GUIDE · POST-CLOSE
The First 90 Days After Your Raise
The wire hit. Now what.
Most founders celebrate the close, then sprint into hiring and spending. The 90 days after your raise determine whether the capital compounds or burns. This guide is the sequencing discipline — what financial infrastructure has to be in place before you deploy, and the order that prevents rework.
HOW TO USE THIS
Eight categories. Score each 1–5.
01
For each of the eight categories below, read the five score descriptions and pick the one that most honestly reflects where you are today. Don’t aspire — describe.
02
If you’re between two scores, pick the lower one. Investors will read the gap, not the aspiration.
03
When you finish, the running total updates live. Your total falls between 8 and 40.
04
The interpretation at the end translates that total into what it means and where to look first. Categories you scored lowest are usually the highest-leverage places to spend the next 30 days.
The interpretation at the end translates that total into what it means and where to look first. Categories you scored lowest are usually the highest-leverage places to spend the next 30 days.
CATEGORY
01
Legal
Entity structure, option plan adoption, employee and advisor agreements, 83(b) elections, FINCEN BOI, IP assignment.
1
MAJOR GAPS
2
PATCHY
3
FUNCTIONAL
4
INVESTOR-READABLE
5
DILIGENCE-READY
CATEGORY
02
Legal
Accuracy of current ownership, ability to model forward, option pool sufficiency, treatment of convertible instruments. Score for Cap Table
1
MAJOR GAPS
2
PATCHY
3
FUNCTIONAL
4
INVESTOR-READABLE
5
DILIGENCE-READY
CATEGORY
03
Legal
Coverage across the 15 finance and back-office functions: bookkeeping, controller, payroll, AR/AP, forecasting, investor relations, treasury, CPA, legal, benefits, billing. Score for Team
1
MAJOR GAPS
2
PATCHY
3
FUNCTIONAL
4
INVESTOR-READABLE
5
DILIGENCE-READY
CATEGORY
04
Legal
Stack across 11 categories: accounting, expenses, payroll, benefits, banking, HRIS, FP&A, cap table, billing, AP, CRM.
1
MAJOR GAPS
2
PATCHY
3
FUNCTIONAL
4
INVESTOR-READABLE
5
DILIGENCE-READY
CATEGORY
05
Treasury & Banking
Yield on cash, 2FA on accounts, dual approval on wires, ACH whitelist, credit card program.
1
MAJOR GAPS
2
PATCHY
3
FUNCTIONAL
4
INVESTOR-READABLE
5
DILIGENCE-READY
“Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
CHARLIE MUNGER (BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY)
Series A Diligence Readiness
Series A Diligence Readiness
monster energy
HOW TO USE THIS
Four phases. Work them in order.
Week 1 — Cash Security & Treasury Setup. Before you spend a dollar of new capital, secure it. Treasury hygiene, dual-approval wires, yield on idle cash, and the banking structure that protects the runway you just raised.
Days 7–30 — Accounting Infrastructure Upgrade. The books that got you through diligence are not the books that run a post-raise company. Accrual basis, revenue recognition policy, chart of accounts restructured for SaaS expense categories, and the monthly close cadence that keeps every number reconciled.
Days 31–60 — Operating Model & Hiring Cadence. The hiring plan isn't a headcount list — it's a burn-rate commitment. Build the operating model that ties hiring velocity to cash coverage, validate pricing before scaling, and instrument the metrics dashboard that tells you whether growth is working.
Days 61–90 — Board Reporting & Next-Raise Infrastructure. The data room for your next round starts now. Board reporting cadence, investor update rhythm, and the metric tracking that gives you leverage 18 months from now.
This guide draws on the same diagnostic framework Centripetal uses with every client — a hundred-question instrument that scores back-office readiness across eight categories. What you have here is the post-close surface of it.
SECTION 1
The First 30 Days — Financial Foundation
New capital feels like safety. It isn't. It's a clock that starts the moment the wire hits. The decisions you make in the first 30 days set the trajectory for the rest of your runway.
Treasury first, spend second
Before a single hire is made or a single contract signed, the cash needs to be secured. This sounds obvious — it isn't, because most founders have never held this much money before and their banking infrastructure wasn't built for it.
What needs to happen in Week 1:
Dual-approval wire transfers. No single person — including the CEO — should be able to move cash unilaterally. Set up dual-approval on your primary bank account before the wire clears. This is not paranoia; it's fiduciary hygiene.
Yield on idle cash. At $3M+ in the bank, uninvested cash is leaving meaningful money on the table. Sweep accounts, treasury bills, or short-duration instruments — the vehicle matters less than the discipline. Your money should be earning something while it sits.
ACH whitelist. Restrict outgoing ACH to known, pre-approved recipients. This closes the most common fraud vector for early-stage companies with newly large balances.
Banking diversification. FDIC covers $250K per depositor per bank. If you just raised $5M and it's sitting in one account, you have $4.75M of uninsured cash. Spread across multiple institutions or use a cash management service that distributes deposits.
For the full treasury playbook, see our Treasury Hygiene in Under an Hour guide.
Accounting upgrade: cash-basis to accrual
If you raised on cash-basis books, congratulations — you're in the majority. But post-raise, accrual accounting is non-negotiable. Investors, board members, and eventually auditors expect it. More importantly, accrual-basis books are the only ones that give you an honest view of the business.
What the upgrade involves:
Revenue recognition policy. Lock this down in the first month. ASC 606 compliance isn't just for public companies — it's the standard diligence teams use to assess how your revenue is recognized. Define what constitutes recognized revenue, how implementation and services revenue is separated, and how multi-year contracts are handled.
Chart of accounts restructure. The four canonical SaaS expense categories — Sales & Marketing, Research & Development, General & Administrative, and Cost of Goods Sold — need to be in your chart of accounts before the first post-raise month closes. Investors read expense categorization as a proxy for financial maturity. Blended categories signal amateur-hour bookkeeping.
Monthly close cadence. Books closed within 15 business days. Reconciliations done. Bank statements tied. This isn't aspirational — it's the cadence that keeps you from discovering a $200K discrepancy during your board meeting.
Cash deployment discipline
We generally counsel founders against committing more than a third to half of a fresh round in the first month, before the operating model has been pressure-tested. The instinct post-close is to move fast — backfill the roles you've been deferring, sign the contracts you've been negotiating, greenlight the initiatives that have been waiting. That instinct is understandable and often wrong.
The reason is structural: until your accounting infrastructure is upgraded and your operating model is built (Days 7–60), you don't have the instrumentation to know whether spend is working. Committing capital before the measurement layer exists means you're flying blind — and you'll only discover it when the board asks a question you can't answer.
What healthy deployment looks like:
Committed vs. discretionary. Separate your spend into committed obligations (existing salaries, contracts, debt service) and discretionary deployment (new hires, new tools, new programs). Only the discretionary bucket should be gated against your operating model.
Scenario-based burn. Build three scenarios — base, aggressive, conservative — and pressure-test each against runway. The base case should give you 24+ months of runway at current hiring velocity. If it doesn't, slow down before speeding up.
SECTION 2
Days 31–90 — Building the Operating Engine
The foundation is set. Now build the engine that converts capital into durable growth — and the measurement layer that proves it's working.
Hiring cadence against the model
The question isn't how many people to hire. It's how fast to hire them — and whether your cash coverage can absorb the ramp. Hiring velocity is the single largest lever on your post-raise burn rate, and it's the one most founders manage by instinct rather than by model.
What the model should show:
Monthly cash coverage ratio. Cash on hand divided by monthly burn (including new hire ramp costs). If this drops below 18 months at any point in the plan, the hiring pace is ahead of the capital. Adjust before committing.
Hiring in cohorts, not ad hoc. Three hires in Month 2, two in Month 4, two in Month 6 — not a continuous trickle. Cohort-based hiring lets you instrument the impact of each batch before deploying the next.
The ramp assumption. No new hire is at full productivity on Day 1. Engineers ramp in 2–4 months, sales reps in 3–6 months. Your model needs to reflect the lag between cost and output. Modeling every hire as immediately productive overstates returns and understates burn.
Pricing validation before scaling
Most founders set pricing pre-raise and never revisit it post-raise. That's a missed opportunity. Post-raise is the moment to pressure-test pricing — before the sales team scales and locks in a price that's leaving meaningful money on the table.
Per OpenView's research across 2,200 SaaS companies, roughly two-in-five companies that actively revisit their pricing report a 25% higher ARR increase compared to those that don't. The mechanism isn't raising prices across the board — it's segmenting by value delivered and pricing accordingly.
Source: OpenView Partners, "Pricing Insights from 2,200 SaaS Companies," 2021. (B-009)
The post-raise pricing check:
Are you charging differently by customer segment, or is pricing flat across all ACVs?
Does your pricing model align with how customers get value — seats, usage, outcomes?
What would a 15% price increase to new customers do to close rates? To NRR?
The metrics dashboard that works
Most early-stage dashboards track blended metrics — total CAC, total NRR, total ARR growth. Blended metrics are comforting and misleading. Post-raise, you need segment-level visibility.
What the dashboard should include:
CAC by channel. Outbound, inbound, channel/referral, product-led. If one channel is 3x more efficient than the others, that's your capital allocation signal.
NRR by cohort. Not blended NRR across the whole base — by signup quarter, so you can see whether retention is improving or degrading as you scale.
Gross margin by product line. If you have multiple products or tiers, know which ones generate margin and which ones consume it.
Board reporting and next-raise infrastructure
Start building your next raise's data room on Day 31, not Day 270. The metrics you track now — cohort NRR, CAC by channel, customer concentration trend, monthly P&L close — become the artifacts investors open 18 months from now.
What to set up in Days 61–90:
Monthly board deck cadence. Even if your board is just your seed lead and an advisor, the discipline of producing a monthly update forces monthly close, metric review, and narrative coherence.
Investor update email. Brief, monthly, to your cap table + warm prospects. ARR, burn, runway, key hires, one ask. This compounds — a founder who has sent 18 consistent monthly updates has built trust an investor can underwrite.
Data room maintenance. The documents from your Series A diligence readiness should stay current. Cap table updated quarterly. P&L and cash flow monthly. AR aging maintained. When the next round comes, the data room is already built — not a scramble.
For the full diligence document checklist, see our Series A Diligence Readiness guide.
Q: How fast should we deploy capital after closing a round?
A: Deliberately. We counsel founders against committing more than a third to half of a fresh round in the first month. The instinct to move fast is understandable, but committing capital before your accounting infrastructure and operating model are in place means you lack the measurement layer to know whether spend is working. Secure the cash first (treasury hygiene, dual-approval wires, yield on idle balances), upgrade your books to accrual, build the operating model, then deploy against it.
Q: When do we need a VP Finance vs. staying with a fractional CFO?
A: The decision is about complexity, not revenue. A fractional CFO handles financial strategy, board reporting, fundraising infrastructure, and operational finance at 10–20 hours per week — which is the right model for most companies from Seed through Series A and often well into the $5–10M ARR range. The switch to an in-house VP Finance — typically $220K–$320K fully loaded — makes sense when the daily operational volume exceeds what an embedded part-time model can absorb: multi-entity accounting, international payroll, covenant reporting across multiple debt instruments, or a finance team of 3+ that needs a full-time manager. If you're post-raise and wondering, the answer is almost always "not yet" — build the infrastructure with a fractional model first, then hire the VP Finance to run it.
Q: What should our first board deck after the raise include?
A: Five things, in this order: ARR and growth trend (monthly, not just YoY), burn rate and runway (three scenarios — base, aggressive, conservative), hiring progress against the plan, one or two key metric updates (NRR by cohort, CAC by channel — whatever you committed to tracking), and one clear ask. Keep it under 12 slides. The goal is to establish a reporting cadence that builds trust, not to produce a pitch deck every month.