How to forecast runway and months of cash on Starch

Runway forecasting is the question every operator eventually has to answer: how many months of cash do you have left, and what would change that number? It sounds simple until you actually try to build a reliable model. Revenue is lumpy. Expenses don't fall neatly into categories. Your bookkeeper closes the month two weeks after it ends. And by the time you've stitched together a spreadsheet from bank exports and QuickBooks reports, the numbers are already stale.

What this workflow looks like in practice varies — the inputs, the cadence, and the decisions you're forecasting toward all shift depending on your business model and how fast things are moving. But the core job is the same: know your current burn rate from actual transactions, know your current cash balance from your actual bank accounts, and have a forward projection that updates when either of those change.

On Starch, you end up with a live dashboard that shows net burn, months of runway, and a 24-month forward projection — all pulling from your real bank balance and actual revenue, not last month's export. You can run side-by-side scenarios to see what happens to runway if hiring slows, revenue grows faster, or you delay a raise. The answer to 'when do I need to raise?' is there when you open your laptop in the morning, not after a Friday afternoon spreadsheet session.