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.
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.
Your data already knows. Now Bruin's on it.
$100 in credits and 50 AI tasks. No credit card.
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