Startup cash & runway dashboard

A cash and runway dashboard answers one question a founder is asked in every board meeting and every investor call: how long does the money last? The preview above shows the four figures that answer it — cash balance, net burn, runway in months, and burn multiple — on sample data for a fictional company.

What each number is doing

The four are deliberately not interchangeable. Each one catches a failure the others hide.

Runway is the headline, but burn multiple is the number investors have moved to, because two companies with identical runway can be in completely different positions. Burning $136,000 a month to add $97,000 of net new ARR is a 1.4x multiple and a company compounding. Burning the same amount to add $30,000 is a 4.5x multiple and a company buying growth it cannot afford.

Gross burn or net burn?

Runway should be measured against net burn — cash out minus cash in — because that is what actually consumes the balance. But keep gross burn on the dashboard anyway. Net burn flatters you in exactly the situation where you are most exposed: if revenue is concentrated in a few customers and one churns, your burn reverts towards gross overnight, and the runway figure you have been quoting was never the downside case.

The other trap is counting cash in as bookings rather than collections. A signed annual contract is not cash until it clears. Dashboards that read from the billing system rather than the bank will show runway that does not exist, and the gap is exactly your days sales outstanding.

Reading burn by category

The table in the preview breaks burn into five categories, with payroll at 60%. That ratio is the one to watch: for most software companies payroll should be the dominant line, and a dashboard where it is not usually means either a contractor-heavy build or an unexamined software and tooling bill.

Category-level burn is what makes the dashboard actionable rather than merely informative. Runway falling by two months tells you there is a problem; seeing that software and tools grew 40% in a quarter while headcount was flat tells you where it is. That split only exists if your chart of accounts was set up to produce it, which is why the reporting problem is usually a bookkeeping problem wearing a different hat.

The four mistakes that make runway wrong

1. Counting money you have been promised. A signed term sheet is not cash. Model it as a scenario, never in the base case — rounds fall through, and the runway number is the one thing that must not be optimistic.
2. Using a single month's burn. Use a trailing three-month average. One heavy month of annual software renewals can make runway look two months shorter than it is, and one light month can start a hiring decision that should not have been made.
3. Ignoring committed spend. Signed offer letters, annual contracts that auto-renew next quarter, and a lease you have not yet started paying are all burn that has already happened in every sense but the cash one.
4. Refreshing it quarterly. Burn moves whenever you hire, sign a vendor, or change payment terms. A runway figure that is three months old has usually moved by more than you would guess, and always in the direction you did not want.

How often to look at it

Cash balance daily, burn and runway monthly as part of the close, burn multiple quarterly. The daily cash figure is not about vigilance — it is about the fact that the first sign of a collections problem is usually a bank balance that did not move when you expected it to.

The six-month rule is worth building into the dashboard itself. A raise takes three to six months from first meeting to money in the bank, so the decision point is not when runway hits six months, it is six months before that. Our burn rate and runway calculator returns that date alongside the runway figure.

Where the data comes from

A dashboard is only as current as the books behind it. This one reads from the bank feed, payroll, and the accounting ledger, which means it is accurate on the days the books are accurate. That is the real reason most startup dashboards drift: they are built on a ledger that closes three weeks after month end, so the runway figure on screen is describing a company that no longer exists.

Zinance closes books daily rather than monthly, so the figures above are current rather than reconstructed. See real-time bookkeeping for how that works, or bookkeeping for funded startups for what the engagement covers.

Frequently asked questions