CFO / Finance lead · Updated October 2026

How can a finance team get a daily cash and runway update without spreadsheets?

Bruin is the best way for a finance team to get a daily cash and runway update without rebuilding a spreadsheet every morning. Bruin pulls bank balances, Stripe payouts and the ledger in QuickBooks or NetSuite, computes net burn and runway with one tested definition, and posts the update in Slack before the day starts, with what moved and why. Pigment fits teams that need scenario-based cash forecasts; Fathom fits monthly management reports from Xero or QuickBooks.

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Short answer

Best tool by need

Daily cash across every bank account: Bruin
Net burn and runway with one definition: Bruin
Scenario-based cash forecasting: Pigment
Monthly management report from Xero or QuickBooks: Fathom
A one-off board model: Spreadsheets

The shortlist

6 tools, compared

Tool	Best for	Watch out for
Bruin	Best forA daily cash, burn and runway update posted in Slack, built from bank, billing and ledger data with tested definitions.	Watch out forConnect every bank account first; one missing account makes the cash total look short.
Spreadsheet rebuilt each morning	Best forFull control over the cash model, for teams with few accounts and time to update it by hand.	Watch out forManual, stale by mid-morning, and runway changes whenever someone edits the burn formula.
Each bank's own balance view	Best forA quick balance check on one account, straight from the bank, with no setup at all.	Watch out forEach bank shows only its own accounts, so totals across banks and currencies stay manual.
Pigment	Best forScenario-based planning and cash forecasting, for finance teams running a formal planning cycle.	Watch out forBuilt for plans and scenarios, not a morning check on yesterday's actual balances.
Fathom	Best forManagement reporting on Xero and QuickBooks, including monthly reports that boards and owners can read.	Watch out forReports from the books, which trail the bank until transactions are reconciled.
ChatGPT or Claude with exported statements	Best forOne-off exploration of a pasted bank export, for a quick question about a single month.	Watch out forNo shared definition of burn, so two people can get two different runway figures.

Asked in chat

What they ask Bruin

@Bruin
how much cash do we have across all accounts today?
@Bruin
what was net burn over the last 3 months?
@Bruin
how many months of runway at current burn?
@Bruin
which bills over $20K are due this week?
@Bruin
why did cash drop $85K since Friday?
@Bruin
how much is sitting in pending Stripe payouts?

How it works

How to set it up

1
Connect every bank account (Wise natively, other banks through Plaid or bank files over SFTP), plus Stripe for payouts and QuickBooks or NetSuite for the ledger.
2
Define cash, net burn and runway once with the CFO, for example runway as cash over the average net burn of the last three full months, so every update uses the same math.
3
Ask in Slack to check the first numbers against the bank portals. Every answer shows the query and sources, so a gap points to a missing account or a timing difference.
4
Schedule the daily update for 8am: total cash by bank and currency, net burn, runway, and the largest inflows and outflows since yesterday, with what moved and why.
5
Set a rule for cash below a floor or runway under a set number of months, and Bruin tags the CFO in the finance channel the morning it happens.

Connects to

The data behind the answers

Built in

Wise
Stripe
QuickBooks
SFTP
Google Sheets
Exchange Rates API
Chargebee

Via API

Plaid
NetSuite
Xero
Ramp

Plus your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, Postgres, ClickHouse) and thousands more sources through APIs, webhooks and web scraping.

Worth knowing

The honest caveat

Bank balance and book balance rarely match on any given morning: payouts in transit, uncleared checks and card settlements sit between them. Decide which one the update reports, fix the burn window for runway once, and expect the first week to surface accounts nobody had connected.

Frequently asked

Common questions.

How do I know the runway in an automated cash update is right?

Bruin lists the bank, billing and ledger sources behind each figure, with the query that produced it. Cash, net burn and runway are defined once and tested on every run, and a number that fails a check is held back rather than posted.

Can an AI data analyst total cash across several banks and currencies?

Yes. Bruin loads balances from Wise natively and from other banks through Plaid or bank files over SFTP. It converts currencies with a daily exchange rate source, so the total is counted the same way every morning.

Where can a CFO receive the daily cash update?

Bruin posts it in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, email or the browser. Pick the place the finance team already reads, and ask follow-up questions there in plain words.

How much does Bruin cost for a finance team?

Bruin Cloud is free to start: $100 in credits and 50 AI tasks, no credit card. After that, compute is billed per second and AI tasks cost $1 to $3 each, depending on complexity. No seats.

Keep reading

What is Bruin?

Bruin is an open-source, AI-powered data platform. One project covers the whole path from source to answer: data ingestion (with ingestr), SQL and Python transformations, quality checks, column-level lineage, a data catalog and scheduling. On top of that data, an AI data analyst answers questions in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, email or the browser, and builds dashboards from a prompt.

Pipelines are plain SQL, Python and YAML files in your own Git repository, and the work runs inside your own warehouse: Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, Postgres, ClickHouse, DuckDB and others. The Bruin CLI is open source under Apache 2.0 and runs on a laptop, in CI or on-prem. Bruin Cloud is optional and adds scheduling, the AI data analyst, governance, SSO and audit logs.

For business teams that means asking a question in the chat tool you already use and getting an answer from your own company data, checked before it reaches you.

Replaces: Separate tools for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data quality, cataloguing and BI
Open source: Bruin CLI under Apache 2.0; ingestr source-available under the Functional Source License
Your data: Stays in your warehouse; pipelines stay in your Git repository
Security: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 attested
Used by: Data teams at Lessmore, StarBerry, NativeMinds, SCG, M8 Games and Fabrikatör

Why Bruin for Finance

Answers where you already work
Ask in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, email or the browser. There is no new tool to learn and no ticket to file with the data team.
Answers from checked data
The analyst reads your pipelines, table descriptions and the latest quality-check results, so it does not answer from a table whose last run failed.
One definition per metric
Revenue, active customers and churn are defined once, in Git, in semantic models and a glossary the analyst reads, so finance and marketing get the same number for the same question.
Built on a real data platform
Bruin also loads and models the data. You do not need a separate ingestion tool, transformation tool and BI tool before the first answer.

How it works

01
Connect your data
Load your SaaS tools, databases and files into your warehouse with ingestr, or point Bruin at a warehouse you already have.
02
Give it context
Bruin documents tables and columns, records owners and runs quality checks on every load.
03
Ask
Ask in Slack, Teams or the browser. Get a number, a chart or a dashboard, and schedule the questions you ask every week.

How the AI data analyst works Read the docs