How to Build a Startup Financial Model

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Forecasting Best Practices for your Startup

Let’s talk about forecasting best practices, that’s building a three-year model that’s dynamic.

Video: What Are the Best Practices to Build a Forecast for Your Startup?

You want your model to easily change assumptions for each year, and you want to include a waterfall throughout the entire sales funnel, that’s going to include conversion rates and unit economics.

This is a best practice that the best CEOs do, because it provides an understanding of resources and effort required to close a sale. You also want to remember to include delays due to sales cycle and customer collections. This is going to affect your cash flows.

Next, you want to stress test your model, conversion rates, growth rates and see what the impacts are. When these start to go sideways, you’re going to be prepared. If not, it can kill your cash. Next, your model should include a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flows. Finally, be honest with yourself in building your model.

How working capital can impact a startup's cash flow

In the early days of a startup, projecting cash flow is relatively simple, because it’s a one-way street. Payroll, rent, R&D and maybe some legal costs equal the cash out the door, with no revenue yet to offset the cash burn. Modeling this out in a spreadsheet is easy for most entrepreneurs.

Understanding cash flow gets a lot more complicated when an early-stage company starts servicing clients - and this is where we see super-basic, back of the envelope financial models start to breakdown. There are a few places where revenue-generating clients can “mess up” a nice cash flow model. At this point of your company's life/growth, understanding and being able to model working capital comes into play.

What is Working Capital?

Working Capital = the difference between current assets and current liabilities on a company’s balance sheet. What this really means for most startups is the difference between when a startup gets paid by clients vs. how long it has to pay your expenses.

The timing of payments from clients usually starts pretty simple but can get complicated quickly. Super easy SaaS companies may collect a Stripe bill each month from their clients. Unfortunately, not all billing platforms wire revenue quickly. Some of the app store billing systems wait up to 60 days to share the cash with their app developers. It doesn’t take long before a simple SaaS business has a variety of receivables to wait on from a variety of billing platforms. Fast growth may mean that customer count is spiking (and costs along with it), but with lagging cash collection, even a gross margin positive customer can drain cash for a while.

Purchase orders make selling into the enterprise even harder. Just because a new Fortune 500 client signs a contract does not mean that payment is on the way. Many larger companies have a Purchase Order system that can add on months to the actual receipt of payment. And if different enterprise clients are requesting different invoices or purchase orders, payment can take a long time to show up.

On the positive side, companies that sell annual subscriptions can get large payments upfront. This can really boost cash flow but does create some modeling issues vis a vis deferred revenue and revenue recognition. (We’ve got a whole video on deferred revenue here).

Expenses that companies incurred as they grow sometimes are automatically paid every month (like your monthly bookkeeping cost)- but others may be paid “manually” - as in when the executive in charge of bill pay decides to pay them. Stretching bill payment does have a positive impact on cash flow, but may not be worth the manual effort. Plus, it may annoy your vendors to the point where they stop providing their service, so this is not a great game to play if you are a startup founder.

Thinking through your startup’s working capital will help you have better projections.

Startup financial models key terms

Startup Deferred Revenue
Startup Financial Modeling 101
Kruze Consulting Simple Startup Financial Model
Startup Budgeting
How to record Equity Investments on the Balance Sheet
Budgeting tips
Where to start your Model
SaaS User Metrics Modeling Tips
Modeling Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Tips for optimizing a startup’s runway
Projecting working capital
Calculating the cost of an employee in your model
What financial statements do startups need to produce?
How to set up realistic financial projections for startups
What projections needs to go into a VC pitch deck?

Startup Deferred Revenue

Deferred revenue, also called unearned revenue, matters to startups that get paid up front for service that they will deliver over time. Deferred revenue hits the balance sheet, and slowly converts to revenue, so really matters when creating a startup's financial model. A very important thing to know about deferred revenue is that, since balance sheets balance, the asset that goes on the balance sheet to balance out a new deferred revenue liability is cash. So, why is deferred revenue a liability? If a company gets a payment in advance of delivering a service, you owe the service to the client. So it's a liability because you owe that service to them. Let's do a pretty simple deferred revenue example. Let's say you're a software as a service startup. A SAAS startup Your service is one hundred dollars a month and a client prepays for the full year, all 12 months. The clients pays the startup twelve hundred dollars. In month one, the startup is able to recognize 100 dollars’ worth of revenue. so they deliver one hundred dollars’ worth of their service to that client. Now the deferred revenue balance was that full cash amount that they received the twelve hundred dollars. And then the recognized revenue of $100 is deducted. At the end of that first month, there is an eleven hundred dollar deferred revenue balance for this client. And this will continue over the life of the contract until the last month when the last one hundred dollars is recognized and this startup has a zero-dollar balance in their deferred revenue account. Deferred revenue can cause some confusing impacts to a startup's cash position. This video will help explain deferred revenue, and how to model it into your startup's financial forecast.

Startup Financial Modeling 101

Top 3 considerations when building your startup’s first financial model: Know the goal to the model, as in, why are you building a model? Are you doing a back of the envelope financial validation of your idea? Or are you raising venture capital? Or does your team need to know their budget? Each of these requires different levels of detail. What are your business’ KPIs, as in what are the key performance indicators that will show you if your company is on the right track. These don’t just have to be accounting related, they could be about the product release schedule, the number of clients, etc. Don’t start from scratch, use an existing spreadsheet template. The act of connecting the cells and putting in the basic formulas is not going to help your startup grow - don’t spend the time on it. Take an existing, free model - like the one we offer, and use it.

Kruze Consulting Simple Startup Financial Model

This is a model that we've created and we provide for free on our website. We're giving this away because there are a number of startup executives who want to build a simple financial model for their startup and who are comfortable enough with Excel to do this on their own. And we also know that there are a large number of very early stage startups for whom hiring somebody like a Kruze Consulting to build a model just doesn't make sense. This model is a very simplified version of one of the model templates that we use when we create financial models for our clients. This free financial model has three main tabs. There's a summary tab, there's a graph tab, and there's a model tab. The summary tab is a high-level output that shows the income statement in cash and some of the KPI's of the startup. We've seen that CEOs really like to use this to try to understand the macro level growth and expenses of their startups. And this is also the output that a number of our clients have used in their pitch decks when they go on to raise venture capital. We know this-this output works well because our clients have raised over half a billion dollars in the past twelve months in seed and venture capital. So, this is something that we really do believe resonates well during the fundraising process. The graphs page is a graphical representation of some of the KPI's of the startup like revenue growth headcount growth. Cash burn. It's a really nice way to visually show what's happening and the impact of the financial projections. Finally, the model tab is the tab where all the magic happens. It's in here that you can enter your projections, your headcount, your expenses, for things like marketing. It will output your cash and your cash balance in the cash balance section which is down at the bottom of this tab. Use the instructions tab for the detailed instructions and how to run the model tab. We hope this free resource is helpful. We do offer financial modeling as a service to startup executives who are looking to get help when they're putting together their financial model. So, contact us if that's something you'd like to learn more about and to find out if engagement with Kruze makes sense.

Startup Budgeting

Having a solid budget helps your startup hit its goals without prematurely running out of cash. A number of us here at Kruze Consulting have worked in fast-growing startups and we've compiled our tips on how to make this budgeting process work. The most important thing is you need to understand or have a vision of what your long-term strategy is and what you need to do to achieve those goals. You'll want to bake your budget around what your strategy is, and the budget is actually the financial representation of that strategy. You got to make sure your team knows what the strategy is - what your financial goals are in terms of the revenue that you need to hit and the cash need to burn. Or what features need to be built and then you'll want to start to pay careful attention to the key parts of the budget. So, for most early-stage startups, the biggest part of burn is headcount. So, you want to pay careful attention to your headcount projections over the coming year and because you'll put this together with your team and your team will have their headcount projections. It will really help them manage their team in a particular know when they need to start recruiting so they'll know when they should be able to bring on additional heads. You should have a very strong opinion on what the revenue should be over the next year. So for example, if you're a SAAS company you should know what your next milestone needs to be in terms of recurring revenue so that you can successfully raise your next round. And then you'll want to build your plan and your budget around what it takes to get there. You want to be very careful around your burn rate. So you want to know how much money you're burning so that you don't prematurely run out of money. And then you'll want to know what your monthly burn is at the end of the year like the burn of the exit with at the end of the year so that you can project your cash out date. You want to make sure you're not... You want to make sure that you run out of cash when you expect to run out of cash which hopefully aligns with you being worth more and raising more capital. Once you've got all this put together you can make sure that it's carefully shared with your department leaders so they can come back and build their detailed budgeting plans with you. And also, they can very clearly understand what their goals are.

How to record Equity Investments on the Balance Sheet

There are two ways that startups might want to record equity investments that they get, like venture capital rounds, on their balance sheet. 1) The Official GAAP way - probably overkill for most startups 2) The way investors like to see it The GAAP way wants your equity section to have three accounts, Common Stock, Preferred Stock, and Additional Paid-in Capital. The hardest part of this is to calculate the Additional Paid in Capital is like the (Issue Price – Par Value) * Basic Shares Outstanding. Financing Costs are netted against this account. Investors prefer to see each new fundraising round as a new equity account. If you use this method, you’ll have Common Stock, Seed Series Stock, Series A, Series B, etc. You’ll subtract your financing costs against each rounds amount. In this method, if you haven’t really calculated APIC, don’t include it on your Balance Sheet - you don’t want to give the impression that you are doing things on a GAAP basis when you are not. Notice that once fundraising round is closed, new funds aren’t added to it. New funds are placed in a new fundraising Equity account. Why do venture capitalists prefer to see the Equity section in the non-GAAP, simpler method? Because it’s cost effective (from a cash-burn spent on accountants perspective) and it’s easy for them to understand how much the company has raised at each round of financing.

Budgeting tips

Here are a few tips for you as you're building a budget for your startup. 1- Headcount is going to be your primary expense in most cases, so this is the place to focus the most. Understanding why your different team members get hired, and how they help you get to the next milestone, is very important. 2- You should have a really strong opinion on the amount of revenue and the amount of cash burn that you'll have in the coming years. Don’t ask your department heads what they want to spend - tell them how much is available and ask them to work within the constraints. 3- Match the amount of cash you need with the size opportunity of the company that you're trying to build. If you are building a company with modest potential, don’t burn millions of dollars!

Where to start your Model

So you’ve got the great idea, and maybe even have the team put together. Heck, maybe you even have a client or two! Now you want to put together a financial model to figure out if you can raise capital, or how long you can last with your existing investment. How do you start that model? There is no single answer to the best way to get going, but here are a few places to think about at first:

How big is the market, and if you capture a small amount of it, do you have enough revenue to have a real business? VCs often ask this question - and it’s a good one for you as you try to decide how to formulate your business. Are you looking at a $100 million revenue opportunity in 3, 5 or 7 years? Or if you get a meaningful percent of the addressable market, will you only have a $5 or $10 million business? This will help you size how much venture funding you should think about raising (and how much you should burn in the near term).
How many people do you need on the team to get to your first milestones? If you need a developer or engineer, is that you or one of the other founders? Or will you need to have cash on the balance sheet to afford to pay a salary for an engineer? You’ll want to model out and project the salary requirements for the business in the first few years pretty carefully, as this is usually the majority of a startup’s cash burn at first.
Understand your product’s unit economics. How much will your clients pay, and what will your costs to deliver it be at first, then at scale? The goal is to understand when the company has a viable cash flow positive product. It’s totally OK, and normal, for a company to lose money on every sale at first, but you do eventually want to have positive cash contributions from your sales.

SaaS User Metrics Modeling Tips

SaaS companies have specific financial modeling needs. In particular, a SaaS company wants to have a strong understanding of its user metrics. This includes how many users are acquired, churned, upgraded in a given period (we usually model it monthly.) Secondly, the length of time of contracts, and how your company is paid, matter for SaaS companies. Annual contracts that are paid up front can create deferred revenue, which is great for cash flow but does present some challenges from a modeling perspective. Finally, many SaaS models that we create have different pricing tiers to help the SaaS company understand the influence and impact of different pricing plans on the company’s top line growth and profitability.

Modeling Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)

What are Customer Acquisition Costs and how do you model them? CAC looks, on a per new unit (i.e. customer basis) how much you pay to get a new customer. So, if you spend $10,000 on sales and marketing and get 100 new customers, your CAC is $10,000 / 100, or $100. The costs that go into CAC usually have two components, fixed costs, and variable costs. Examples of fixed costs would be costs that don’t increase as your company grows. The salary for your demand generation team would be a clear example of a fixed cost - if they are scalable, then you can acquire 1 user or 100 in a period and still have the same salary cost. Some software costs don’t vary much as the company grows, such as the cost of SEO software. Variable costs move up as the company acquires more customers. Clear examples of variable costs include some online marketing costs, such cost per click advertising. The cost of a sales team can also be variable, as you likely need to hire an ever increasingly large sales team to help your company close more and more new clients.

Tips for optimizing a startup’s runway

Managing a company’s burn and the runway is a constant challenge for an early-stage, funded company. Having helped hundreds of companies manage their burn, Kruze Consulting’s view is that the companies who have a well-developed budget are the ones who best manage their runway. You need to have a vision of what your long-term strategy is and what you need to do to achieve those goals so that you can build a budget to manage your burn and optimize your runway. Why do you need a budget? Because knowing where you want to spend, and how those choices impact your burn, is critical to managing your runway. Plus, you need something against which to measure your burn - and that’s called your budget!! Your budget may have money coming in - other than venture capital money, that would be from revenue. Revenue may or may not be an important part of your projections. If you are something like a SaaS company, you’ll likely need a particular set of revenue and revenue growth numbers to raise your next round. Build your budget based on the targets you need to hit - and then you can modify your hiring and other burn based on how closely you hit your spending. Money goes out of your company’s expenses. Every very early-stage startup spends >80% of their money on 3 things: Payroll, Rent, and Contractors. You may also have some large legal expenses from your recent fundraise, so ask your attorney if you haven’t already. Controlling these expenses give you levers you need to manage your runway. Payroll: people are expensive. Hire the very best people that you can and pay them well. Always take the quality of people over quantity. As David Barrett highlights in this article, more people does not equal more output, it means more overhead. Rent: Rent is expensive, so consider having some remote people, using a WeWork or headquartering in a city other than San Francisco or New York. Contractors: Contractors are expensive… but less so than employees. You don’t have to manage additional rent/desk space, equipment, or training. You will also feel less likely flexing their hours/spend, although, in turn, they may give you less loyalty.

Projecting working capital

Working Capital is effectively the delta between a startup is paid by its clients and when it needs to pay its vendors. A more technical definition of working capital is the difference between current assets and current liabilities on a company's balance sheet. Working capital matters for startup financial models because understanding working capital becomes important for being able to project cash flows. Not all clients will pay immediately. Not all vendors need to be paid immediately (although some may be paid ahead of time). Critical factors to think through when modeling the impact of working capital in a startup’s financial model include: how long it takes to get paid (especially if selling into the enterprise); if any revenue will be collected up front (creating deferred revenue and putting cash onto the balance sheet); which vendors are being pre-paid; how long the payment will be on other vendors. If you are modeling a very early stage startup, it’s OK to assume you pay your vendors in the same month and defer your revenue collection 30 to 60 days. Later stage companies will likely need to have a more detailed working capital model built into their balance sheet and cash flow projections.

Calculating the cost of an employee in your model

When you are analyzing the cash flow of each new employee, you need to look beyond their core salary. Things like benefits, commissions, computer setup and more should be taken into account.

What financial statements do startups need to produce?

All startup projections should have an income statement and a running cash balance. You can also have the three, traditional financial statements in your model if you’d like; those are:

Income statement
Balance sheet
Cash flow statement

Having all three does increase the complexity of your projection work - remember, the balance sheet should balance, the cash flow’s ending cash amount should equal the cash position on the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement and the income statement are intricately linked! So we don’t recommend that level of complexity for your seed stage model - just the IS and the cash position (maybe working capital or inventory).

How to set up realistic financial projections for startups

Silicon Valley-style technology and biotech startups, by their very nature, have extreme financial projections. No venture capitalist wants to invest in a highly-risky company where the management has modest projections! But how should a founding team set up realistic projections that are still aggressive enough to explain the massive opportunity and get VC’s interested in investing?

Step 1: make sure the projections capture the size of the market; bigger markets lend themselves to bigger projections and estimates, higher growth, etc.
Step 2: if you are projecting big growth/big top-line revenue numbers, don’t forget to have big expenses to go along with them. In particular, we see time and time again founders who have projections of reaching $50 million or more in revenue with just a handful of employees. It would be very unusual to not have a lot of headcount growth to reach a huge revenue size. And VCs will doubt your credibility if you show them a company that has 80% pre-tax margins at scale - this is, generally, pretty unrealistic. So scale up your expense projections alongside your revenue growth.
Step 3: Focus on the assumptions behind your unit economics. Make sure these make sense from your target customers’ point of view. The average consumer can’t pay $50,000 per year for a new product; the average small business can’t either. So, understand the customers’ willingness to pay, and then how that impacts your margins and growth.
Step 4: Research similar companies’ business models and financial statements. For example, if you are in the social media space, look at Facebook and Twitter - see how their financial statements changed over time. The same is true if you are an eCommerce business - plenty of eCommerce companies have gone public and shared their data.
Step 5: Don’t model yourself out of a deal! If you are truly focusing on a huge market opportunity with tons of potential customers willing to pay for your product, don’t be so conservative that your projections don’t look interesting to potential investors, co-founders and employees.

What projections needs to go into a VC pitch deck?

There are two types of standard financials that are needed in a VC pitch deck. and they can usually be shared in the same summary slide. The first is for companies that already have real operations, so a pure "startup" with no operating history doesn't really need this. But if your company is in business, you'll want to show the historical financials in a summary format. And these should "roll" into the projections, which is the second thing you'll need to show. Note that it makes sense to do this either quarterly or yearly - too much detail isn't helpful in a deck. The second is that the best pitch decks also have financial projections. Again, you'll want to integrate these into the historical projections, and in most cases show them all on one slide. Keep in mind that the VC is trying to understand 1) what the company will look like when it raises the next round of funding; 2) how "big" the founders think the business can get; 3) how much capital the business will need; and 4) do the founders have a good grasp of the financial implications of their business model.

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As a startup, moving quickly is a top priority for us and we just needed to get our tax return done. After we uploaded our docs, we got our tax return in 3 days! E-filing was confirmed by Day 4. Super responsive and helpful!

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VP, Operations of Calm.com

Avochato has been growing rapidly in the past year – in fact, too quickly for us to keep up with books, taxes, and budgeting for growth. Partnering with Kruze Consulting has been fantastic to manage, track, and analyze our finances while we continue focusing on building our customer base. Kruze’s team knows what startups need.

Alex De Simone

CEO @ Avochato

I had a great experience working with Kruze Consulting when we raised Series A. They know what VCs need to see, and how to present a startup’s books and finances. If you are going to raise venture capital, you need experts like Kruze.

Chris Mansi

CEO @ Viz.ai

Kruze Consulting is the perfect Accounting, Finance and Tax partner for Los Angeles Startups. Kruze delivers exceptional monthly reporting and financial projections. When we need help with benefits or payroll, Kruze solves our problems. Kruze does our taxes for a fraction of what previous accountants have charged. Thank you Kruze for being a great partner.

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CEO @ FLYR

Being a repeat tech entrepreneur, I know how challenging it is to find the ideal CFO - not only is it often expensive to find the right one, but CFOs who combine expertise with scrappiness, market vision and perspective with detail orientation and 'roll up your sleeves' execution is near impossible for an early stage company. So I've been thrilled to work with Kruze Consulting, who not only provide all the ideal characteristics of a top-tier tech CFO, but also live and breathe entrepreneurship themselves. I've known Scott and Vanessa for many years and their deep personal integrity and strong reputation in the industry and made it an easy decision to work with them again.

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Charlie Silver

CEO @ Mission Bio

As a startup, it’s incredibly important to keep track of where our money is coming from and where it’s being spent. Kruze Consulting really helps keep our books and taxes in order so that we can focus on the core business. Extremely responsive and very professional, the accountants at Kruze Consulting are a pleasure to work with. We’d highly recommend their services.

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CEO @ Emburse

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Startup Financial Models

Numbers that Explain Your Startup’s Potential