Track cash runway and test recurring costs for daily spending decisions. For a raise, model hiring dates and revenue assumptions month by month, including what happens if revenue arrives late. This guide compares spreadsheets, startup modeling tools and FP&A suites by those different jobs.
Vendor details below were checked on each vendor's own site on 14 October 2026.
A startup financial model has to answer a different question at each stage: how long the cash lasts before you raise, whether the round reaches the next one while you raise, and whether you are on plan after Series A. The table sets out what the model must hold at each stage and which kind of tool is enough.
| Stage | The question | What the model needs | Enough tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed, pre-revenue | How long does the cash last, and what does the next hire do to it? | Cash, monthly costs, the team, one scenario | A simple sheet or a live runway tool |
| Seed, raising or just raised | Does this round get us to what the next round needs? | 18 to 24 months, month by month: hiring with start dates, revenue drivers, churn, use of funds, two or three scenarios | A spreadsheet model or a startup modeling tool |
| Series A and later | Are we on plan, and if not, why? | Three statements, actuals from the books against plan, department budgets, board reporting | An FP&A suite, run by a finance person |
Take a seed-stage SaaS company with €600,000 in the bank, €48,000 of monthly costs and €9,000 of MRR. Net burn is €39,000 a month, so runway is 600,000 / 39,000 = 15.4 months. The founders want two engineers at €7,500 a month each, fully loaded, starting in month four, and they expect MRR to grow 6% a month.
A live runway tool answers from today's numbers. Add the hires as a €15,000 a month plan and burn becomes €54,000, so runway reads 600,000 / 54,000 = 11.1 months. That is how Plainhub compares a draft plan: as if it started today, with revenue flat.
A month-by-month spreadsheet knows the hires start in month four. Three months at €39,000 spends €117,000, the remaining €483,000 lasts 8.9 months at €54,000, and runway is 11.9 months.
The same spreadsheet with 6% monthly growth lifts MRR to about €17,100 by month twelve and runway to 12.9 months.
The growth assumption, which takes most of the modeling effort, moved the answer by one month. The flat-revenue 11.1-month case shows your exposure if the growth assumption fails. The full model earns its place in the raise itself, where an investor will want the hiring plan and the revenue drivers behind the 12.9.
Building the investor model, then running the company off it. The model is right on the day it is finished. Three months later the hire started late, a customer churned and a tool got cancelled, and the runway tab still says what it said in the data room. Keep two things apart: a model you rebuild when you raise, and a runway number you update as money moves.
Four kinds of tool can hold a startup model: spreadsheet templates, startup modeling tools, FP&A suites and a live runway tool. Each is described below, with the vendors checked on their own sites on 14 October 2026, and the table at the end sets cost and best use side by side.
Free or close to it, and every investor can open the file. Slidebean offers a free startup financial model template (you register to create your model) with sheets for revenue, cost of goods, operating costs and capital spend. Hemrock (the old foresight.is address now redirects there) publishes open-source financial model spreadsheets on a pay-what-you-want basis. For the next thirteen weeks of cash rather than a full model, Graphite Financial has a free 13-week cash flow template for Excel and Google Sheets.
A template works at any stage if someone maintains it. What goes wrong is formulas that break quietly as the file grows, and a model nobody opens between rounds.
These replace the spreadsheet with a guided model. Sturppy Planning is aimed at early-stage founders building an investor-ready model without Excel skills; you can share a live read-only link with investors and export the model to CSV. Its Sturppy Plus tier connects live data and adds an AI CFO chat. Forecastr sells its software together with a dedicated finance expert, and its pricing page lists Essentials at $5,000 a year and Growth at $10,000 a year.
They suit a seed raise when you would rather not build the model from scratch. You still own the assumptions, and a guided model is only as good as the growth rate you type into it.
Budgeting, actuals against plan and reporting, fed by your accounting, payroll and CRM data.Abacum describes itself as an AI-native FP&A platform built for CFOs, with more than 700 integrations. Cube works inside Excel and Google Sheets and quotes every plan on request. Two names founders still search for have moved: Causal joined the Lucanet Group in October 2024 and now sits inside Lucanet's extended planning product, and Finmark belongs to BILL, which completed the acquisition, with finmark.com redirecting to bill.com. Finmark's help centre says its payroll integrations were discontinued from 30 July 2025. HiBob announced its acquisition of Mosaic in February 2025, and the old mosaic.tech address now leads to HiBob's FP&A product.
A suite makes sense with a finance hire, clean books and a board that wants variance analysis. Bought before anyone has time to run it, it sits empty. The suites are compared one by one in best FP&A software, and when you don't need it yet.
This is where Plainhub sits. You record money in and out in plain words, add the team on the People page and customers with their status, and runway, burn and MRR recompute on every change. A draft plan shows runway and the cash-out date before and after, up to three side by side, and committing it adds it to burn from its start date. There is no bank login and no accounting integration. Pro is €29.99 a month; Max, at €59.99, adds a PDF report with a twelve-month straight-line cash projection.
Plainhub fits as the live runway tool, not as the investor model. It projects in a straight line from this month's numbers, with no growth, no three statements and no budget against actuals, so the limits below are where a template, a modeling tool or an FP&A suite takes over.
| Option | Examples | What it costs you | Best at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spreadsheet template | Slidebean, Hemrock, Graphite 13-week | Free or pay what you want, plus your upkeep | A full model you control |
| Startup modeling tool | Sturppy, Forecastr | Sturppy sells plans and a lifetime deal; Forecastr from $5,000 a year with an analyst | An investor model without building it cell by cell |
| FP&A suite | Abacum, Cube, Lucanet (Causal), Finmark | Mostly priced on request, plus a person to run it | Plan against actuals once the books are clean |
| Live runway tool | Plainhub | €29.99 or €59.99 a month and a few minutes a week | Runway, burn and MRR kept current between raises |
Put your own cash, costs and revenue into the cash runway calculator and note the number. If you are about to hire, run the person through the employee cost calculator first, because the loaded cost is what goes into burn. If you are about to raise, size the round backwards from runway with how much runway to raise for, then build the model in a template or a modeling tool.
Usually not. Before you raise, the decisions are how long the cash lasts and what the next hire does to it, and a runway number answers both. Build the full model when you raise, because that is when someone will read it.
Causal joined the Lucanet Group in October 2024, and causal.app now points to Lucanet's extended planning product. BILL completed its acquisition of Finmark, finmark.com now redirects to bill.com, and the Finmark help centre is still online. We found no primary source for a Finmark shutdown date, so check with BILL before you plan around one.
Sources: Lucanet press release on Causal; BILL press release on Finmark; Finmark payroll integrations notice
Not for a raise. Plainhub projects in a straight line from this month's burn and revenue, with no growth assumptions, no three statements and no month-by-month hiring timeline. It replaces the weekly job of updating the runway tab; the investor model is a separate document.
For the model itself, often yes, and a good template saves most of the work. The weak point is upkeep: a sheet is right the day you update it. If nobody updates it between board meetings, keep the model for fundraising and track the live numbers somewhere that stays current.
Answer seven questions to see your first runway estimate before choosing a plan, with no card required. Keep the estimate current by recording changes to costs and revenue. You can explore the same app on a sample company in the homepage demo before signing up.