5 money metrics every founder should track
The handful of numbers that actually tell you whether your finances are healthy — and how to read them without a finance degree.
Most founders track everything and understand nothing. They open a dashboard, see forty numbers, and close it again none the wiser. The truth is that a small handful of metrics will tell you almost everything you need to know about the health of your money.
1. Runway
Runway is the number of months you can keep going at your current burn rate. It’s the single most important number you own, because it answers the only question that ever really matters: how long do I have?
Calculate it simply: cash in the bank divided by your average monthly net burn. If you have $120,000 and you spend $15,000 more than you earn each month, you have eight months. Check it weekly, not quarterly.
2. Net burn
Net burn is money out minus money in. Gross burn — total spend — feels scarier, but net burn is the honest number, because revenue is real and it offsets cost. Watch the trend more than the value. Burn creeping up while revenue stays flat is the quiet emergency most teams miss.
3. Gross margin
Gross margin tells you how much of every dollar of revenue you actually keep after the direct cost of delivering your product. A healthy software business often sits north of 70%. If yours is thin, growth makes the problem bigger, not smaller.
A business with weak margins doesn’t grow out of trouble — it grows into it faster.
4. Cash conversion
You can be profitable on paper and still run out of money. Cash conversion is the gap between earning a dollar and receiving it. If customers pay 60 days late but your team gets paid on the 1st, you need a buffer to bridge that gap. Track it.
5. The boring one: recurring expenses
Subscriptions, tools, retainers. They feel small individually and enormous in aggregate. Once a quarter, list every recurring charge and ask one question of each: would I sign up for this today? If not, cancel it.
You don’t need a finance team to watch these five. You need them in one place, updated automatically, and visible enough that you actually look. That’s the whole idea behind Cirrus.
