What it knows when you ask
Plainhub's agent answers from a snapshot of your model that goes out with every question: cash in the bank, monthly costs, MRR, net burn and runway, team size and cost, spend by category, the share of revenue from your top customer, revenue that is signed but not paying yet, revenue marked at risk, and up to 14 customers with their monthly amount and status. These are the numbers on the startup financial dashboard, kept in the startup finance platform the agent sits in.
It is instructed to answer only from those figures and to say what it would need when they are not enough. It does not get your list of past transactions, the date, or your earlier questions. Each question is answered on its own, so "what changed since last month?" is outside what it can see, and a follow-up needs the context repeated.
A worked example
Say you have €240,000 in the bank, €41,000 of monthly costs and €13,000 of MRR. Net burn is €28,000 and runway is 8.6 months. Your biggest customer pays €5,200 a month, 40% of revenue, so Plainhub already shows a concentration warning on the Revenue page.
Ask "can I afford a €6,500 hire?" and the arithmetic the agent has to do is 240,000 / 34,500 = 7.0 months. Ask "what happens if my top customer leaves?" and it is 240,000 / 33,200 = 7.2 months. The wording of the answer changes from one question to the next because it is a language model; the inputs do not. For a number you are about to act on, add the hire as a draft on the Plans page, which computes runway and the cash-out date with the same formula every time.
Log money from a sentence
You can log money by typing a sentence such as "paid 4,000 for Meta ads", "received 12,000 from Northwind" or "add customer Acme paying 2,000 a month". The agent proposes the entry, with the amount formatted and the category it picked, and waits. Nothing is saved until you confirm.
Code reads the amount using the same parser as the app's money fields. Review the proposed amount and category before confirming, especially when your sentence contains several numbers. It can only add an expense, an income or a customer, dated today. It never edits or deletes anything; you do that on the page where the entry lands.
What it will not do
Plainhub's agent has five limits: it does not give regulated financial, tax or investment advice, it stops at 20 questions an hour per account, only the workspace owner can open it, it needs an active subscription, and it knows only what you have recorded. Each is explained below.
- Give regulated financial, tax or investment advice, file anything, close your books or talk to your bank.
- Answer more than 20 questions an hour per account. Past that, replies come from built-in rules on the same numbers until an hour has passed.
- Work for teammates. Only the workspace owner can open it, because it reads the whole model, salaries included.
- Run without a subscription. The live agent needs an active Pro or Max plan; the demo answers from built-in rules.
- Know anything you have not recorded. If the model is three weeks old, so are the answers.
A language model can still get arithmetic wrong, so check any figure you plan to act on against the Overview or a draft plan. For decisions that need judgment, like how to structure a raise, you want a person: what a fractional CFO costs and when you need one covers that side.
Where your numbers go
The question and the snapshot above go to Plainhub's backend and to a third-party language-model provider, only to write the reply. They are not used for advertising. The privacy policy lists the providers by role. Plainhub never asks for bank logins, so nothing from your accounts is in the snapshot unless you typed it in.
