Note, this sheet deprecated in v5 of the Standard Model base.
The Standard Financial Model was built to make it easy for people to create a forecast of their business and show the complete story of the business, from a forecast of growth, revenues, expenses, capital, exits, and returns. The optional Fundraising sheet plays a key part in automatically creating forecasts of future funding rounds - by equity, convertible notes, SAFEs, or traditional debt - and show how the balance sheet, cash flows, and cap table of the business changes.
The Fundraising sheet is optional and can be deleted at any time with no impact to the rest of the model.
The Fundraising sheet analyzes the future cash flow needs of the company, and whenever the ending cash balance dips below zero in a month, raises the necessary financing based on analyzing the future of a number of different sources of cash needs (e.g. SG&A, cost of goods sold, CAPEX), and then exposes these forecasted rounds through Hooks for the model to carry through how that funding round impacts the business.
If you are using the working capital line (or commonly called a revolver, or revolving line of credit) inputs on Get Started, the working capital line will take precedence in handling cash flow needs, and then if the working capital line is maxed out, the external fundraising will kick in.
How it works
The automatic fundraising calculations work in combination with the manual inputs on Get Started. In the manual input section, you can type in specific expectations of funds raised, the date, and whether it is raised as equity, convertible notes (and SAFEs), or debt.
The model will use both the manual inputs and the automatic calculations together; the manual round changes the cash on hand, thus changing any automatic forecasted cash needs.
Inputs
The inputs for Fundraising are on the Get Started sheet, covering:
- Use automatic fundraising calculations? (yes/no dropdown, by default no is selected). If the fundraising sheet is included in the model, this chooses if you want to use the fundraising rounds generated automatically in addition to the manual inputs.
- Number of Months of cash flow needs to fund. If the model determines external financing needs to be raised, this sets how many months of future cash flow needs the model will use to calculate the round size.
- Optional: Round the amount raised up to the nearest N. By default, this is set for 100,000, meaning that it rounds the amount forecasted to need to fundraise up to the nearest increment of 100,000; adjust however you want. If you don't want to round, just type in "1". Effectively, this just makes it easier to understand the raise amounts, for example by rounding a forecasted 459,341 up to an even 500,000.
- Raised as Equity, Convertible Instrument, or Debt? By default this applies to all rounds, but this can be edited very granularly the Forecast sheet. Note: convertible applies to convertible debt and SAFEs, and is separate from debt, referring to long term debt (bank debt, equipment financing, etc.)
Additionally, on the Fundraising sheet, you can:
- Select, using the yes/no dropdown for each expense line, whether you want to use that expense in the fundraising need calculations.
Common Modifications
No common edits to this sheet other than using the inputs to refine the capital planning.