title: "Know your runway without a $10k-a-month CFO" slug: "runway-without-a-cfo" dek: "Bank reconciliation is mechanical work, not judgment work — Lycato drafts it from your Mercury and Stripe feeds so you review a five-minute diff instead of paying a monthly retainer." audience: "Solo and small-team founders who do their own books and want a real runway number without hiring a fractional CFO or losing a Saturday to a spreadsheet." tags: [finance, runway, reconciliation, bookkeeping, solo-founder]
Runway by vibes
Most founders can tell you their bank balance on request. Fewer can tell you their runway — balance divided by burn — because burn moves every month and nobody reopens the spreadsheet until it feels urgent.
The question shows up in exactly that form on Indie Hackers, in a post titled know your runway without a $10k/month CFO. The title is the whole problem. Whoever wrote it already knows what a fractional CFO costs. They're looking for a version of the same answer that doesn't cost that.
Ask around and the honest answer is usually: nobody knows precisely, not today. They knew three or six weeks ago, when the spreadsheet was last opened. Stripe and Mercury have both moved since.
Two options, same problem
When a founder does go looking for help, the market offers two prices. At the top, a fractional CFO — the $10k a month the question itself names — for work that, in a company's first year, is mostly mechanical: pull transactions, match them to invoices, categorize, compute burn. At the bottom, unpaid labor: the founder's own Saturday, or a freelancer hired by the hour to do the matching by hand.
That bottom option is a real, sizable market. Upwork's bank reconciliation category lists over 1,300 open jobs at any given time, for a task that is, by definition, comparing two lists of numbers and flagging what doesn't match.
A thread on r/startups asking how early founders handle accounting and finance drew 64 replies, and the tone wasn't a recommended tool — it was resignation. One reply said it plainly: "the bookkeeping isn't complex, you're paying someone to babysit reconciliations."
Babysitting is the right word. Reconciliation isn't accounting judgment. It's confirming that a Stripe charge shows up as a Mercury deposit five to fifteen days later for the same amount, and flagging the ones that don't. That's a matching problem, and a diff is a good way to show a matching problem.
What Lycato drafts
Lycato's Mercury and Stripe adapters pull transactions into your company repo as plain markdown, one file per month, under money/ledger/. No second login, no dashboard holding its own copy of the truth.
lycato reconcile cross-matches every Stripe charge against Mercury settlements — same currency, amount within a few cents, inside a date window — and writes a short report of what matched and what didn't. lycato money runway reads the ledger and prints current balance, trailing three-month average burn, and a runway figure in months. At month end, lycato close runs the finance-close agent: it reviews the month's transactions, drafts categorization fixes, and appends a runway note — on a branch, not as a direct write.
money/ledger/2026-07.md
- - 2026-07-18 +4900.00 USD — (unknown) — payout <!-- id:tx_1188 source: mercury -->
+ - 2026-07-18 +4900.00 USD — Stripe payout — matches stripe tx_2214, 2026-07-16 <!-- id:tx_1188 source: mercury -->
money/reconcile-2026-07.md
+ Matched pairs: 42
+ Mismatches: 1
+ - Stripe charge has no matching Mercury settlement — 2026-07-29 310.00 USD — (no memo) <!-- src: money/ledger/2026-07.md tx:tx_2231 -->
The second file is the one worth five minutes. Either that payout hasn't landed yet, or something's wrong with it. Either way, it surfaced on its own, instead of waiting for you to notice a shortfall in September.
A diff, not a dashboard
The output of a close or a reconcile run is a branch, reviewed the way you'd review a pull request from a contractor: are the categories right, does the flagged mismatch make sense, does the runway number match what you expected. You approve it by merging. Until then, nothing is posted — no ledger entry exists that you didn't choose to accept.
That's deliberate, not incidental. A dashboard gives you a number and asks you to trust it. A diff gives you the change and asks you to check it. Every runway figure traces back to a specific ledger line, which traces back to a specific bank or Stripe record — not a black box you take on faith.
What this doesn't do
Lycato is not an accountant, and it doesn't try to be. It doesn't produce GAAP-compliant financials, handle accrual timing or revenue recognition, or consolidate multiple entities. It doesn't file anything — no 1120, no state franchise return, no 1099s. You still need a CPA at tax time, and for anything that requires real judgment rather than matching.
The reconciler matches; it doesn't audit. It flags what doesn't line up and leaves the "why" to you. And it only knows what's in the feeds you've connected — cash handled outside Mercury and Stripe still needs a manual entry, same as before.
Bottom line
You still have to look at the number, and you should look at it more than once a quarter. Lycato's job is to make looking cheap — a few minutes reading a diff instead of a Saturday in a spreadsheet, or a monthly retainer for work that was always mechanical. Approve the diff, and the runway number in front of you is one you checked yourself.