Public-company finance discipline for B2B SaaS founders approaching a first audit, a raise, or an exit. The senior seat your bookkeeper cannot occupy, and your auditor is barred from filling.
Your bookkeeper is excellent at the day to day, but technical accounting sits outside their remit. Your auditor will scrutinize your revenue recognition, your software capitalization, your stock comp, and your leases, yet independence rules bar them from making the judgment calls your raise depends on. A national firm quotes a number built for a company ten times your size. The gap opens precisely where the pressure is highest.
Most founders tell us the same thing: the books are messy, and they are not sure how messy. A raise, a first audit, or a bank facility is about to settle that question, in front of people who do this for a living. What surfaces sets your valuation, your timeline, and whether the round closes.
Your ARR bridge, net revenue retention, and CAC payback, defined the way the people across the table will rebuild them, so the story holds when they do.
When the board deck, the billing system, and the financials disagree, diligence slows and trust drops. One set of numbers, true everywhere.
Multi-element contracts, usage-based and ramped deals, and the standalone-selling-price allocation an investor and an auditor reprice first.
A driver-based forecast that survives a stress test on the call: bookings, burn, the hiring plan, and the months of runway behind them.
Books closed on a cadence an investor trusts, with the reconciliations and cutoff that make every other number believable.
Option expense, 409A valuations, and a cap table that ties to the equity rollforward an investor will trace line by line.
Sales commissions capitalized and amortized over the life of the customer, not the month you paid them.
What the auditor will ask for, the package that answers it, and the controls that hold the first time someone looks closely.
Your bookkeeper cannot make the calls a raise demands. Your auditor is barred from making them for you. The senior finance seat in between is the gap I close.
A focused 45-minute working session on wherever the pressure sits: a raise, a first audit, a facility, or a close that has outgrown its setup. You leave with the risks most likely to surface next and the order to fix them.
Entry pointDefensible technical accounting, a clean close, a complete PBC package, and controls that hold up the first time an auditor or an investor looks closely.
The sprintOngoing senior finance leadership through the raise, through the audit, and beyond. The standard of a public-company controller, without the cost of a full-time hire.
The engineA career built inside institutional capital, now opening that door for the founders the old guard tends to overlook. The same standard that satisfies an audit committee, applied at the stage where it actually changes your outcome.
Nine dimensions. Two minutes. A readiness score and your top gaps.
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