Your first financial review

Open Financial progress in your application (/progress). The checklist reflects the underlying records. It is not a set of manually checked onboarding tasks: a completed step reopens if supporting information changes.

1. Bring in financial evidence

Prepare statements covering your starting boundary, current bank activity, and the agreements or assumptions behind major future receipts and spending. Confirm the active company before uploading.

Review source identity, extracted facts, and proposed accounting in the workspace. An approved document does not automatically establish complete activity or a posted journal. Follow Evidence and imports.

2. Reconcile starting cash

In the starting-cash section, check each cash account against approved statement evidence at the exact boundary. Resolve missing account mappings, conflicting statements, mismatched amounts and omitted accounts.

An evidenced zero balance is valid. An unexplained zero is not proof. See Starting cash and coverage.

3. Review activity coverage

Open Expectations & coverage (/reconciliation). Review the account and date range represented by each import, then record complete or partial coverage with its support.

Coverage and balance reconciliation answer different questions. A statement balance can tie while part of the activity remains missing.

4. Review expectations and exceptions

Inspect forecast candidates before capturing them as obligations. Check whether an item is independent of other forecasts, whether its amount and date are supported, and which actual payment should settle it.

Allocate partial payments explicitly. Reschedule overdue amounts only when a new expected date is justified. Resolve forecast exceptions or understand why a calculation is unavailable. See Forecasts and actuals.

5. Choose a primary cash goal

In /goals, draft a month-end target or a minimum month-end cash floor. Activate the goal when its dates and amount are ready, then choose the primary goal for the progress page.

For example, a synthetic company might target $400,000 at October month-end, while also keeping at least $350,000 at each September and October month-end. These are two different constraints. Neither guarantees cash stays above $350,000 every day.

6. Preserve the plan

Review the current assumptions, calculation limitations and goal evaluation. Save an approved plan for that goal version. A plan preserves the outlook you approved; later imports do not rewrite it.

A target is an objective, not a forecast receipt. Setting a higher target does not make cash appear. See Goals and plans.

Complete the review cycle

The six readiness steps establish the starting workflow. Formal report ownership is a separate step: use /reviews to prepare a financial review, assign exceptions, submit it, and preserve sign-off.

A founder can prepare and sign their own report, with explicit self-review acknowledgement. A separate CFO can act as reviewer. See Reviews and sign-off.

Repeat as evidence changes

After new activity arrives, revisit incomplete steps, compare the outlook with the plan, and inspect the largest changes. Use Decisions and scenarios when the business needs to change course.

For a complete numerical walkthrough, follow From plan to decision.