Watch the runway,not the paperwork
Laptops for new hires, a stack of SaaS renewals, team dinners after the launch — early-stage spending is fast and scattered. Scan each receipt and burn stays visible before the books exist.
Sound familiar?
Moving fast breaks bookkeeping
Burn is a feeling, not a number
You know roughly what payroll costs. It's the other spending — tools, equipment, meals, travel — that scatters across cards and founders' pockets until the monthly surprise.
Subscriptions multiply in the dark
Every experiment adds a tool; nobody cancels anything. Auto-renewals stack up until the SaaS line quietly rivals a salary.
Someday, someone will ask for records
Your accountant at year-end, an investor in diligence, the tax authority eventually — early receipts get asked about later. 'It was on someone's personal card' is not an answer that ages well.
Spend-management platforms assume you have spend to manage
Corporate cards, approval chains, policy engines — the venture-backed finance stack is built for companies with a finance team to run it. At pre-seed, adopting one is like hiring a stadium crew for a garage gig: the overhead arrives before the problem does.
What an early team actually needs is embarrassingly simple: every receipt captured the day it happens, categorized, in one place, exportable. That's the difference between 'burn is roughly forty a month, we think' and a number you'd say out loud to an investor. Graduate to the heavy stack when you have the headcount — the clean history comes with you.
Steal this setup
Workspaces that mirror the burn conversation
Gross burn minus payroll is where the surprises live. Split the non-payroll spending the way you already talk about it at the Monday meeting.
Cloud bills, dev tools, the API you're testing. The subscription graveyard lives here — a monthly dashboard glance is the cheapest audit you'll ever run.
Ad spend receipts, conference tickets, the landing-page tool for one campaign. Each experiment's true cost, visible when you decide whether to double down.
Equipment for new hires, coworking, launch dinners. The 'small stuff' that quietly becomes a salary's worth of annual spend.
When the accountant or the diligence request arrives, each workspace exports as its own clean CSV — with the receipt images behind every line.
How Receni helps
Built-in answers for startups
Scan it the day it happens
Snap the receipt before the standup. Receni's AI reads merchant, date, total, and category in seconds — no expense-report ceremony.
Spending by team or project
Keep a workspace per function — product, marketing, ops — or per experiment. See where the burn actually goes.
Non-payroll burn, visualized
Dashboards break spending into equipment, software, meals, and travel by month. The trend line is your early-warning system.
Budgets before the CFO
Set monthly limits per category and see overruns while they're small. Financial discipline that fits in a founder's pocket.
Accountant- and diligence-ready
Export categorized expenses as clean CSVs — for your accountant at close, or for the data room when someone asks.
Global tools, global travel
Tools billed in dollars, a conference in Berlin — receipts record in the currency you paid, so records stay accurate across borders.
30
Free AI scans a month — enough to trial a real sprint's spending
Per team
Workspaces show where the burn actually goes
1 tap
CSV export for your accountant or the data room
Pre-seed, our 'finance stack' was three personal cards and optimism. Scanning everything into per-team workspaces gave us a real burn number — and when our accountant finally came on, we handed over a CSV instead of an apology.
FAQ
Startups questions, answered
No — Receni doesn't issue cards, approve requests, or process reimbursements. It's the lightweight layer before all that: capture every receipt, categorize it, and keep burn visible until you graduate to heavier tooling.
More industries
Receni works your way, whatever the work
Ready when you are
Runway is math. Give it real numbers.
Download Receni free and capture today's spending before tomorrow's standup.