For founders & startups
Cash flow forecasting for founders
bluprnts lets a founder build a financial forecast from the decisions they are actually making — what they sell, who they hire, what they spend and what they raise. It works before you have books to extrapolate, so a pre-revenue company can model its runway on day one.
What founders use it for
Three questions it answers
“How long have we got?”
The question underneath most founder anxiety. Not an average burn rate, but which month specifically gets tight, and how close to zero it comes before it recovers.
“Can we afford to do this?”
A hire, a lease, a marketing push, a price change. Each one is a fork, and the honest answer needs the two futures side by side rather than a feeling about headroom.
“What do we show them?”
Investors, a bank, a board. All three want the same thing: numbers that hold up when somebody pulls on them, and the assumptions written down beside them.
How long is our runway?
bluprnts reads runway off your forecast cash path rather than dividing your balance by an average burn. The model produces a closing bank balance for every month, so the answer is the first month that balance would go negative, and the lowest point it reaches on the way.
The difference shows up exactly when it matters. A startup can average a comfortable burn across a year and still be short in a single month, because a VAT bill, an annual renewal and a slow-paying customer happened to land together. An average will never show you that month. A month-by-month path shows you nothing else.
Because runway is derived rather than entered, it moves when the plan moves. Push a hire back a quarter and the figure updates, along with the statements and every report built on them.
Can we afford to hire?
Hiring is the decision founders re-litigate most often and model least well, usually because the cost of a person is not their salary. It is their salary plus employer national insurance plus pension, starting in a particular month, against revenue that may not arrive for two more.
In bluprnts you build it as a scenario: add the headcount from the month you would actually start them, and compare it against your base plan. The comparison shows what you need to know, which is rarely the profit line. It is the lowest cash point, and whether the new one is survivable.
The same shape works for the other forks: putting prices up, losing a large customer, stretching supplier terms, or taking funding. Each is a set of levers rather than a new spreadsheet, and each stays live against the base case as the plan changes underneath it.
What do we send investors?
A report, generated from the live model, in your brand. It carries the headline figures, a written narrative, the cash chart with its low point marked, the full statement tables and an assumptions register: forecast length, opening balances, payment profiles, tax treatment, everything a diligence process asks for in its first email.
The narrative is written by AI. Not one number in it is. Every figure is computed by the forecasting engine from your model and traces back to the drivers behind it. That distinction matters more in a raise than anywhere else: the moment an investor finds a figure they cannot reconcile, they stop reading your document and start auditing you.
Export it to PDF for the data room, or share a link that stays current while the plan is still moving.
No accounting data? Still works.
This is the part most cash flow tools cannot do. Almost all of them connect to Xero or QuickBooks and project your accounting history forward, which means a company with no history has nothing for them to work with.
bluprnts builds the forecast from drivers you set rather than data you have accumulated: the products you intend to sell, the price you intend to charge, the people you intend to hire, the costs you already know about, and whatever you have raised or borrowed. Every one of those exists before your first sale does.
A pre-revenue company can model its runway on day one. That is not a softened claim. There is genuinely nothing to connect first.
Once you are trading and keeping books, you can connect Xero to bring actuals in alongside the plan. It grounds the model against reality. It is never the thing the model is made of.
Proof
We have no founder case studies yet, so we are not going to show you any. What we can show you is the product working on a real model, which you can open without giving us anything.
The live demo runs six made-up companies. Each has a complete five-year forecast built from its own products, sales, people, costs and financing, with statements, runway, scenarios and finished reports. None of them has an accounting system connected. Change any driver and watch the rest of the model move.
Model your runway before you need to.
Start free. No accounting data required.
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