The KPIs every startup should close each month (and send to investors)
Gross margin, growth, burn, runway, CAC, churn, CLTV and burn multiple in a 10-minute monthly dashboard.
Startups rarely fail overnight. They lose margin, burn a little more, let churn creep up — and nobody looks at the numbers together until it's too late. A monthly dashboard fixes that in ten minutes after closing the books.
What to log each month
Revenue, cost of revenue, operating expenses (with sales & marketing broken out), new customers, lost customers, active customers at month end and cash at month end. That's it.
What the dashboard calculates
- Gross margin: (revenue − cost of revenue) ÷ revenue.
- Month-over-month growth and compound monthly growth for the period.
- Net burn and runway from that month's cash.
- CAC = sales & marketing ÷ new customers.
- Churn = lost customers ÷ customers at the start of the month.
- CLTV, CLTV:CAC and burn multiple.
What each view is for
The monthly view is for operating: catching a trend change early. The period summary is for the investor update — and well-informed investors are the ones who back you in the next round.
Close the loop
In the exkmo Finance KPI dashboard, one button sends last month's numbers to every other tool: runway, CLTV vs. CAC and the SaaS model start from your real data.