomes a reference point that’s hard to escape, even when you know it’s arbitrary. ...

It’s your first week as the finance hire at a Series A company. The CEO sends you a Google Sheet with 15 tabs. “Here’s the model,” they say. “The board wants updated projections by Friday.” You open it. Tab names like “Revenue v3 FINAL” and “Headcount (old — don’t use).” Color-coded cells where yellow means assumption and blue means formula, except on the third tab where the colors are reversed. A VLOOKUP references a sheet called “Q3 Scenarios” that no longer exists. The burn rate on the summary tab says $180K/month. The bank account says you’re spending $210K. ...

Here’s a question every founder faces during fundraising: what if we raise $1M instead of $1.5M? It sounds straightforward. But in a spreadsheet, answering it means duplicating your entire model, changing the funding round, adjusting the downstream hiring plan, recalculating runway, and then trying to compare two 14-tab spreadsheets side by side. Most founders either skip the exercise or do it in their head, which is worse. Burncast now supports scenario modeling as a core feature. And it works differently from copying a spreadsheet. ...

Over the past two years, the three tools that best served startup financial modeling have all been acquired and absorbed into larger companies. Finmark was acquired by BILL and is sunsetting in April 2026. Causal was acquired by Lucanet in October 2024. Pry was acquired by Brex for $90M. Each of these products was built specifically for startups. None of them exist independently anymore. This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a pattern worth understanding, because it left a real gap that affects real founders. ...

You’ve been writing code for six months. You have a product, three people on the team, and $2K in monthly recurring revenue. An investor wants to meet next week and you know they’re going to ask about your financial model. You don’t have one. You’re not even sure what goes in one. This is a normal place to be. Most technical founders haven’t built a financial model before. The problem isn’t intelligence — it’s that startup finance has its own vocabulary and conventions, and nobody teaches them to you until someone asks for a spreadsheet you don’t have. ...

A founder I know discovered last year that her runway was off by four months. Not because her assumptions were wrong. Because a SUM range in row 47 didn’t include the last three hires she’d added to the team sheet. The formula referenced B12:B24. Her team list went to B27. She’d been making hiring decisions based on a number that was silently, confidently wrong. No error message. No red cell. Just a clean-looking spreadsheet telling her she had until March when she actually had until November. ...