Use Cases

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...