How the Financial Engine thinks.

Gross profit is revenue minus the variable cost of delivering it. If you provided a Gross Margin %, we use it as the anchor. Otherwise we derive it from variable costs.

Net margin is netProfit / monthlyRevenue.

Customer acquisition cost is the all-in cost to win one new customer in the period — marketing spend divided by new customers.

Payback under 12 months is healthy for most service & SaaS models; under 6 is excellent.

Lifetime value uses a 36-month cohort decay rather than the lossy ARPU / churn shortcut, which over-states LTV when churn is high.

Closed-form: ARPU × margin × (1 − (1−churn)³⁶) / churn. For transactional models (retail, e-commerce) we substitute repeat-purchase frequency for churn.

The ratio of lifetime gross profit per customer to the cost of acquiring them. The industry-standard target is 3× — below that, growth is too expensive; above 5×, you're likely under-investing in acquisition.

The monthly revenue level at which contribution margin exactly covers all fixed costs — including marketing and sales, which are real fixed obligations for most service businesses.

How many months the business can operate at its current burn before cash hits zero. If you provided a monthly burn rate, we use it; otherwise we infer burn from actual net loss.

The diagnosis engine evaluates 9–12 candidate constraints across LTV:CAC, payback, churn, margin, concentration risk, runway, and scale-readiness. Each is scored 0–100 on severity and ranked. The top 3 surface as the focus list; the rest live behind the expander.

Each constraint shows a confidence badge based on how complete the relevant inputs are. We tell you which inputs would sharpen the diagnosis instead of silently guessing.

Benchmarks are anchored to your selected business model (Service, SaaS, Retail, E-commerce, etc.) and industry. Report copy adapts the vocabulary — “churn” for SaaS, “repeat purchase” for retail, “repeat order” for e-commerce — so the diagnosis reads naturally for your model.

We don't store your inputs unless you explicitly save the report. We don't sell or share your data. We don't pretend to know what we don't — every estimate is flagged.