12/11/2022
Core elements of a good startup report
Startup reporting is an important tool for entrepreneurs and investors to track the performance of a company and make informed decisions about its future. Good startup reporting practices can help a company communicate its progress, identify areas for improvement, and provide valuable insights to investors and other stakeholders.
One key aspect of good startup reporting is transparency. This means providing clear, accurate, and complete information about the company's financial performance, operations, and growth. This can include details such as revenue and expenses, customer acquisition costs, and key performance indicators such as user growth or retention rates.
Another important element of good startup reporting is regularity. This means providing regular updates on the company's performance, ideally on a monthly or quarterly basis. This can help investors and other stakeholders stay informed about the company's progress and identify any potential issues or opportunities.
In addition, good startup reporting should also include clear and concise communication. This means presenting information in a way that is easy to understand and accessible to a wide audience. This can include using visual aids such as graphs and charts, and providing summaries and key takeaways that highlight the most important information.
Finally, good startup reporting should also include a focus on actionable insights. This means providing information that can be used to make decisions and drive the company forward. For example, this can include identifying trends or patterns in the data that can inform strategies for growth or improvement.
Overall, good startup reporting practices are crucial for entrepreneurs and investors who want to track the performance of a company and make informed decisions about its future. By being transparent, regular, clear, and actionable, startup reporting can provide valuable insights and help drive a company's success.
Content Blocks
There are a number of crucial elements that a startup report should include. At Lakeside we try to focus on the few core fundamentals that we expects startups to report upon:
From an investor perspective, can you please include the following information in investor updates:
- Revenues: - Projected revenues for the active year overall (estimate): - Revenue development over time - Actual revenue growth in % yoy (or other base mom, qoq)
- Cash: - Actual Cash Burn (= Cash inflow - Expenses on a per month basis, before capital insertions / or investments) - Projected Cash Burn (if available) - Current Liquidity (in k€) - Runway (= Liquidity / Cash Burn in months)
- Invest: - Where do you see the current valuation of your venture? - Are you planning a next financing round? If so when and with which terms (approximate). - Are there other upcoming investor relevant events (e.g. conversion of convertibles, VSOPs, …)?
- Other relevant business news or information
We recommend startups to provide an informal status update on a monthly to quarterly basis and we expect a more complete status report and strategy update once to twice a year.
To synthesize the most relevant information about a startup in our invest portfolio Lakeside has compiled a 1-page reporting template summarizing the most important elements of our portfolio companies on a single page. This page contains:
- Basic information about the startup: Name, tag line description, URL, core contacts, investment date
- Core invest performance indicators: Revenues, revenue growth, burn, runway, startup value, invested capital, current return in absolute terms (MOIC = money on invested capital) and relative terms (IRR = internal rate of return = yearly gain).
- Qualitative core information: company status and plan ahead. Action and attention points for the investor
- Financials: Revenues, gross margin, earnings (EBITDA = earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization), cash requirements.
- Background information: room for 1 to max 5 update pages as copy/paste from recent reporting to provide more relevant insights on core aspects of the business
This report can be adapted to your respective needs. We have found it useful to get a concise and comparable quantitative and qualitative overview about the progress of our portfolio companies.
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