Finance and improve
How a Startup keeps money events distinct, posts a Cost for every Action, passes the unit-economics checks, and improves one change at a time.
Finance tells a Startup whether delivering value pays; improvement turns that answer into the next change. The loop runs every week, and every turn ends in one recorded Decision.
Keep money events distinct
Accepting an Offer, paying, delivering and earning are four facts at four times. place commits the Customer and records the Price. pay settles the amount and posts the Entries, and confirm earns the fee.
The ledger follows each fact separately. A payment taken before the work is a liability, never earned revenue, and a refund posts reversing Entries rather than erasing the sale.
Every Action posts a Cost
Every Action posts a Cost: model calls, compute, Supplier payouts, human minutes, refunds. A capability bought from the Studio carries an explicit transfer price, and shared Cost is split by a stated rule. Fully loaded Cost sums them all.
Take an Agent sold as a service that reconciles payouts for online course creators, at $39 a month. Its first 60 Customers show model calls at $2 a month each, but $11 of human review on accounts with refunds. A cheaper model saves little; flagging refund-heavy accounts at signup saves most.
Four numbers gate Repeatable
Repeatable asks whether the business pays, and four Metrics answer it.
| Metric | Line | Reads |
|---|---|---|
| Contribution margin | 0 or more, every paid Offer, 30 days | Each Offer earns more than its delivery and acquisition cost |
| Acquisition payback | 30 days or less | The lead Play earns back what a Customer cost |
| Cost coverage | 1 or more, 4 weeks | Outside revenue pays for the whole Startup |
| Default alive | 1 or more, latest week | Profit arrives before the money runs out |
Every number counts outside revenue only. A sibling Startup's subscription keeps the lights on; it never proves the business works.
Close the books
The Finance Lead closes every month by day 5, reconciled to Stripe. Monthly close reconciles every Transaction to the ledger and closes the Period. Dunning retries failed payments and pauses access only after the last attempt.
Issue a refund returns money within the Billing Specialist's Limit and leaves an Approval above it. Refunds and price changes are one-way decisions: each waits a delay window, during which anyone watching can pause or cancel it.
Forecast forward
Default-alive check runs weekly. Runway is the Startup's own cash, or the budget its Studio allocated; burn is fully loaded Cost, human minutes included.
The Treasurer sets spend to FREE, TIGHT or HOLD. Each step down tightens every Limit beneath it, so a Startup that turns default dead slows its own spending before anyone intervenes.
Improve one change per path
Weekly review reads the state's one number, finds where most Customers leak, and makes one Change per path with an undo note. Changes on separate paths, such as pricing and onboarding, run in parallel; two changes on one path hide each other's effect.
A change worth testing runs as an Experiment. Run an experiment fixes its threshold and sample first and holds a control arm. It ends in a Decision with the Evidence and what would reverse it.
Small Startups rarely have the traffic to settle a test alone. They start from what the Portfolio already learned and pool exposures across sibling Startups. Office hours then read the week's result and write the next Decision.
Next
Scale, hold, and transfer decides what the numbers earn.