A free way to see your startup runway, from a bank CSV

I built ShoestringCFO after doing a lot of fractional CFO and COO work for startups, because I kept running into the same issue. The finances were misunderstood or just plain wrong, it was really hard to track only the important things, and there was no budget for expensive financial tools. So it's a dashboard that works out your cash, burn and runway from a CSV export of your bank. Every account gets 14 days free, and it doesn't ask for a card.

You asked about Mercury, Brex and Ramp too. I haven't checked what they include for free, so their own pages are the place to look. If one of them already shows you the numbers you want, great. Here's what ShoestringCFO does, so you can compare.

Getting your data in is the easy part. Download a CSV from your bank and drop it in. ShoestringCFO reads the columns, skips duplicate transactions, and never asks for your bank password. Automatic bank sync is coming, but it isn't live yet, so for now the CSV is how you get in. The first time takes about ten minutes, and after that it's a couple of minutes a week.

Then you get your answers on one screen. Cash on hand is what you have today. Monthly burn is your average spending over the last three complete months, so one big invoice doesn't throw it off. Runway is your cash divided by your burn, and it shows as months and as an actual date. Green means more than six months, yellow is three to six, and red is under three. Revenue sits right next to it.

Every transaction gets a clean vendor name and a category, with a note on why. If one's wrong, fix it, and the rules learn from your corrections. Those same transactions feed a P&L and a balance sheet, and every line traces back to the real transactions behind it.

ShoestringCFO is software, not an accounting service. It's built for the stage before you can afford one.

If you'd like a little help reading the numbers, Founder Plus adds an AI CFO. It gives you a feed of insights and a weekly email on what changed and why, and you can chat with it about your own numbers. Founder Core is $19 a month or $190 a year, and Founder Plus is $49 a month or $490 a year. The first 14 days are free, so you can import a CSV and see your runway date before you pay anything.