Features

The hardest errors in a financial model are often not arithmetic errors. They are connection errors. A sales-driven revenue stream can be linked to the wrong role. An expense can draw its budget from the wrong funding round. A hiring plan can begin before the cash expected to support it arrives. The projections still calculate, so the problem may not be obvious in a statement or summary metric. The new Visualizations page gives you two ways to inspect the model behind the totals: ...

Most startup financial models treat hiring plans and budgets as separate things. You plan to raise $4M, and separately you plan to hire 8 engineers. But those two numbers are connected: the engineers are funded by the round. If the round comes in at $2M instead of $4M, the hiring plan should change. In a spreadsheet, you update both manually, then check the statements tab to make sure nothing broke downstream. Change one cell, verify ten others. This is exactly the kind of fragile linking that makes spreadsheet models a liability. ...

Building a financial model usually starts with a blank page and a lot of clicking. Add a team role, fill in salary, set a start date, save. Now do it again for revenue, costs, and funding rounds. By the time you reach the projections tab, you have spent 30 minutes on data entry and have not made a single strategic decision. We wanted to fix that. Starting today, you can describe your business in plain text and Burncast builds the model for you. ...

Three questions every founder should be able to answer in under a minute: What if we raise 50% less than we want? What if we double our growth rate? What if we hire 3 more engineers? These are not hypothetical exercises. They come up in board meetings, investor calls, and late-night planning sessions. But answering them usually means opening a dialog, changing a number, saving, waiting for projections to recalculate, and then undoing everything because you were just exploring. Or worse, if you are using a spreadsheet: changing a cell, scanning downstream formulas for breakage, and hoping you did not miss one three tabs over. Most founders skip it. ...

“What if we only raise half of what we planned?” “What if churn drops by 5 points after we ship the new onboarding flow?” “What if we double the engineering team and bet on faster growth?” These are the questions that shape a startup’s trajectory. But in a spreadsheet, answering any of them means duplicating your entire model, changing the numbers, 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. ...