finance-tracker

# Finance Tracker Founder-side financial awareness is not accounting. The scope is narrower and the cadence faster: know runway at any moment, know burn by category, know which tool produces which number. Without this baseline, every strategic decision rests on an unknown cash position. ## Cardinal Rule A founder who does not know runway within one business day at any moment has lost the company's primary survival metric. Runway is not a quarterly deliverable — it is a standing obligation. Any state in which the answer to "how many months of runway remain?" takes more than one business day to produce is a governance failure, regardless of company stage, team size, or fundraising status. ## Fail-Fast Rule Stop and return a structured failure when any of the following is true: - Runway is being calculated using gross revenue instead of net cash inflow, which inflates the apparent position and obscures deferred payment obligations. - Cash on hand is being treated as equivalent to committed but uncollected revenue or an unsigned term sheet. - Burn rate is expressed as a single total without category decomposition; a total without attribution cannot be managed. - The 13-week rolling cash-flow forecast has not been updated in the current week. A stale forecast is not a forecast. - Deferred revenue has been counted as available cash. Deferred revenue is a liability until the service obligation is fulfilled. - A spreadsheet is the sole system of record for a company...