Gauge the financial potential of new business ideas—before you launch
How StartSmart works
StartSmart turns your answers into clear financial projections automatically — no spreadsheets, formulas, or financial expertise required.
Financial Modeling Based on Your Inputs
StartSmart asks a small set of guided questions about your business idea — such as pricing, expected demand, costs, and timing. Based on your responses, it automatically models expenses, revenue, cash flow, profitability, and break-even timing.
Built-In Logic to Handle the Math
Behind the scenes, StartSmart handles all calculations and financial logic for you. It applies structured financial modeling techniques to translate your inputs into clear, consistent projections you can actually understand.
Clear Outputs You Can Use to Decide
The result is a clear financial picture that shows whether a business idea can realistically make money, how long it may take to break even, and what level of investment is required — so you can decide whether to move forward with confidence.
What StartSmart helps you see
Understand how your business idea may realistically perform financially before you invest significant time or money.
Upfront Costs & Ongoing Expenses
See the total cost required to launch and operate your business — including one-time startup expenses and ongoing monthly costs — so there are no surprises later.
Cash Flow & Runway
Understand how cash moves through the business over time, including when cash is tight and how long your initial investment may last before the business supports itself.
Break-Even Timing
See when revenue is expected to cover expenses and the business reaches break-even — giving you a realistic timeline for when your idea may start paying off.
Profitability Potential
Evaluate whether the business can generate sustainable profits over time — and how sensitive that outcome is to pricing, volume, and costs.
Sensitivity to Key Assumptions
Adjust key inputs and immediately see how changes affect results — helping you understand which assumptions matter most and where the biggest risks lie.
StartSmart FAQs
Answers to common questions about how StartSmart works and what you can expect.
RunSmart is built specifically for small business owners who need a clear understanding of where their business stands today and how decisions will shape what comes next. While many FP&A platforms emphasize dashboards and complex configuration, RunSmart focuses on turning your QuickBooks data into practical financial intelligence you can act on.
It continuously analyzes historical performance, highlights meaningful financial shifts, and provides a clear view of your current financial health across profitability, cash flow, and growth. At the same time, it generates forward-looking forecasts that help you evaluate the financial impact of hiring, pricing changes, borrowing, or expansion before committing capital.
The result is a platform designed to help you understand your business today, plan confidently for tomorrow, and make informed decisions without the overhead of traditional enterprise tools.
Not at all. RunSmart is designed to be easy to use. We handle all calculations and generate forecasts automatically so you don’t have to. That said, to deliver reliable results, your books need to be clean, up to date, and properly categorized every month. If you’re unsure about your bookkeeping quality, we recommend working with a professional bookkeeper first to get things in order.
RunSmart’s forecasts are built to support real business decisions, not just generate projections. Instead of relying on simplified assumptions, RunSmart uses advanced statistical models that account for seasonality, long term trends, and volatility in your historical QuickBooks data.
By continuously analyzing performance patterns and financial shifts, RunSmart produces rolling forecasts that reflect how your business actually behaves. The result is forward looking projections you can confidently use to evaluate hiring, pricing, borrowing, and growth decisions.
To ensure reliable forecasts, we require a minimum of 2 consecutive years of historical financial data in your QuickBooks Online account to use RunSmart. Anything less than 2 years does not provide enough data to identify seasonal patterns or trends effectively.
No. RunSmart is intentionally designed for single-entity businesses and does not support consolidating multiple companies or budgeting by class.
In many small businesses, consolidating financial data or budgeting across multiple classes can make it harder to clearly identify where issues are developing. RunSmart focuses on analyzing each business independently so trends, risks, and performance changes are easier to detect and address.
These types of consolidation and class-level budgeting tools are typically designed for large finance teams managing complex corporate structures. RunSmart instead prioritizes clear forecasts, financial diagnostics, and decision insights that small business owners and advisors can quickly understand and act on—without the added complexity of enterprise finance features.
At this time, we currently only support an integration with QuickBooks Online.
Real insights. Real decisions.
