​The hidden time sink in early-stage startup finances

I’ve been working closely with a few early-stage founders on financial decision-making, and there’s a pattern I keep seeing. Basic bookkeeping is usually handled. But when real decisions come up ,for example: -hiring or delaying a hire -expanding a team or pausing growth -increasing or cutting spend -pricing or packaging changes -committing to longer-term contracts or tools -deciding whether to extend runway or push growth -understanding what actually breaks if a plan doesn’t work …the numbers needed to answer those questions aren’t always immediately available or fully trusted. What often happens instead: -pulling data into Excel for the specific decision -rebuilding assumptions from scratch spending a lot of time validating that the numbers are actually correct -manually running scenarios still feeling uncertain before making the call What should be a fairly straightforward decision can end up taking hours or days of spreadsheet work. I’m trying to better understand this in-between phase, after bookkeeping is in place, but before hiring dedicated finance help. I’m looking to work through a few real upcoming decisions with founders to understand how this is currently handled, where time gets spent, and what would actually make this easier in practice. If this sounds familiar and you’re dealing with decisions around growth, spend, or runway, I’d be glad to connect and compare notes.