What you'll do with it
Build a 3-year monthly budget. Track expenses and hires. Model equity, debt, and grant funding. Watch your cash balance roll forward and see exactly when you run out, and what changes when you cut, hire, or close a round.
Lighter than the Standard Financial Model. No prebuilt revenue logic. Paste your revenue assumptions in and focus on the spend side. Most early-stage founders don't need a complex revenue forecast; they need to know the burn picture is right.
Edit with AI
Every cell open. Inputs in blue, formulas in black, rows documented. Built so you and your AI can edit without breaking it.
- Context primer. Paste it into Claude or ChatGPT before you make a change.
- Prompt guide. Ready-made prompts for setup, hire planning, scenario modeling, and board prep.
- Hemrock Skill. A drop-in Claude Agent Skill that loads this model's sheet map, prompts, and checks into any Claude Project. Free, with no connector to set up.
- MCP server. On ChatGPT, Cursor, or another tool? The MCP server feeds the same context to any AI that speaks MCP.
- Verify before you trust. The sanity-check prompts catch hallucinated numbers and wrong references.
Common questions
Why download this when I could build a burn tracker myself?
You could. But the burn picture going into a round or a board meeting has to be right, and a cash forecast that double-counts a hire or drops a month is the kind of mistake nobody catches until it matters. This is a clean structure that already handles the rolling cash math, so you (or your AI) fill in numbers instead of debugging formulas.
What's the difference between this and the Standard Financial Model?
This is cost-focused. Plug your own revenue numbers in. The Standard adds a full prebuilt revenue model. Pick that one if you need to forecast acquisition, conversion, churn, MRR/ARR, and the like.
Excel or Google Sheets?
Both. All formulas open, no macros.
Pay what you want?
Yes. Set the price you think is fair. Updates are free for the major version.
What if I outgrow it?
Move to the Standard Financial Model when you need real revenue modeling. The cost structure carries over.
Documentation