Most founders send a diligent update for two months after the raise, a shorter one in month four, and then nothing until they need something. By the time the next round comes round, the people best placed to help have no idea what has happened for eight months and have to be re-sold from scratch.

The monthly update is not investor relations etiquette. It is the cheapest fundraising infrastructure you will ever build, and it is also, done properly, the discipline that forces you to look at your own runway honestly once a month. This is what goes in it, and the calculation that most updates get wrong.

Cadence and format

Monthly, by email, by the tenth working day, same structure every time, and short enough to read on a phone. Not a deck. Not a data room link. An email an investor can read in ninety seconds and forward to someone useful in ten more.

Same structure every time matters more than it sounds. An investor who has read eleven identically-shaped updates can spot the change in your business in about four seconds. One who has to re-learn your format every month reads the first line and archives it.

The six numbers

  1. Cash in the bank at the month end, and the figure from last month.
  2. Net burn for the month — and see the next section, because this is where updates go wrong.
  3. Runway in months, on today's burn and on the plan.
  4. Your growth metric — monthly recurring revenue for SaaS, gross merchandise value for a marketplace, revenue for most other things. One metric, the same one every month, even in a bad month.
  5. One leading indicator that predicts the growth metric: qualified pipeline, activations, trials started. This is the number that tells an investor whether next month is already decided.
  6. Headcount, with offers out and leavers. The single biggest lever on burn, so it belongs next to it.

The mistake: burn that flatters

Net burn is the change in your cash balance across the month. That definition is fine right up until a one-off receipt lands, and in a UK startup one usually does: an R&D tax credit, a VAT refund, a grant instalment, the second tranche of a raise.

Three runway figures from the same cash balance: headline, underlying and on plan Same £612,000 in the bank. Three very different answers. Illustrative figures from the worked example below. Headline burn £56k 10.9 months — and wrong Underlying burn £117k 5.2 months On the hiring plan 5.0 months A £61,000 R&D credit landed in the month. Leave it in the burn and you report twice the runway you have — to your investors, and to yourself.

Report the raw cash movement in that month and your burn looks tiny, your runway looks generous, and the one person most damaged by the error is you. Strip non-recurring receipts out and report underlying net burn: what the business consumes in a normal month. Show the one-off separately, on its own line, so nobody thinks you are hiding it.

The same applies in reverse to one-off payments. A year of insurance paid in one month, or a corporation tax payment, inflates burn and makes a fine month look alarming. Both directions deserve the same treatment: state the underlying figure, list the one-offs beneath it.

Two runway numbers, not one

Runway on today's burn is a fact. Runway on the plan is the number that determines whether you are already late to start raising, because the plan almost always includes hires.

Give both. If they differ by more than a month, the difference is the most important sentence in your update.

A worked example

The figures below are illustrative, for a seed-stage B2B SaaS company reporting July.

  • Cash at 31 July: £612,000. At 30 June: £668,000.
  • Raw cash movement: −£56,000.
  • Included in July receipts: an R&D tax credit of £61,000 for the year ended 31 December 2025.
  • Underlying net burn: £56,000 + £61,000 = £117,000.

Now the three runway figures:

  • On the raw movement: £612,000 ÷ £56,000 = 10.9 months. This number is fiction.
  • On underlying burn: £612,000 ÷ £117,000 = 5.2 months, to roughly the start of January.
  • On the plan: two hires from October at a combined loaded cost of £9,400 a month take burn to £126,400 from that point. Cash runs out in the second half of December — about 5.0 months.

The gap between 10.9 and 5.2 is the whole point. A seed extension or Series A process realistically takes around six months from first conversation to money in the bank. On the honest number this company needed to start last month. On the flattering one, the founder has four months of imaginary comfort and will start the raise against a deadline instead of from a position of strength.

The rest of the update, in the same email:

  • MRR: £18,400, up from £16,900 in June (+8.9%). ARR £220,800.
  • Customers: 34, one lost in July (a seed-stage company that shut down), three added.
  • Pipeline: £41,000 of MRR-equivalent at proposal stage, up from £29,000.
  • Headcount: 7, two offers out.
  • The ask: three warm introductions to funds that lead £1.5m to £3m rounds in B2B SaaS. One named fund, one named partner.

Bad news goes at the top

Not buried in paragraph six under a heading called "challenges". At the top, in the first three lines, in plain language, with what you are doing about it.

The reason is not moral. It is that investors have seen hundreds of companies and can smell a burying. A founder who leads with the churned customer and the missed hire is a founder whose good news can be believed. A founder who leads with a partnership announcement and mentions the churn at the bottom has just devalued every number above it.

Make the ask specific

"Let us know if you can help" produces nothing. One or two asks, each specific enough that the reader either can or cannot act on it in five minutes: an introduction to a named person, a candidate for a named role, an opinion on a named decision. Repeating an unanswered ask next month is fine and works more often than the first attempt.

What to leave out

  • Vanity metrics. Website visits, followers, "conversations". If it does not predict revenue or cash, it is filler and reads as such.
  • Individual salaries. Report total payroll and headcount, not who earns what.
  • Customer names under NDA, and anything a competitor would enjoy. Your update list is wider than you think, and it gets forwarded.
  • Excuses. One sentence of context per miss. Anything longer reads as a defence.

Who gets it, and what they are entitled to

Most SEIS and EIS investors hold small stakes with no formal information rights, and they still belong on the list — they are the people who follow on and who introduce you. Institutional investors and anyone with a board seat will have information rights written into the shareholders' agreement, typically monthly management accounts within a set number of days and annual budgets ahead of the year. Read that clause once; a monthly update does not automatically satisfy it, and quietly missing a contractual obligation is an avoidable own goal.

Neither of those replaces your statutory filings. Accounts at Companies House and a corporation tax return still land on their own schedule, and they are not an investor update: they are nine months out of date by the time anyone can read them.

What to do this month

  1. Pull your closing cash for the last three month ends and calculate underlying net burn for each, stripping out one-off receipts and payments.
  2. Divide today's cash by the average of those three. That is your real runway. Compare it with the number you have been repeating.
  3. Redo it including every hire in your plan, and note the date the money runs out, not just the number of months.
  4. If that date is under nine months away, your fundraise starts now — see our runway and forecasting guide.
  5. Write the template once, with the six numbers as fixed headings, and send it on the same day every month.
  6. If an R&D claim is part of your cash plan, know the month it will actually land — our post on R&D relief covers the timing.

Where we help

Our clients get their monthly numbers closed in FreeAgent early enough to send an update in the first fortnight, with burn and runway calculated the honest way rather than off a raw bank balance. We also keep the forecast that sits behind the second runway number current, so the hiring plan and the cash date stay connected. Banded fixed fees from £49 + VAT a month. Get started.