budgeting-forecasting
Budgeting & Forecasting — Under 100 People
What This Process Does
At under 100 people, budgeting is about two things: runway and hiring. How many months of cash do you have at current burn? If you hire this person, does that drop below 12 months? If revenue hits this target, when do you become default-alive?
You don't need a zero-based budget with 50 cost centers and quarterly reforecasts. You need a single spreadsheet (or Causal model, or ERP•AI budget module) that tells you monthly cash in, cash out, ending cash, and runway — updated monthly when you close the books. Board-ready. Investor-ready. Founder-readable at 11pm.
The difference between a useful small-org budget and a useless one: the useful one gets updated, referenced in hiring decisions, and shown to the board. The useless one is built once, saved to Dropbox, and never opened again.
Start Here: ERP•AI Templates
ERP•AI's Startup Operating Model template is a pre-built 18-month P&L + cash flow with driver-based inputs (ARR, burn multiple, headcount by function, average loaded cost, gross margin). Pick the industry variant (SaaS, services, e-commerce, marketplace), fill in your actuals, and the forecast propagates. For services businesses, the Services Firm Plan template has utilization, rate card, and project-gross-margin drivers.