Startup Finance Guide: Before Your First CFO

A frank conversation between founders and finance professionals who’ve collectively seen hundreds of startups navigate the messy phase between “we just got funded” and “we actually need a finance function.” Based on a live panel at Maria 01, Helsinki — hosted by Finnish Startup Community and Greenstep.

Panelists:

Teemu Myllymäki, Co-Founder & CEO, Measurlabs — marketplace connecting companies with 900+ testing laboratories across 40 countries. Raised €2.5M seed round led by VentureFriends, with Lifeline Ventures, Tesi, and Curus. ~40 employees.
Jarkko Antila, CEO, Kuva Space — building the world’s first hyperspectral microsatellite constellation for Earth observation. Raised €30M+ total, including an €8M round that closed in 51 hours. ESA and EU Copernicus contracts. Satellites in orbit, expanding to the US.
Vilhelmiina Kilpeläinen, Head of Finance, Distance Technologies — glasses-free mixed reality displays for automotive and defense. Raised €13M including a €10M seed round led by Google Ventures — GV’s first investment in Finland. Founded by Varjo co-founders.
Oliver Lindholm, Partner, Greenstep — 15 years as a fractional CFO for tech startups in the 0–10M€ revenue range. Part of the largest CFO team in the Nordics.

Moderated by Tanja Piha, Greenstep

What should a startup CFO actually do?

Before diving into the guide — here’s the reality check. Whether you’re the founder doing this yourself, a first finance hire, or a fractional CFO — these are the tasks that need to happen. Most early-stage companies are missing half of them.

💰 Cash & runway Check your bank balance weekly. Maintain a 12-month rolling cash flow forecast with at least two scenarios. Update it monthly with actuals. Know your fixed vs. variable costs. If cash is tight, negotiate 60–90 day payment terms with vendors. Make sure excess cash is earning interest.
📊 Planning & reporting Set up a monthly reporting flow: close, management report, board materials. Track sales forecast vs. actuals to calibrate assumptions over time. Define your accounting dimensions early (cost centers, projects). Make sure accounting is current — not months behind. Consider when to capitalise vs. expense costs.
🔍 Cost control Kill unused subscriptions. Review vendor costs monthly and re-negotiate after year one. Track who is purchasing what across the company. Set up a shared invoice email so nothing gets lost or better yet direct all invoices to your e-invoice adress.
🏛️ Funding, grants & tax Investigate public grants: Business Finland, ELY, EU Horizon, Nordic Innovation. If you have grants, log hours and costs rigorously. Reclaim VAT on foreign business trips. Understand R&D tax incentive eligibility. Start preparing financials 3–6 months before you need to raise. Know your unit economics cold.
⚙️ Systems & automation Choose tools appropriate for your stage — don’t over-invest, but don’t stay on Google Sheets too long. Select an accountant and payroll provider who understand startups. Automate recurring invoices, expense approvals, and receipt collection. Set up hour tracking before it becomes a compliance problem.
👥 Team & communication Report to the management team monthly: burn rate, runway, what needs to be true. Decide how much to share with the broader team — and be consistent. Communicate targets clearly so people know what success looks like.

Nobody does all of this from day one. The guide below helps you figure out what to prioritise first.

1. The founder as accidental CFO

Nobody starts a company because they love financial planning. You start it because you’ve found a problem worth solving. But somewhere between the first customer and the first hire, you become the person responsible for the money — whether you chose that role or not.

Teemu Myllymäki, co-founder of Measurlabs, ran the finances himself from day one. He handled fundraising, monitored burn rate, made investment decisions, and forecasted the future. For a while, it worked. Then the company started scaling, and everything began to crack.

The pattern is common: the founder manages finances well enough during the early stage, but as the team grows and complexity increases, confidence in the numbers starts eroding. Runway estimates become guesswork. Forecasts stop being useful. The founder knows something is off but doesn’t have time to fix it.

The signal: When you stop trusting your own forecasts, something needs to change. It doesn’t mean you need a full-time CFO yet — but you need more capacity than you currently have.

2. Know your cash — the one habit that matters

Before models, before tools, before processes — there’s one habit that every panelist agreed on: know your cash position. Oliver Lindholm, who has served as fractional CFO for dozens of startups over 15 years, puts it simply.

It sounds almost too basic. But the insight is that a bank balance is the one number that doesn’t lie. Your P&L has accruals, timing differences, and accounting choices. Your forecasts have assumptions. Your cash balance is the truth. Checking it weekly builds an intuitive sense of your company’s financial rhythm — what comes in, what goes out, and whether the pattern is healthy.

The next step is understanding the shape of that cash. Not all expenses are equal when you’re managing runway.

Fixed costs vs. variable costs: You need to know what you’re paying regardless — salaries, rent, subscriptions — versus what you could cut tomorrow if needed. When runway gets tight, your variable costs are your first lever. Your fixed costs tell you the minimum burn rate you can’t avoid.

3. Building your first cash flow model

If you don’t have a cash flow forecast yet, the good news is that the bar for “good enough” is lower than you think. Oliver’s rule of thumb: if your cash flow model doesn’t fit on one A4 page, it’s too complicated.

You need four things: your opening cash balance, what money is coming in (and be pessimistic about this), what money is going out (be realistic), and what financing you have in the pipeline — grants, loans, funding rounds. Put twelve columns in a spreadsheet, one per month, and you have your model.

Jarkko Antila from Kuva Space describes how they run multiple cash flow scenarios: an optimistic view, a pessimistic view, and a base case. The key is building in decision milestones — points in time where you’ll evaluate the scenarios and decide whether to invest, cut, or raise. As a deep tech company with large, variable R&D expenditures, they can tune when and how much they spend on hardware and infrastructure, which directly affects their trajectory.

The point isn’t precision. In a startup, you can’t forecast at a granular monthly level and expect to be right. The point is knowing the range of possible outcomes and the decisions that affect which outcome you land on.

Three scenarios, one spreadsheet: Duplicate your model three times. Keep costs the same. Change only revenue assumptions between optimistic, base, and pessimistic. This shows you how much your runway depends on sales performance — and when you need to act if things don’t go as planned.

Teemu describes the emotional side of this process: he put it off for too long, pocketing estimates in his head rather than building a proper model. When he finally spent a couple of days making all assumptions explicit, the result was both a beautiful model and a significant reduction in stress.

“I kind of hate the process but I do love the outcome. Once I made all the lines visible — assumptions for everything — I got a really beautiful model of the company. And it decreased the stress levels a lot.”
— Teemu Myllymäki, Measurlabs

📊 Download: Startup Cash Flow Forecast Template — A simple 12-month rolling cash flow model with opening balance, cash in/out split by fixed and variable costs, runway calculation, and space for three scenarios. Blue cells are your inputs — everything else calculates automatically.

Tip: When building your scenarios, a common mistake is being optimistic on both revenue and timing. At Greenstep, where we’ve built cash flow models for hundreds of startups, we typically see founders overestimate revenue by 30-40% and underestimate how long sales cycles take by 2x. Build your pessimistic scenario first — if it still works, you’re in good shape.

Once you have the model, the next challenge is keeping it honest. Teemu’s method: at the start of each period, he takes a snapshot of his 12-month forecast and locks it as a budget. Then every month, he replaces the assumptions with actuals — how many sales calls were made, how many meetings happened, what the conversion rate actually was.

It’s manual work, and Teemu is the first to admit he hasn’t found a more elegant way to do it. But the payoff is that his future assumptions have become dramatically more trustworthy, because they’re calibrated against real historical data rather than optimism.

📈 Download: Sales Forecast vs. Actuals Tracker — Track your sales pipeline assumptions against reality each month. Includes columns for outbound calls, meetings, proposals, deals closed, and revenue — with automatic variance calculation.

Once you’re tracking forecast vs. actuals manually for a few months, you’ll start wanting to see the patterns visually — how your assumptions trend over time, where the gaps keep appearing. That’s when a lightweight BI layer helps. Tools like BI Book connect to your accounting data and give your management team and board a real-time dashboard instead of a monthly spreadsheet email. You don’t need this on day one, but once you’re reporting to a board or investors, having live numbers beats a PDF attachment.

4. The overspend trap — a real story

This was the most candid moment of the panel. Teemu describes what happened after Measurlabs raised their seed round in 2023: they started hiring aggressively. More developers, more salespeople, more experts, including in other countries. The growth targets were ambitious. The plan made sense on paper.

But the ramp-up time for salespeople was longer than expected. Sales cycles were longer than modeled. Conversion rates didn’t hit the assumptions. Within about a year, they had to go through change negotiations and temporarily let people go — even though they had just raised.

Then something interesting happened. At almost exactly the moment they cut costs, the earlier sales activity started converting into paying customers. Within five or six months, they had called back every person they’d laid off. The burn rate had decreased, revenue was growing, and the company’s trajectory had fundamentally shifted.

⚠️ The lesson: Don’t base hiring decisions on ambitious assumptions about sales cycle length and conversion rates. Start with conservative assumptions, invest incrementally, and monitor payback time closely before scaling further. By the time you realize your assumptions were wrong, you may already be in trouble.

When scaling goes wrong and you need to course-correct, the people side is just as critical as the financial side. Change negotiations in Finland, Sweden and Norway have specific legal requirements, timelines, and notification obligations. Getting this wrong creates legal risk on top of financial stress. If you don’t have in-house HR, having an experienced HR partner during these moments isn’t optional — it’s protection. The same applies to rapid hiring: structuring employment contracts, equity, and benefits correctly from the start saves painful cleanup later.

5. What breaks as you scale

Vilhelmiina Kilpeläinen, Head of Finance at Distance Technologies, describes what her job actually looks like: reporting to the management team monthly with a direct and clear message. This is our burn. If we burn like this, we run out of money in X months. And critically: what needs to be true for us not to run out of money.

That level of clarity is what you’re aiming for. But several processes tend to fall apart before you get there.

At Greenstep we often see companies come to us with 6 months of unprocessed invoices and a bookkeeping backlog. The fix is always more expensive than prevention. A shared invoice email and a simple expense management tool like Bezala can prevent this from the start.

Working hours tracking is one of the first things to break. If your company has projects where hours need to be allocated — common for companies receiving Business Finland or EU grants — a Google Sheet works at the start. But it degrades fast. People stop filling it in, and you end up twisting arms to get the data you need for grant reporting.

Purchasing and invoice handling is the other common breakdown. In the early days, everyone buys what they need — someone pays for a software subscription, someone else orders hardware on an invoice. Nobody has a clear picture of total spend. Jarkko shares a universal truth: if you send invoices to someone’s personal inbox, they will be ignored.

If you do one thing: Set up a shared invoicing email (e.g. invoices@company.com) and route all purchase invoices there. It’s a 10-minute fix that prevents the most common mess.

One question that comes up at every stage: are we using the right systems? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on your complexity and headcount.

Under 10 people with simple operations, a good cloud accountant plus a spreadsheet plus an expense tool gets you surprisingly far. Once you pass 15-20 people, start operating across borders, or need project-level profitability tracking, a lightweight ERP like Procountor/Netvisor/Fortnox/Tripletex starts earning its keep — particularly for automating invoicing, purchase flows, and multi-entity reporting.

If you’re scaling past €5M revenue, operating in multiple countries, or preparing for a Series A where investors want audit-ready financials, that’s typically when a full ERP like NetSuite/Light/Business Central comes into play. The implementation takes time, so start the conversation 6 months before you actually need it — not when the spreadsheets are already on fire.

The expensive mistake isn’t choosing the wrong system — it’s migrating too late and losing 3 months of finance team productivity during the switch.

6. How open should you be about finances?

This topic generated the most debate. There’s a spectrum, and the panelists landed at different points on it.

Teemu describes a radical approach: early on, Measurlabs didn’t share financial details with the team. Then they decided that secrecy wasn’t building trust, and flipped to full transparency. Now they go through their P&L in monthly all-hands meetings, share runway figures, and discuss what assumptions need to hold for the company to survive.

The team’s reaction? Mostly positive. Some people appreciate the detail; others feel the full P&L review is too much. But the key benefit is trust — people know the company isn’t hiding bad news.

Jarkko describes a middle ground: the management team sees the full picture, including the cash scenarios. But the broader team gets top-level goals and direction, not the detailed curves. Her reasoning: not everyone benefits from seeing the runway chart tick down — it can create anxiety without actionable context.

Oliver, who works across many companies, notes that it varies enormously by company culture. Some organizations are transparent from day one; others share almost nothing. There’s no single right answer, but the common mistake is sharing nothing at all.

A practical middle ground: Share key metrics and direction with the full team monthly (revenue trend, key goals, whether you’re on track). Share detailed financial scenarios with the management team. Be honest about runway when it’s relevant — especially before fundraising, when the team will feel the urgency anyway.

7. What investors actually want to see

When you’re approaching Series A, what do investors actually look at? Not what you think. Oliver breaks it down:

The core message: investors don’t spend much time debating whether your forecast says 420 million or 480 million — that’s noise. What they care about is whether you understand how your business works in numbers. Can you explain the unit economics? Do you know your customer acquisition cost? Can you show that investing in sales actually converts into paying, repeating customers?

In other words, product-market fit expressed in financial terms. You need to demonstrate a repeatable process: money goes in through sales and marketing, customers come out the other end, and the math works at scale.

“You need to be able as a founder to convey the message that you understand the business in terms of numbers. Not just pitch the business plan, but really see what the unit metrics are and how they turn into profitability.”
— Oliver Lindholm, Greenstep

As for due diligence: investors will look at your P&L to make sure nothing illegal is happening. But the real scrutiny is on your assumptions. They want to understand where the model comes from, not whether the model is precise.

Before your next investor meeting: Can you explain, in two minutes, how €1 invested in sales turns into €X in revenue? If not, that’s the model you need to build — not a more detailed P&L forecast.

8. When to get help

At what point does a founder need to bring in dedicated finance help? Jarkko’s experience is instructive: he went with a fractional CFO rather than a full-time hire. The company gets significantly more finance capacity without the full cost, and the fractional model means they get someone with experience across multiple companies.

Jarkko’s framing is philosophical but practical: whenever you feel that the financial admin is preventing you from doing the work that actually matters — building product, selling, leading the team — that’s the signal. Whether the answer is an external fractional CFO, a part-time finance hire, or even a capable bookkeeper with more scope, the key is to act before things get worse.

⚠️ “Do it pretty quickly, because it will just get worse.” — Jarkko. The moment you feel finance admin is stealing time from your actual job, get help. The longer you wait, the more cleanup the new person will need to do.

A fractional CFO doesn’t have to be a big commitment. Many of our startup clients at Greenstep start with just a few hours per month — enough to set up the right model, clean up the books, and give the founder someone to pressure-test decisions with. You can always scale up as the company grows.

Resources: Startup Finance Toolkit

We’ve put together a practical toolkit based on the frameworks discussed in the panel. All templates are pre-built with formulas — just replace the blue cells with your own numbers.

📊 12-Month Cash Flow Forecast — The “one A4 page” cash flow model. Opening balance, cash in/out split by fixed and variable costs, automatic runway calculation. Duplicate the sheet for optimistic/base/pessimistic scenarios.

📈 Sales Forecast vs. Actuals Tracker — Teemu’s method: save your forecast at the start of each period, then track actual sales metrics month by month. Automatically calculates variance so you can see where your assumptions were off.

✅ Finance Health Checklist — 22 questions across cash visibility, processes, transparency, and investor readiness. Rate yourself honestly — anything marked “Critical” should be addressed this month.

Frequently asked questions

When should a startup hire a CFO?

There’s no universal revenue threshold. The clearest signal is when financial administration starts stealing time from your actual job — building product, selling, leading the team. If you’re spending more time on spreadsheets than strategy, it’s time to get help. That doesn’t necessarily mean a full-time hire: a fractional CFO, an expanded bookkeeper, or even a part-time finance lead can bridge the gap. The key is acting quickly — the longer you wait, the more cleanup work the new person inherits.

What should be in a startup cash flow model?

Keep it simple. Oliver Lindholm’s rule: if it doesn’t fit on one A4 page, it’s too complicated. You need four things: your opening cash balance, incoming money (be pessimistic here), outgoing money split by fixed and variable costs, and any financing in the pipeline (grants, loans, funding). Twelve columns for twelve months. Create three versions — optimistic, base, and pessimistic — by changing only the revenue assumptions. Update monthly with actuals.

What do investors look at before Series A?

Not your forecast precision. Investors don’t care whether you project €420 million or €480 million — that’s noise. What they want to see is that you understand how your business works in numbers. Can you explain your unit economics? Do you know your customer acquisition cost? Can you demonstrate a repeatable process where investing in sales converts into paying, recurring customers? Product-market fit expressed as financial data is what earns investor confidence.

How open should founders be about company finances with the team?

It depends on company culture, and there’s no single right answer. Some companies share full P&L and runway in monthly all-hands meetings and find it builds trust. Others share high-level direction with the full team and reserve detailed scenarios for management. The common mistake is sharing nothing at all — employees can sense when something is off, and silence breeds anxiety. A practical middle ground: share key metrics and targets with everyone monthly, share detailed cash scenarios with the management team.

What’s the difference between fixed and variable costs?

Fixed costs are what you pay regardless — salaries, rent, insurance, core software subscriptions. These represent your minimum burn rate and can’t be cut immediately. Variable costs are what you could stop spending today if needed — marketing, travel, discretionary R&D purchases, event sponsorships. When runway gets tight, variable costs are your first lever. Understanding this split is fundamental to managing cash.

What finance processes break first as a startup scales?

Two things tend to break earliest. First, working hour tracking — if you have projects requiring allocated hours (common with Business Finland or EU grants), a Google Sheet works briefly but degrades fast as people stop filling it in. Second, invoice and purchasing management — people buying software, hardware, and services with no central oversight. Setting up a shared invoicing email and a simple approval process prevents the most common chaos.

Should I use a spreadsheet or specialised finance tools?

A spreadsheet is perfectly fine in the early stage — especially for cash flow forecasting. The signal that it’s time to upgrade is when the spreadsheet becomes unreliable: formulas break, nobody trusts the numbers, or you’re spending hours maintaining it instead of making decisions. For working hours and expense tracking, dedicated tools pay for themselves relatively quickly because they reduce the time spent chasing people for data.

What’s a fractional CFO and when does it make sense?

A fractional CFO works part-time across multiple companies, giving you experienced financial leadership without the cost of a full-time executive. This model works well for startups between seed and Series A — you get someone who has seen dozens of companies at your stage and knows the patterns. It typically makes sense when you need more than a bookkeeper but can’t justify (or afford) a full-time CFO. Many startups stay with a fractional model until Series B or beyond.

This guide is based on the “Founders & Finance — Building Blocks Before Your First CFO” panel held at Maria 01, Helsinki in April 2026. Hosted by Finnish Startup Community and Greenstep.

This guide covers the foundations, but every company’s situation is different. Whether you need someone to build your first cash flow model, set up the right ERP, handle a difficult scaling decision, or just tell you honestly what to fix first — that’s what our startup team does across finance, HR, and technology. No pitch deck needed, just your questions.

Need help with your startup’s finances? Greenstep provides fractional CFO services, accounting, and financial advisory for growth companies.