Which accounting statements do I need for my startup pitch deck?

Our clients have raised billions of dollars, so we’ve helped many successful companies figure out how to present their financial statements in their pitch. You won’t need to attach any financial statements in your pitch deck, but you should be ready to provide a high level summation of your financial model. Anything more than 5 lines of data is likely overkill. I’ve seen entire P&Ls pasted into a deck and its absolute information overload. Here are few things that you will want to include on your finance slide:

• KPIs: Every company has a dashboard of metrics that they track growth and success by a few examples include number of users, customers, margin, customer acquisition cost, Twitter followers, website traffic, etc. Look to the past and show that there is a correlation between X (could be # of Sales Reps) and Y (could be your revenue), then use this as a driver towards the future projections.
• Burn Rate/Runway/Break Even: your investors want to know why you’re asking for $X of investment, what you plan to do with it, and most importantly (to them)… when are they are going to see a return on that investment? Have confident answers ready about when you plan to achieve certain milestones.
• Customer Acquisition Cost & Customer Lifetime Value: how much is it going to cost you to get your customers? Once you have them, what is their monthly value? And finally, how long do those customers stay?

This list is by no means all-inclusive: there are many other data points that you could include, some of which are more specific to your industry. But so make sure that you highlight just the 5 most impressive data points on your company. If the investor wants more detail, then send your financial model.