financial-model-builderlisted

# Financial Model Builder A model earns its keep in the ten minutes when someone challenges it. The chief financial officer asks what happens if churn runs at three percent instead of two, and either one cell changes and every output moves, or the answer is that the analyst will come back on Thursday. The second answer ends the conversation about the business and starts a conversation about the spreadsheet. By Thursday the decision has been taken on instinct and the model is a document nobody opens again. The expensive version is quieter. A number reaches a board pack or a data room and cannot be traced to anything, because it came from a growth rate typed inside a formula eleven months ago by someone who has since left. Under diligence, or under a plan that misses, somebody pulls the thread, and what they find is not a wrong number but a model whose logic cannot be reconstructed. At that point every figure in it is suspect, including the ones that were right. ## When to use this, and when not to Use it to build any projection of money over time: an operating budget, a three-statement model, a runway and cash model, unit economics, a business case, a fundraising model. Use it equally to audit a model somebody else built, before its output is quoted anywhere. This is the general construction standard. Three neighbouring skills apply it to specific questions, and the boundaries matter because all four involve numbers in a spreadsheet: - `revenue-forecast` is the current y