Most companies that ask do not need this yet

Partly because it is true, and partly for a straightforwardly commercial reason worth admitting: an engagement that should not have started goes badly for both sides. The founder pays for something that does not change anything and concludes the whole category is theatre. That is a bad outcome and it is usually predictable in the first conversation.

So it is cheaper to say it here. Six situations where the answer is no, what to do instead in each, and the signals that mean it has changed.

Below roughly ₹2 crore of revenue, with one product, one price and a founder who can still hold the whole business in their head, there is not enough complexity for analysis to find anything the founder does not already know.

Unit economics on a business with one unit is a short document. Segment analysis needs segments. A driver-based model with four customers is a spreadsheet with four rows and a guess.

What to do instead: a good accountant who closes the books monthly, and a thirteen-week cash forecast you update yourself every Friday. That combination costs very little and it is genuinely the whole finance function a company this size needs. The template for the second is free on this site.

If you have under four months of runway, the question in front of you is not optimisation. It is survival, and the levers that matter are free.

• ·Collect what you are already owed. Call the five largest debtors this week rather than emailing.
• ·Invoice everything delivered and not yet billed, which in most firms is a week or two of revenue sitting idle.
• ·Stop discretionary spending, and pause hiring that has not been committed.
• ·Work out whether the business reaches break-even before the money runs out on current growth, which decides whether the problem is timing or structure.

All four are on this site as free tools and guides, and none of them needs anybody hired. Do them first. If, after doing them, the numbers still say something difficult, that is a different conversation and a legitimate one.

There is a difference between nobody having time to produce the numbers and nobody being able to interpret them. They feel identical from inside and they have completely different solutions.

If the analysis would be obvious once someone did it, and the problem is purely that nobody has the hours, you need capacity. That is an internal finance hire, an outsourced controller, or reporting production bought as a service, and all three cost less than judgement does.

The test is volume. If the operational work of payroll, receivables, vendor payments and the close calendar would fill three or four days a week, hire someone. Buying senior judgement to do a controller's job is an expensive way to get a controller, and the person doing it usually leaves.

This is the uncomfortable one and it is the most common reason an engagement produces nothing.

Analysis is only worth what the decisions that follow it are worth. If the answer would be ignored because a co-founder has already decided, or because the investor expects a particular number, or because the thing everyone privately knows is wrong is politically impossible to change, then the money buys a document.

A useful test before starting anything: name the decision this is for, and name what you would do if the analysis came back against your instinct. If the honest answer to the second is that you would do it anyway, do not commission the analysis.

Finance work makes a raise easier. It does not make one happen, and the two jobs are done by different people.

A model, a data room and diligence preparation are genuinely useful and they are not a substitute for a business investors want to fund, introductions, or somebody running a process. Anyone suggesting otherwise is selling something they cannot deliver, and a fee tied to money raised makes it worse by creating an incentive to close a round rather than the right round.

What to do instead: if the gap is the material, that is finance work and it is worth doing. If the gap is access to investors, that is a different search, and it is worth being clear with yourself about which one you are in.

Neither of these comes up often, and both waste a lot of money when they do.

The first is a business that has not found what it sells yet. A company still testing which customer, which product and which price is not short of financial analysis; it is short of evidence from the market. Segment economics on a business whose segments change every quarter describes a snapshot of something that will not exist in six months. The cash discipline still matters, and the analysis can wait until there is a pattern to analyse.

The second is a disagreement between founders that has been reframed as a numbers question. It surfaces as a request to settle whether a channel is working or whether a hire is affordable, and the analysis arrives and changes nothing, because the actual disagreement was never about the figures. Finance work is genuinely useful for informing a decision and useless for resolving a dispute about who decides. That one is worth naming honestly before anyone is engaged.

The signals that it has stopped being too early. Any two of these together and it is usually worth a conversation.

1. 01A decision in front of you that is hard to reverse and that nobody can put numbers behind: a location, a product line, a large customer on unusual terms, twenty hires.
2. 02The accounts are reliable and you still cannot tell whether the month was good.
3. 03An investor or a board asks for something nobody can produce, twice.
4. 04You are spending more than a few hours a week rebuilding the same analysis by hand.
5. 05Segments have appeared. More than one product, channel, location or customer type, behaving differently, and nobody has split them.
6. 06Or the plainest one: decisions are being delayed because the numbers are not ready, or made without them.

Note that none of those is a revenue figure. Revenue is a rough proxy for complexity and complexity is what actually creates the need, which is why a business with four channels at ₹5 crore needs this before a business with one product at ₹15 crore does.

The tools and writing on this site are free and unrestricted, with no email required, and they are deliberately built so that a founder can do the work themselves. If this page has talked you out of hiring anyone, these are the four worth having anyway.

• ·A thirteen-week cash forecast, updated weekly. The single most valuable finance document a small company owns.
• ·A monthly close that happens on a date, agreed with your accountant, using the free checklist.
• ·One written definition per metric you report. An hour of work that prevents a year of numbers quietly meaning different things.
• ·And the default alive calculation, so you know whether the business reaches break-even before the money runs out.

That is most of what an early engagement would build anyway. Doing it yourself is slower and it is free, and a company that has done it arrives at the eventual conversation in a considerably better position than one that has not.