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 seen this before. Every startup CFO has. The question is whether you spend the next two weeks fixing the spreadsheet, or whether you rebuild in something that won’t break the same way.
The real cost of inherited spreadsheets
The broken formulas aren’t the worst part. The worst part is that nobody trusts the model. The CEO stopped looking at it three months ago because the numbers didn’t match reality. The board gets a different format every quarter because whoever updates the sheet restructures it each time.
You can fix the formulas. You can’t fix the loss of confidence. That requires a model where assumptions are separated from calculations — where changing a hiring timeline doesn’t accidentally zero out revenue projections because someone overwrote a formula in row 47.
Rebuild in an afternoon, not a sprint
Start with what you know is true: the team. Enter all 22 people across engineering, sales, ops, and your one-person finance department (that’s you). Actual salaries, actual start dates. For planned hires, add them with expected start dates and comp ranges. Burncast calculates fully loaded cost (salary plus benefits, taxes, and overhead) automatically.
Next, revenue. The company has three streams: a SaaS product at $45K MRR, a professional services line doing $15K/month, and a new enterprise tier that launched last quarter at $8K MRR. Enter each separately with its own growth assumptions. The SaaS product is growing 10% month-over-month. Services is flat. Enterprise is too new to call, so you model 20% growth and plan to revisit.
Then expenses. Hosting at $12K/month, growing with usage. Office lease at $18K/month, fixed for two years. Software subscriptions, travel, legal — everything that isn’t headcount.
Finally, funding history. Enter the seed round and the Series A with actual terms. The cap table (the ownership breakdown showing who holds what percentage of the company) builds itself. Founders, seed investors, Series A lead, option pool — all accounted for.
Total time: maybe two hours. And nothing references a deleted sheet.
The part that actually matters: scenarios for the board
The board meeting is Friday. They want to see three cases: the base plan, a conservative scenario if the enterprise product is slower than expected, and an aggressive scenario if you hire the sales team faster.
In a spreadsheet, this means three copies of a 15-tab workbook. Three separate files to maintain. When you update an assumption in one, you have to remember to update it in the other two — unless that assumption is supposed to be different in that scenario, in which case you need to remember which changes are intentional and which you forgot to propagate.
In Burncast, you create scenarios using delta-based modeling. Each scenario starts from your base model and only stores what’s different. The conservative scenario changes one thing: enterprise growth drops from 20% to 5% month-over-month. Everything else inherits from the base. The aggressive scenario changes two things: you add three sales hires in Q3 instead of Q4, and enterprise growth goes to 30%.
Creating both scenarios takes about ten minutes. Not because the tool is doing something unusual — but because you’re only entering the differences, not duplicating the entire model.
What the board actually sees
Three projections on one screen. Same structure, same metrics, different assumptions. The base plan shows 14 months of runway (the number of months before the company runs out of cash). Conservative shows 16 months — slower growth but also less spending pressure. Aggressive shows 11 months with a path to much higher revenue.
The conversation shifts from “do we trust these numbers” to “which tradeoffs do we want to make.” That’s the conversation you were hired to enable.
The model that survives your successor
Spreadsheets are personal artifacts. They reflect the thinking style of whoever built them. When that person leaves, the model becomes an archaeology project.
A Burncast model has a fixed structure. Assumptions are in one place. Projections are generated, not hand-built. Scenarios are explicit. The next person who sits in your chair opens the same model and sees the same thing you see.
You didn’t just replace a spreadsheet. You built something the company can actually rely on.