Overview
Detailed Assessment
90-Day Plan
Model Notes
Alexandre,
Your financial thinking is ahead of your stage. Your financial plumbing isn't.
We ran our diagnostic across five areas that tend to break between Seed and Series A. Your model, your spend discipline, and your scenario planning are genuinely strong. The risk is that everything runs through you personally, and the systems underneath are manual enough that they'll slow you down the moment Halo signs and the partner channel picks up.
The one thing to do first: Get payroll onto Wagepoint or Humi, and set up Dext for expenses. Under $100/month combined. Removes the most immediate friction before things accelerate.
2
Financial Visibility
Your model is strong. The process feeding it is informal.
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3
Burn Discipline
Best-in-class for your stage. Constraint-driven hiring.
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2
Metric Integrity
Revenue segmented well. No deployment economics yet.
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1
Operational Scalability
Manual payroll, no expense tools, manual data flows.
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1
Finance Ownership
You are the entire finance function.
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Will break as you scale
Will slow you down
Built to hold
$1.5M
Cash on hand
~20 mo
Runway (current burn)
$150K
ARR (1 customer)
$73K
Monthly burn (Feb)
Questions on any of this? Happy to walk through it.
Grab 20 Minutes
or email jordan@growthpartners.ca
We evaluate five areas that determine whether your company has the operating infrastructure to scale after raising. These are the things that tend to break between now and Series A. Each gets a simple rating: green means it would hold without you, amber means it's started but could slow you down, and red means it will break under pressure.
Financial Visibility Can you see what's happening financially without building the picture from scratch?
Burn Discipline Is spending connected to a plan with scenarios, or based on the bank balance?
Metric Integrity Are you tracking what a Series A investor will actually ask about?
Operational Scalability Will your payroll, expenses, and reporting systems still work at twice the size?
Finance Ownership Could finance keep running if you took two weeks off?
2
Financial Visibility
Can you see what's actually happening?
What we found
- You built a model with budget vs. actuals, scenarios, and a dashboard. Well above average for pre-seed.
- Only one month of actual data so far. The system is built but hasn't been tested over time.
- No formal monthly close. Your bookkeeper gives you payroll numbers but there's no structured process completing each month.
- You review numbers every couple of weeks. Good instinct, but it's informal and depends on you having the time.
- Board reporting done once (December). Appropriate, but there's no repeatable process to produce it.
What's at stake
Right now this works because everything is fresh in your head. When you're traveling to pharma sites and managing Halo's onboarding, the model won't get touched for 6 to 8 weeks. That's when the picture goes stale and board conversations run on outdated numbers.
What to do about it
Set up a lightweight monthly close: books reconciled within 15 days, actuals dropped into the model, a quick snapshot to the board. Put it on the calendar. The model is excellent. What's missing is the habit that keeps it fed when you're busy.
3
Burn Discipline
Is your spending connected to a plan?
What we found
- You hire based on constraints: the team identifies a bottleneck, maps it to a capability gap, and only then opens a role.
- Bear, base, and bull scenarios are modelled. Your detailed scenario tab ties client signing timing to hire timing to burn.
- About 88% of your spend is people. Non-people costs run roughly $8K per month. Very little waste.
- IRAP grants ($400K last year, another envelope this year) are built into your cash flow planning.
What's at stake
This is your strongest area. Your engineering background shows. The one thing to watch: this discipline lives in your head and in team conversations. As you add more hires in H2, the process needs to be written down so it's reviewable at board level.
What to do about it
Keep doing what you're doing. Write down your hiring trigger criteria in the model: what constraint triggers the hire, what the expected output is, and what it does to burn. This becomes evidence for Series A.
2
Metric Integrity
Are you measuring what actually matters?
What we found
- Revenue is properly split between integration (one-time) and licence (recurring). Important and done right.
- Your pipeline tracks deal status clearly: Closed, Verbal, Pilot, Pipeline.
- No deployment cost tracking per client. No CAC. No gross margin by customer. You said it yourself: "the deployment efficiency, we don't really have metrics on it."
- Your 3-year projections use a gross margin assumption (20% to 60% to 80%) that isn't based on actual delivery data yet.
- Partner commissions aren't in the revenue model. The channel partner's cut means your net revenue on referred deals is lower than what the model shows.
What's at stake
As you bring on your next 2 or 3 customers, the cost to deploy each one will tell you whether $100K to $150K ACV is a healthy deal or a margin problem. Enterprise implementations with heavy customization can eat into margins in ways that are hard to spot until you're already committed.
What to do about it
Start logging hours per implementation from the next customer forward. A simple time tracker per project is enough. Also add a commission line in the revenue model so the partner's cut is visible. Both are small changes that pay off significantly when the Series A conversation starts.
1
Operational Scalability
Will your systems scale with you?
What we found
- Payroll: your accountant sends you the numbers, then you pay directly from the bank. No full-service platform.
- Expenses: no Dext, no receipt automation. You called it "annoying" and said it takes about an hour. It will take longer as the team grows.
- QuickBooks data is exported manually and pasted into your model each month.
- Board reporting gets assembled by hand every time.
What's at stake
This is the weakest area and the one that will show cracks first. At 8 people, manual processes are annoying but survivable. At 12 to 15, with 3 or 4 active customer implementations and the partner channel generating demos, every manual step becomes a real bottleneck. The board deck that takes you 2 hours today will take 6.
What to do about it
Move payroll to Wagepoint or Humi before the next hire. Set up Dext for expense capture. These are low-cost and high-leverage. Also worth asking: will your current bookkeeper adopt these tools? If not, they may not be the right fit for where you're headed.
1
Finance Ownership
Does finance run without you?
What we found
- You handle cash flow, budgeting, the model, board reporting, spend decisions, and expense oversight.
- Your accountant covers payroll calculations and government filings. No strategic finance input beyond that.
- You said it yourself: "I don't see why I should be the one doing that." The awareness is there.
- If you took two weeks off, every financial process in the company would stop.
What's at stake
Every hour you spend on payroll, expenses, and model updates is an hour you're not spending closing Halo or working the partner channel. You're capable of doing this well, and that's part of the problem. Being good at something makes it harder to let go of, even when your time is worth more elsewhere.
What to do about it
You don't need a full finance engagement right now. But set a clear trigger for when you will: probably when customer number 3 signs and implementation workload doubles. Have the scope figured out ahead of time so the decision is ready when you need it.
Want to walk through any of these in more detail?
Grab 20 Minutes
or email jordan@growthpartners.ca
1
Remove the Manual Friction
Days 1 to 30
- Move payroll to Wagepoint or Humi. Full-service QC payroll that handles taxes, ROEs, and T4s. Roughly $20 to $40 per employee per month.
- Set up Dext for expense capture. Receipt scanning and auto-categorization into QBO. About $30 per month.
- Put the monthly close on the calendar. Books reconciled within 15 days, actuals into the model, a quick update to the board. Make it a recurring event.
- Check in on your bookkeeper. If they won't adopt Dext or similar tools, they may not be the right fit for the next stage of the company.
2
Build the Metrics Layer
Days 30 to 60
- Track implementation hours per customer. Simple time log per project. This is the foundation for understanding your deployment economics.
- Add partner commissions to the revenue model. Reflect the channel partner's cut so you can see the real net revenue on referred deals.
- Calculate your cost per deployment. People hours times loaded cost, divided by the implementation fee. Know this number for 2 to 3 customers before any Series A conversation.
- Write down your hiring criteria. Document the constraint-based process you described on our call. Put it in the model so it's visible at board level.
3
Prepare the Evidence Layer
Days 60 to 90
- Ground your margin assumptions in real numbers. Use the Halo implementation to replace the estimated gross margin projections with actual delivery cost data.
- Build a board deck template. Cash position, burn, runway scenarios, pipeline status, deployment margin. Build it once, then reuse it quarterly.
- Move the cap table to Mantle. Free for the first year. Creates a single source of truth before you issue more options.
- Set your finance function trigger. Define the conditions (probably customer number 3) where you bring in outside support. Have it scoped so you're not figuring it out under pressure.
Want help prioritizing or getting started on any of these?
Grab 20 Minutes
or email jordan@growthpartners.ca
What's working well: Revenue is properly split between integration and licence. Your QB-to-model mapping is automated with lookup tables. Budget detail is granular with raise timing built in. The scenario planner connects client timing to hire timing to burn. This is more sophisticated than what we typically see at Series A, let alone pre-seed.
Worth watching: Your 3-year gross margin projection (20% to 60% to 80%) is assumption-based. Once you have real delivery cost data from your next implementation, replace it with a bottom-up calculation. Also, your channel partner's commission (the medium double-digit cut you mentioned) isn't reflected in the revenue tab. That means net revenue on partner-referred deals is currently overstated in the model.
Not there yet: No cost-of-goods-sold or cost-of-delivery tracking. No unit economics layer. No burn multiple calculation. None of this is urgent at pre-seed, but all of it should be in the model before you start the Series A conversation.
Want a second set of eyes on anything specific in the model?
Grab 20 Minutes
or email jordan@growthpartners.ca