Extended Runway by 4 Months

The Challenge

After raising a $2.5M seed round, the founding team focused on what they do best — building product. Financial management meant a shared Google Sheet updated by the CEO every other week. By month 10 post-raise, they knew cash was getting tight, but they didn't know how tight or why.

Their burn rate had crept from $85K/month at raise to $103K/month — an increase nobody planned for and nobody could fully explain. At the current rate, they had roughly 8 months of runway. Not enough to hit the metrics they needed for a Series A.

What CentSight Found

Within 48 hours of connecting QuickBooks, CentSight surfaced three categories of hidden costs:

• Duplicate SaaS subscriptions: Seven tools were being paid for on both individual and company cards. Total overlap: $4,200/month.
• Unused services: Four subscriptions from pre-launch experiments were still active. Nobody had used them in 5+ months. Cost: $2,800/month.
• Vendor price creep: Three vendors had implemented automatic annual price increases. Combined impact: $11,000/month over what was budgeted at raise.

The Fix

The team cancelled duplicates and unused subscriptions immediately — recovering $7,000/month with zero operational impact. They then renegotiated with the three vendors that had raised prices, using CentSight's historical pricing data as leverage. Two vendors offered rollbacks; the third offered a 12-month rate lock.

Net savings: $18,000/month. Burn rate dropped from $103K to $85K — back to post-raise levels.

The Impact

That $18K/month in recovered cash extended their runway from 8 months to 12 months — enough time to hit the ARR milestone they needed for their Series A raise. More importantly, CentSight now monitors their spend continuously, flagging any new anomalies before they compound.

The CEO estimated that the entire exercise — from connecting accounts to implementing changes — took less than 4 hours. The Google Sheet approach would have taken weeks to surface the same insights, if it surfaced them at all.