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Expense Mapping for Founders: Where You’re Burning Cash (and Don’t Know It)
Jun 20
2 min read
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Your cash flow problem might be a clarity problem.
A founder once messaged me:
“We’ve got revenue coming in, but our bank balance keeps shrinking. I can’t figure out where the money’s going.”
Another had raised ₹1.5 crore, only to realize six months later:
“We were leaking ₹5–6 lakhs/month on things I hadn’t looked at twice—tools, perks, and unused pilots.”
Early-stage startups don’t usually fail from big spends.
They fail from silent, compounding leaks.
Let’s map out how to audit your expenses, find the hidden burns, and plug the gaps before they become survival risks.
Step 1: Start With a Zero-Based Review
Most startup budgets are just rolling guesses.
Instead, do a zero-based expense review every quarter.
Ask:
“If I had to justify this spend today, would I approve it?”
Categories to check:
Software and SaaS subscriptions
Marketing agency retainers
Founder perks (meals, travel, memberships)
Office and coworking costs
“Pilot” initiatives that never scaled
Start from ₹0 and re-earn every rupee of spend.
What you keep should feel essential—not historical.
Step 2: Group Expenses by Purpose, Not Vendor
Instead of just tracking line items, organize by intent:
Revenue-generating (ads, commissions, tools tied to sales)
Operational efficiency (payroll, infra, legal, accounting)
Founder lifestyle (non-core perks, personal assistants, travel upgrades)
Vanity (PR spend, decor, custom merch, swag boxes)
Experiments (MVPs, feature pilots, POCs)
This shows you where the business is bleeding—and why.
Spend isn’t the problem.
Unproductive spend is.
Step 3: Audit SaaS and Tools Ruthlessly
This is where the silent bleed happens.
What to check:
Duplicate tools solving the same problem
Seats paid for but unused
Annual plans with low actual usage
Tools your team doesn’t use because they don’t like the UX
Create a SaaS stack sheet: tool name, owner, purpose, last logged-in date.
Cancel what’s not used.
Consolidate what overlaps.
Downgrade where usage is light.
Founders often find ₹50K–₹2L/month savings here—instantly.
Step 4: Track CAC Beyond Just Ad Spend
Your actual customer acquisition cost isn’t just ads.
It includes:
Design agency bills
Sales team salaries
Content creation
CRM and sales tools
Affiliate fees
Do a CAC bundle audit:
“What’s the all-in cost to acquire and onboard one paying customer?”
You might be burning cash not because CAC is high, but because you’ve never defined it completely.
Step 5: Build an Expense Ritual Into Your Culture
One founder did this brilliantly:
Every team lead reviewed their burn monthly
Founder asked: “What will give us the same output at 70% of this cost?”
Friday finance updates included top 3 cost-saving wins
Make cost control a team KPI, not just a finance job.
When everyone owns the runway,
you stretch every rupee further—with less resistance.
TL;DR – Too Long; Didn’t Read
Use zero-based budgeting to question every expense, not just track it.
Organize expenses by purpose—revenue, ops, vanity—not just by vendor.
SaaS bloat is real—audit tools quarterly and cut aggressively.
Bundle all real costs into CAC—not just ad spend.
Make cost awareness a cultural habit, not a crisis trigger.
Your burn rate isn’t a number.
It’s a map of your priorities.
And if you don’t review it often,
you’re probably funding decisions you’ve already outgrown.
