Startup-Cfo

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. ...

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. ...