Daily Prompt Pack: burn rate planning – Map your cash runway before it bites

Burn rate is the number founders dodge until the bank balance makes the point for them. Here are three prompts to stop guessing and start planning your cash runway like a finance lead would.

[Claude]

You are a startup CFO. Given my last 12 months of monthly expenses and revenue (paste the table below), build a burn rate model that separates fixed, variable, and one-off costs. Output a 3-row table: gross burn, net burn, and effective runway in months at current cash balance. Then flag the top 3 drivers of burn and give one concrete cut for each with an estimated monthly saving.

[ChatGPT]

Given the burn rate and headcount data I will paste, produce a hiring-cost-to-burn sensitivity table. For each of 3 scenarios (add 1, 3, or 5 hires at my average fully loaded salary), show new monthly burn, revised runway, and the revenue needed to break even. End with a one-line go/no-go recommendation on delaying each hire tier.

[Cursor]

Write a Python function forecast_burn(cash, monthly_fixed, monthly_variable, delta_variable) that projects monthly cash balance for 24 months, flagging the month cash hits zero. Include a plot-ready output of (month, balance) and a simple CLI that reads a CSV of expenses and prints the runway date. Add unit tests for the zero-crossing logic.

More prompt packs on the topic at aicofounderstack.com/tag/prompt-pack.