Startup Financial Model building is a pain. Let’s be honest. Unless you are the Goddess of Excel, Leila Gharani. It’s not just a problem of building up the model. The main issue is knowing what information to put into it.
For startups, a financial model is a finance tool that should be the numerical representation of the startup’s strategy and vision. It communicates and forecasts the company’s revenues, customers, KPIs, expenses, employee headcount and cash position.
For early-stage businesses or simple ‘ideas,’ the startup financial model is a business plan that outlines the near-term expenses and goals for the company, and longer-term illustrates the startup’s growth potential. Companies raising venture capital funding will use the projections as a tool to communicate with the VCs, and it will often be an important part of finance due diligence.
Most projections that investors and experienced founders are expecting to see are pretty much the same template – revenue and expense projections, and a net cash position. Some templates have the three most important financial statements (the income statement, cash flow statement and balance sheet), but many templates simplify to just the income statement and a projected cash position.
We tend to recommend that founders use a template without the balance sheet and cash flow statement unless they are working with a professional like us. This is because the balance sheet can be tricky to model correctly – an unbalanced balance sheet is embarrassing and can cause investors to lose faith in the modelling exercise.
Since most early-stage companies don’t have complicated working capital, capex or loans, the balance sheet adds less to the analysis than you’d think. Thus, we recommend that founders who DIY their projections use a template that doesn’t bother with the balance sheet and cash flow statement. Although, when we produce projections our templates and outputs always have these statements – but again, we do this every day, so it doesn’t take us meaningfully longer to get them right.
If you’d like to learn more about Financial Modelling, we highly recommend this page on the Kruze Consulting website, which also has free templates that you can use.
If you are the Founder of a Startup and you intend to raise capital from anyone other than your friends and family, you need to build a financial model before you start contacting investors.
Just in case you were wondering, I wrote another blog which covers the topic – what business metrics do investors check before investing? You can read it here.
James Spurway is an Angel Investor, Mentor, Advisor, Speaker, former Commercial Pilot, and Author who specialises in raising debt and equity capital. He strives to model diversity, equity, and inclusion in the founders he agrees to invest and work with. He has paused his angel investing activity to focus on raising his first US$ 50M venture capital fund, which will invest in startups that can accelerate the achievement of net zero emissions. James spent the past 33 years living in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, the USA, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Australia, his country of birth. In that time, he started 10 businesses, exited from seven, shut down two, and kept one. He has invested in a total of 50 startups since 2001 and had six successful exits.
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