Convert Bank Statements for Burn Rate and Runway

Runway comes from the bank, not the model

A founder can build an elaborate forecast, but the account balance is what actually keeps the lights on, and it moves for real reasons the model may not capture. Runway, the number of months before the cash is gone, is best measured from the bank statement, which records every dollar that truly left and arrived. Converting the statements to a spreadsheet turns that raw record into the monthly totals you need, so the runway figure rests on what happened rather than what was assumed.

Gross burn, net burn, and the runway number

Three figures tell the story. Gross burn is the total cash going out in a month. Net burn is that minus the cash coming in, your revenue, so it is the real monthly drain on the balance. Runway is the current cash divided by the average net burn, expressed in months. In a spreadsheet built from the statements you total outflows and inflows per month, subtract to get net burn, and divide the balance by it, so the three numbers fall out of the same tidy sheet instead of a guess.

Where the cash actually goes

Knowing the burn is half of it; knowing what drives it is how you change it. Categorizing the outflows, payroll, cloud and infrastructure, software subscriptions, marketing, contractors, shows which lines actually move the number. A converted spreadsheet lets you tag each payment and total by category, so instead of a single scary burn figure you get a ranked list of where the money goes, and therefore where cutting or renegotiating would extend the runway most.

Watching the trend for fundraising

One month's runway is a snapshot; the trend is the story investors and founders actually care about. Tracking net burn month over month shows whether you are drifting toward a wall or pulling away from it, which is the difference between being default alive and default dead. It also drives timing: raising while you still have healthy runway, often a year or more, is far easier than raising with a few months left, so watching the trend from the statements tells you when to act.

Accuracy and privacy

Because a wrong burn figure can send a founder into a raise too early or too late, every transaction is reviewable in the converter before export, so the runway math rests on accurate cash flows. The output is a clean spreadsheet ready to total and categorize. Since the statements hold the company's real activity, they are processed to build the spreadsheet and then deleted automatically, with nothing kept on a server afterward.

Frequently Asked Questions