The Series A Finance Ops Checklist: Critical Infrastructure You're Missing

# The Series A Finance Ops Checklist: Critical Infrastructure You're Missing

You just closed Series A. The money is in the bank. Your team is growing. And suddenly, the spreadsheets and manual processes that got you here are actively holding you back.

This is the moment most founders face a critical decision: invest in **series a financial operations** infrastructure now, or patch problems later at 3x the cost.

We've worked with dozens of Series A startups, and we've noticed a pattern. Founders focus on product velocity and hiring, but financial operations sits in a messy middle ground—not urgent enough to prioritize, but critical enough that delays create cascading problems. Cash forecasting breaks down. Revenue recognition becomes inconsistent. Tax exposure grows. Board reporting requires last-minute firefighting.

The difference between startups that scale smoothly and those that hit growth walls isn't always product market fit. Often, it's whether they built the right **financial infrastructure** at the right time.

Here's what needs to happen in your first 90 days post-Series A.

## The Core Infrastructure Gap: Why Your Current Systems Are Failing

When we audit new clients at the Series A stage, we find a consistent set of broken processes:

- **Revenue is recognized inconsistently** across contracts, making forecasting unreliable
- **Cash flow visibility lags by 2-3 weeks**, creating constant uncertainty about runway
- **Expense data lives in three different systems** (corporate card, accounting software, and someone's email)
- **Payroll taxes and withholding aren't optimized**, leaving money on the table
- **Board-ready financial statements require manual rebuilding every month**, taking 30+ hours
- **There's no audit trail for spending decisions**, creating compliance and control risks

None of these are unusual. They're just the natural byproduct of growing from seed to Series A without intentional infrastructure planning.

The problem is that Series A investors—and your board—expect these systems to exist. More importantly, your team's growth depends on them.

## The Finance Ops Checklist: What Actually Needs to Be Built

### 1. Revenue Recognition Framework

This is where we start with almost every client, because it's the foundation for every other financial system.

Before Series A, revenue recognition was probably straightforward: invoice sent, cash received, revenue recognized. At Series A scale, it becomes complex. You might have:

- Annual contracts with monthly billing
- Multi-year deals with annual upfront payments
- Usage-based or consumption pricing
- Free trials that convert at different rates
- Volume discounts or tiered pricing

Without a consistent framework, your revenue forecast is fiction.

**What to build:**

- Document your revenue recognition policy in writing (required for audit anyway)
- Define revenue by contract type with specific recognition triggers
- Create a revenue recognition calendar that maps contractual terms to actual revenue booking dates
- Implement monthly revenue reconciliation between your contracts list and your accounting system
- Train your finance person (or contractor) to apply the policy consistently

This typically takes 2-3 weeks to implement properly. It's worth every hour.

### 2. Real-Time Cash Flow Visibility

One of our clients was operating with a 10-day cash reporting lag. They thought they had 6 weeks of runway. They actually had 4 weeks. That's the kind of surprise that creates panic.

**What to build:**

- Implement daily bank balance monitoring (most accounting platforms offer this automatically)
- Create a cash flow calendar that projects daily cash for the next 90 days
- Include all known commitments: payroll, rent, vendor payments, tax deadlines
- Update the calendar weekly with actual actuals
- Set up automated alerts when available cash drops below your minimum threshold

The level of sophistication here depends on your burn rate. If you're burning $100k+/month, daily visibility isn't optional—it's survival infrastructure.

### 3. Centralized Expense Management

At seed stage, someone's credit card works fine. At Series A with 20+ employees, you have compliance exposure.

**What to build:**

- Choose an expense management platform (Brex, Ramp, or traditional corporate card with automated reconciliation)
- Establish a spending policy and communicate it clearly (this prevents category chaos later)
- Require pre-approval above certain thresholds
- Implement monthly expense reviews by department
- Create automated feeds into your accounting system

This sounds administrative, but it solves real problems: tax categorization becomes automatic, audit trails exist by default, and you catch unusual spending patterns immediately.

We've had clients discover $15k/month in category miscoding just by implementing proper expense feeds. That's real money to your P&L accuracy.

### 4. Headcount and Compensation Tracking

Payroll is often seen as a vendor relationship, not an operational system. That's a mistake.

**What to build:**

- Maintain a compensation schedule that tracks every role, salary, bonus structure, and equity
- Calculate true cost of headcount (salary + taxes + benefits) by role
- Track payroll tax obligations monthly and plan for quarterly tax deposits
- Model headcount growth vs. runway (this is critical for board conversations)
- Review payroll system reports monthly for withholding accuracy

One client discovered their payroll processor wasn't withholding enough state tax. That $8k liability would have hit at the worst possible time without monthly review.

### 5. Department-Level P&L Accountability

As you grow, you need visibility into which parts of your business are actually performing.

**What to build:**

- Create a chart of accounts that maps to your business units (sales, engineering, product, operations)
- Assign each expense category to a responsible owner
- Monthly P&L reporting by department
- Trend analysis that shows whether unit economics are improving or degrading

This is where [The CEO Metrics Hierarchy: Which Numbers Actually Drive Decisions](/blog/the-ceo-metrics-hierarchy-which-numbers-actually-drive-decisions/) becomes essential. You're not just looking at numbers—you're understanding which metrics actually drive your business decisions.

### 6. Formal Board Reporting Package

Your board will want monthly updates. Scrambling to create them is expensive and error-prone.

**What to build:**

- Standardized financial statement package (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow)
- Key metrics dashboard (CAC, churn, payback period, runway)
- Variance analysis (actual vs. forecast)
- Narrative commentary explaining significant changes
- Board-ready document template that requires minimal monthly changes

Once you've built this properly, monthly board reporting drops from 20 hours to 2 hours. That time savings compounds across the year.

### 7. Audit Trail and Controls Infrastructure

You're now at a scale where compliance and controls matter to investors, auditors, and potentially regulators.

**What to build:**

- Implement dual approval for expenses above a threshold
- Require documented evidence for revenue transactions
- Monthly reconciliations: bank to general ledger, subsidiary ledgers to GL, vendor statements to payables
- Review and sign-off on financial statements before distribution
- Document your close process in a written procedure

This isn't to be bureaucratic—it's to prove to investors that your numbers are reliable. Credibility is worth more than efficiency at this stage.

## The Common Mistakes We See

### Mistake #1: Choosing Tools Before Defining Processes

Founders often ask: "What accounting software should we use?" before defining how they want to work. This is backwards.

The right order is: process → data requirements → tool selection.

Define your revenue recognition policy first. Then find a tool that supports it. Don't contort your business to fit software capabilities.

### Mistake #2: Hiring a Finance Person Too Late

If you're post-Series A with no dedicated finance hire, you're about to waste money. Not because finance needs to manage other people—they don't. Because founders spend 20+ hours monthly on finance tasks that a $50/hour contractor could do, or that a fractional CFO could systematize.

Read more: [The Fractional CFO Timeline: Why Most Founders Hire Too Late](/blog/the-fractional-cfo-timeline-why-most-founders-hire-too-late/)

### Mistake #3: Building Systems That Don't Scale

Some founders build Series A infrastructure thinking "we'll improve it when we raise Series B." That's expensive.

If you're manually reconciling 50 vendor invoices monthly now, that becomes 200 invoices at Series B scale. Build automation now, not later.

### Mistake #4: Ignoring Tax Optimization Opportunities

Series A is the perfect time to revisit your entity structure and tax position.

R&D tax credits, cost segregation studies, tax-efficient equity planning—these opportunities exist at your scale, but you need to act intentionally. [R&D Tax Credit Claims: Why Your Company Structure Matters More Than You Think](/blog/rd-tax-credit-claims-why-your-company-structure-matters-more-than-you-think/) covers this in detail.

## The Implementation Timeline

Don't try to build all of this simultaneously. Here's the realistic sequence:

**Month 1:**
- Document revenue recognition policy
- Implement daily cash flow tracking
- Establish expense management system

**Month 2:**
- Build department-level P&L structure
- Create first board reporting package
- Implement payroll review process

**Month 3:**
- Build expense approval workflows
- Create reconciliation schedule
- Document close process

This timeline assumes you have a part-time finance contractor or a fractional CFO helping guide the work. Without that, timeline doubles.

## Why Cash Flow Matters More Than You Think

Once your operational systems are in place, cash flow visibility becomes your strategic advantage.

We worked with a Series A SaaS company that discovered their annual payroll tax liability ($180k) would hit in March. That's fine—except their cash flow was lumpy. January was weak, February was weaker, and March would've been negative without that insight. They pre-borrowed from their line of credit in December. Crisis avoided.

That's what good finance ops enables: not just reporting, but actual strategic decision-making.

Read: [The Cash Flow Stress Test: Preparing Your Startup for the Unexpected](/blog/the-cash-flow-stress-test-preparing-your-startup-for-the-unexpected/)

## Unit Economics and Scaling Reality

Here's where finance ops connects to growth strategy: once you can track unit economics accurately, you can make better hiring and product decisions.

When [SaaS Unit Economics: The Scaling Paradox Founders Don't See](/blog/saas-unit-economics-the-scaling-paradox-founders-dont-see/) becomes clear—that is, when you understand your actual CAC, payback period, and LTV by segment—you can optimize your go-to-market strategy. But you can only see that with clean operational data.

## The Board Conversation You'll Have

When your board asks, "Are your financial systems audit-ready?" you need to be able to say yes with confidence.

A board member who's been through this before knows that operational rigor predicts execution ability. They're not just looking at your numbers—they're assessing whether you have the discipline to scale.

The companies that build proper finance ops systems at Series A close Series B faster and on better terms. Not because their metrics are necessarily better, but because their metrics are credible.

## What You Should Do This Week

1. **Audit your current state:** List every system involved in your financial close process (accounting software, spreadsheets, email, individual files). That list will shock you.

2. **Identify your biggest pain point:** Is it cash visibility? Revenue forecasting? Board reporting? Start with your highest-pain area.

3. **Define your revenue recognition policy:** Write it down in simple language. This is foundational.

4. **Talk to your board about expectations:** Ask them explicitly what financial systems and reporting they expect to see.

## Next Steps

Building financial operations infrastructure is unglamorous work. No press release, no customer demos, no product velocity. But it's the difference between a startup that scales smoothly and one that constantly firefights.

If you're uncertain whether your current finance ops are actually adequate for Series A scale, we offer a free financial audit that specifically evaluates your operational infrastructure against Series A standards. We'll identify the gaps, prioritize what matters most, and give you a realistic timeline for implementation.

[Get your free financial audit from Inflection CFO](https://www.inflectioncfo.com/financial-audit) and let's make sure your operational foundation is as strong as your product.