Advice and answers from the Slidebean Team
When building a startup’s financial model, one of the most important outputs is your financial statement—the core monthly breakdown that helps you understand if you’re on the path to profitability.
This article dives deep into the FS-Month sheet from our financial model template, showing you how to read a financial statement, how each component connects with your company’s operations, and what matters most for founders tracking performance and runway.
A financial statement is a structured summary of a business's financial performance. The FS-Month sheet includes three key sections:
All these sheets pull their data from elsewhere in the model—you should never manually input values here. That’s a key principle of working with our financial statement template: values flow from where they’re generated.
The income statement tells the story of your startup’s monthly performance. It includes:
Since this sheet connects directly to growth projections, taxes, and even your dashboard, always update the original input sheets rather than adjusting numbers directly here.
The balance sheet is a snapshot of your business’s financial health.
Key components include:
For example, equipment purchases show up as long-term assets, while loans are listed under liabilities. Manual inputs are allowed for rare items like inventory or prepaid expenses, but in general, the sheet is auto-filled by the rest of the model.
The cash flow statement has three sections:
This is where you’ll start modeling your startup's cash runway and figure out how long you can operate before needing additional capital.
Let’s say your startup launches in November 2023. Before then, you’ll see several months of negative net income and EBITDA. This is expected. As the model populates with your projections:
The model adjusts the monthly cash position automatically, calculating:
This provides a clear monthly view of how your financial statement evolves over time.
If you’re planning a funding round, this is where things get strategic.
You’ll see how much capital you need to inject to cover your cash dip.
For example:
These assumptions affect your cap table, equity, and dilution—automatically calculated in the model.
The FS-Month sheet allows you to simulate scenarios:
This allows you to optimize for capital efficiency and better runway planning—things that are crucial in the early stages of a startup.
Convertible notes, interest, and tax liabilities are also modeled here:
All of these elements affect your final ending cash balance, which is the single most important number for your business’s survival.
Use the dashboard to monitor how much runway you have left and when you’ll reach profitability.
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