Investor reporting for startups

What investors want to see every month or quarter

Reporting doesn't have to be extensive, it has to be consistent and current. In practice a limited set of figures does the work, provided they're the same set every period and they reconcile with your books.

• Cash position and the movement since the previous period.
• Burn: net spend per month, and how it develops.
• Runway: how many months you have left at the current burn.
• Revenue, and for subscription models MRR or ARR with churn.
• Gross margin and the cost lines that drive it.
• The KPIs specific to your model, configured once and then tracked.

Why this usually goes wrong

Almost every startup starts reporting by hand: an export from the bookkeeping, a number from the billing tool, a tab in a spreadsheet. That works for two quarters. Then someone leaves, a definition changes, and the revenue in the investor update no longer matches the revenue in the books.

That mismatch costs more credibility than a bad month. A month you can explain. Two different numbers for the same thing suggests nobody is in control of the source, and it's exactly the kind of thing an investor's advisor pulls on during due diligence.

How we set it up

Everything comes out of one source: your bookkeeping, kept current daily. Your dashboard reads directly from it, so a figure in your reporting is the same figure as in your books, by construction rather than by reconciliation.

On top of that sits the investor portal. Your board members and lead investors get their own login with role-based access, so they see the report you want them to see without PDFs travelling through WhatsApp. Basic portal access is included on all plans; a white-label portal with your own branding is an add-on on the Growth and Scale plans, and the Scale plan includes a quarterly report.

Monthly update or quarterly report?

Both exist alongside each other, and they serve different purposes. A monthly update is short and factual: the numbers, what changed and what you're doing about it. A quarterly report is the fuller picture that a board discusses, with the trend across periods instead of one month in isolation.

What matters more than the frequency is that both come from the same source, so a monthly figure and the quarterly figure that contains it never contradict each other. That's the part that breaks when reporting is assembled by hand each time.

• Monthly: cash, burn, runway and revenue, straight from the dashboard.
• Quarterly: the same figures with the trend, margin development and your KPIs, in a report you can share.
• Continuously: your dashboard, so between reports nobody has to wait for an update.

Around a round and a due diligence

When a round gets serious, the questions get specific: why did costs jump in March, what's in that one large item, does this contract match this invoice. With a current administration you answer from the dashboard instead of from memory.

Two things make that possible, and both are a by-product of daily bookkeeping rather than a separate project: every change has an audit trail, and the documents sit with the entries they belong to. That's why preparation for a due diligence is mostly a matter of not having let things slip.

Where our work stops

We produce the figures and the reporting. We don't write the story around them.

• We do: the reporting set, the dashboard, the portal, the underlying bookkeeping and the year-end close, so every number is traceable.
• We don't: your investor narrative, your forecast as advice, a valuation, negotiation support or advice on the terms of a round. Those are a different profession, and we'll point you to a party that does it.