The months before revenue arrives are where most founders run out of runway — Cash Compass tracks personal cash, startup costs, and the line between them.
Apple-native · No bank logins · iCloud sync
Before any business banking opens, the only real metric is how many months of personal expenses you can cover. Cash Compass shows monthly burn against the cash buffer, so you can see whether your runway is six months or eleven. Voice entry handles the daily logging without slowing the actual founder work down.
The SBA's standard guidance is to separate personal and business banking immediately — even before you have an LLC — because untangling them at tax time costs real money. Cash Compass tags each transaction by category, and the CSV export is clean enough to hand to an accountant. Receipt scanning on premium captures the $14 office supply run and the $400 contractor payment with equal speed.
IRS Section 195 lets you deduct up to $5,000 of startup costs in your first year of business, with the remainder amortized over 15 years. That requires clean records of pre-revenue spending — market research, legal fees, incorporation costs, early travel. A dedicated 'startup costs' category in Cash Compass keeps them visible and ready for Schedule C or your CPA's intake form. Premium's CSV export turns the prep work into a single download.
Voice, photo of a receipt, or 3-tap manual entry — every method takes under 5 seconds.
Cash Compass picks the category automatically. Override once and it learns your pattern.
Weekly chart shows where money went. Adjust caps before the month is over, not after.
SBA-aggregated 2024 data puts the average startup cost at around $3,000 for service businesses (consulting, freelance, online services) and $40,000 or more for product or retail businesses that need inventory or storefront space. The number people miss is personal runway: most new businesses don't pay the founder a living wage for 6-18 months, so you need savings to cover personal expenses on top of the business launch. The honest math is monthly personal expenses times your expected runway months, plus the business launch budget. For a service business with $5,000 monthly personal expenses and a 12-month runway target, that's $60,000 in personal savings plus the $3,000 launch budget. Track both in Cash Compass — personal categories for the runway math, business categories for the launch spend.
The data favors building before quitting. A 2014 paper by Levine and Rubinstein in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that incorporated business owners who built revenue while still employed outperformed those who quit cold. The practical reason is cashflow — keeping a paycheck while testing the product reduces the runway pressure that forces premature decisions. Most founders aim for 30-50% of replacement income from the side business before going full-time. Cash Compass makes this visible: log side-business revenue as a separate category, log personal expenses as another, and watch the ratio over six months. When the side income covers your minimum-survival expenses for three consecutive months, the quit decision has data behind it. Until then, the runway buffer matters more than the leap.
Self-employment tax is 15.3% — 12.4% Social Security plus 2.9% Medicare — on net earnings up to the Social Security wage base ($168,600 in 2024, rising in 2025). This is on top of federal and state income tax. The standard rule is to set aside 25-30% of every dollar of net business income for taxes the moment it arrives, and the IRS expects quarterly estimated payments (April 15, June 15, September 15, January 15). Missing those payments triggers underpayment penalties. Create a 'tax holdback' category in Cash Compass, route 25-30% of every business deposit there, and treat the balance as untouchable until the quarterly due date. The annual chart shows whether your tax savings are tracking the actual liability — most first-year founders undershoot by $2,000-$8,000.
Six costs that consistently get underbudgeted: business insurance ($500-$2,500 a year for general liability, more for professional liability), accounting and legal fees ($800-$3,000 in the first year even for simple structures), state and local registration plus annual report fees ($50-$800 depending on state), the gear and software stack that turns out to need annual subscriptions rather than one-time buys ($1,000-$4,000 a year), payment processing fees (Stripe and Square average 2.6%-2.9% of revenue), and health insurance once you're off the W-2 plan ($500-$1,500 a month for individual coverage, more for family). Section 195 of the IRS code lets you deduct up to $5,000 of these as startup costs in year one if you classify them correctly, which is why the separate Cash Compass category matters from the first transaction.
Built native for iPhone, iPad, and Mac with iCloud sync. Works offline.
No bank logins, no Plaid, no data sales. All data lives in your iCloud.
Manual entry, charts, category tracking — all free, forever. Premium is optional.
Free to start, separate categories for personal versus business, and CSV export when the accountant asks for it.
Download Cash Compass on the App Store