Model the futures. Commit the plan.
The planning core of Strategic Finance: one continuous forecast of revenue, cost, capacity and cash — built from your real customer economics, not a spreadsheet guess. Model a few futures, see each one forward, and seal the one you choose as the baseline the whole company runs on.
The forecast was wrong the day you built it.
Out of date on arrival
You rebuild the model every quarter. By the time it's blessed, the pipeline, the churn and the hiring plan have all already moved on.
A growth rate typed into a cell
The whole forecast hangs on a few numbers someone guessed — not on how your cohorts actually retain and expand.
Cut off from the real numbers
The model can't see your billing, CRM or ledger — and it never knew the hiring plan. It drifts from reality the moment it's saved.
So the most leveraged decision you make all year — how hard to grow, what to spend, who to hire, when to open the round — runs on a model that's stale, hand-typed, and cut off from the business it's meant to predict.
Model the futures. See each one forward.
Actual to today, then a live forecast of the whole company — revenue, cost and cash together. Switch the scenario and the forecast line, its confidence band and the outcomes all redraw. This is where a CFO models the futures; choosing one — the leadership call — is what you commit in Set your targets.
Grow hard — spend ahead of revenue. Fastest ARR, thinnest runway.
Illustrative — Latitude, a software company, modelled on its own numbers. Plan is the baseline you've sealed; each scenario is a future modelled against it.
Every dollar of the forecast traces to a driver.
The forecast isn't a growth rate typed into a cell. It's built from your real customer economics — new business, expansion and churn, recomputed from your cohorts as the data moves. Here's the $27.0M plan, assembled from its parts.
Change a growth-rate cell in a spreadsheet and you've made a guess. Move a cohort's retention or expansion and Beacon's forecast moves with it — because that's what actually changes the number. See these drivers live on the scorecard →
The plan funds the capacity. Humans and agents.
The forecast doesn't stop at revenue. It runs cost, headcount and capacity, and cash as one connected model — so a revenue scenario reprices the hiring plan on its own. And capacity now means two things: the people you hire, and the agents you run — Beacon’s own crew, or agents you build yourself. Beacon plans both, and checks the plan actually funds the capacity the number needs.
Sales is running four reps short of the capacity the plan funds. That gap is what's under the new-business shortfall — and you can see exactly whose number it lands on next. Capacity feeds cash & runway →
Illustrative. Capacity is shown as coverage of what the plan needs; agents are planned as capacity alongside people, not counted as headcount.
When the number drifts, it already has a name on it.
The plan doesn't sit in one cell. It's shared out to the people who carry each piece, and every owner's result rolls back up. So a shortfall isn't a mystery to hunt — the variance is already traced to the owner and the department behind it.
Beacon rolls up who owns what and how each one is tracking — it never sets a weight or a slice; you do. Watch each owner recover in Track & re-steer →
Retire the planning tools. Keep your systems of record.
The planning and forecasting tools you rent — Cube, Pigment, Mosaic, Runway, Causal — the headcount spreadsheet, the quarterly rebuild. The whole forecast estate.
Your accounting, billing, CRM and HRIS stay the source of truth. Beacon reads them, forecasts on top, and links every figure back to the record.
Above ~$100M ARR, the warehouse and a data team still earn their place. Below it, this is your planning stack.
Stop rebuilding the forecast. Start steering it.
One continuous forecast — revenue, capacity and cash, driven by your real numbers and sealed as the plan the company runs on.