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A founder came to us last spring with a pitch deck that looked ready for a Series A. The slides were clean, the market size slide had a big number on it, and the traction chart went up and to the right. When we asked for the underlying model, he sent over a spreadsheet with one tab. It had last month’s actuals and a growth rate typed into a formula. No cash view, no headcount plan, nothing that showed what happened if a big customer churned in month four. He wasn’t being careless. He’d just never been shown what a real model looks like, because most founders haven’t.

Early conversations about AI in finance centered almost entirely on automation and substitution. The vision that captured the most attention was “lights-out finance,” a close process running end to end with minimal human involvement, reconciliations clearing themselves, reports generating on schedule without anyone in the loop. It was a compelling picture, and for a while it shaped how a lot of finance leaders thought about AI investment.

Many SaaS companies set their pricing once, early, under pressure, and then never touch it again until growth stalls and someone finally asks why. The pricing page that made sense at $2M ARR often has no logical connection to the value the product delivers at $20M ARR. Nobody revisited it because nothing forced them to.

A CEO we worked with last year opened her Series B model three weeks before her first partner meeting and found that marketing spend had been booked under four different line items depending on which month you looked at. She spent the better part of a weekend just reconciling categories before she could even start building the forecast an investor would actually read.

Gross margin is one of the first numbers a VC will pull up against benchmark data, and it’s often the first place a diligence conversation gets uncomfortable. A founder walks in reporting 78% gross margin, confident that number reflects a healthy SaaS business, and the investor’s model shows comparable companies at their stage sitting closer to 65%. That gap isn’t usually a sign the business is genuinely more efficient than its peers. More often, it’s a sign that what’s sitting inside COGS hasn’t been rigorously defined, and the founder didn’t know there was a question to ask in the first place.

Ask most founders what scenario planning means and you’ll get some version of the same answer: take the revenue line, bump it up twenty percent for the good case, knock it down twenty percent for the bad case, and call it a model. It feels rigorous. It fits neatly into a spreadsheet. And it tells you almost nothing about how your business actually behaves under pressure.