How fast your business spends cash — and the single most important metric for managing runway.
Burn rate is the rate at which a company spends its cash reserves, typically measured monthly. It's the difference between cash in and cash out over a given period.
There are two types:
Burn rate directly determines your runway — how many months you can operate before running out of cash. A burn rate that creeps up unnoticed is one of the most common ways growing businesses get into financial trouble.
The danger isn't usually a single large expense. It's the accumulation of small increases: a new SaaS tool here, a vendor price bump there, an extra hire that wasn't in the plan. Each one is reasonable in isolation, but together they can add 20-30% to your burn rate over a year.
Net Burn Rate = Total Cash Spent − Total Cash Received (for the month)
Gross Burn Rate = Total Cash Spent (for the month)
CentSight calculates your burn rate in real time by connecting to your QuickBooks and bank accounts. Instead of waiting for month-end to update a spreadsheet, you can ask: “What's our burn rate this month versus last month?” and get an instant answer. CentSight also alerts you when burn rate increases unexpectedly, so you can investigate before small changes compound into big problems.
CentSight monitors your burn rate daily — not monthly — so you catch changes before they compound.
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