Extend your runway.
You ship the technology. We close the books.
Traditional bookkeeping watches your cash bleed out, letting six figures of eligible capital slip away year after year. Nimble & Cross closes your books daily, tagging compute and payroll to the engineering work it funds in real time. We build defensible R&D claims from that evidence, rather than paying a year-end SR&ED broker to reconstruct it. In our reference startup, the $540,330 refund forecast represents 7.7 months of additional runway, without giving up a single share of equity.
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Stage 00 // The math
[ THE RUNWAY EQUATION ]
⇔ Click any term to run your own numbers
Available Cash. Cash available after reserves and amounts owed, excluding the forecast refunds counted separately below. Grow it by keeping a live, audit-proof data room running in the background. An investor’s counsel asks for diligence on a Friday afternoon, and you hand over verified financials in minutes instead of losing weeks to an accountant’s fire drill.
Recoverable Tax Capital (SR&ED/ITCs). Expected refundable R&D credits supported by qualifying work and a realizable claim, not cash already received. Non-refundable credits and grants not yet awarded are kept out of this refundable-cash figure. Replace a contingency consultant’s year-end ‘reconstruction’ with tracking that runs the whole year: because we’re already watching your compute and payroll as the work happens, we can tell you which projects qualify, which don’t, and what experimental work and evidence the next one needs to support a claim.
Monthly Net Cash Burn. Cash paid out less cash collected each month, including the timing of prepayments and commitments. Allocating a cost between R&D, COGS and an asset changes reporting, not the bank payment. We reduce burn through vendor pricing, usable capacity commitments and purchase timing, then show their actual cash impact. Prepaid service expense is recognized as consumed; a lower monthly P&L charge does not put a prepayment back in the bank.
Stage 01 // The blind spot
// “Our bookkeeper was just blindly categorizing every single Vercel, AWS, and OpenAI charge as ‘software expense.’ When our lead investor asked what our actual gross margin on inference was, I couldn’t answer the question.”
— Seed-stage AI founder
Generic bookkeepers and CPAs get your technology wrong, and it costs you more than the fees you pay them.
Generic bookkeepers and legacy CPAs approach AI-native and deep-tech companies using a 2015 B2B SaaS playbook. They treat your books like an administrative chore: categorizing transactions weeks after they occur, dumping cloud invoices into generic software accounts, and treating engineering spend as flat overhead.
In a venture-backed AI startup where compute swings by thousands of dollars a week and technical development drives the company’s valuation, this operational blindness creates three severe financial misclassifications: COGS vs. OpEx, expensing vs. capitalizing, and GAAP vs. tax law.
Misclassification 01: COGS vs. OpEx
// So what
We allocate compute by what it does: customer delivery, internal research, development or administration. Our documented policy puts customer-serving inference in delivery COGS and keeps experimental research out of that margin, with shared workloads allocated on a supportable basis.
// The reality
AI infrastructure doesn’t behave like a flat monthly SaaS bill. Two things push your cost to serve each customer down over time:
Your own volume
As usage grows, reserved capacity, batch pricing, and caching lower your cost per request.
The industry curve
Independent of your own usage, model providers keep shipping smaller, cheaper models that do the same job for less.
Your true cost to serve a customer should trend down over time, rather than stay flat.
// The blunder of generic accounting
A generic bookkeeper looks at your AWS, Anthropic, or OpenAI invoice and dumps the whole thing into software subscriptions.
That single call breaks your numbers in two directions. Leave inference that serves real users out of COGS, and investors can’t see whether serving each customer actually makes money. Dump every training experiment into COGS instead, and your reported margins can crater from 74% to 38% in our reference month, even though the delivery economics have not changed.
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Your books are quietly sabotaging your valuation and burn rate, and misrepresenting your business to investors and lenders.
Stage 02 // The reality
// “Our books were always a couple weeks behind, so whenever an investor asked for diligence access, we had to stall. Our bookkeeper was literally the rate limit on our fundraise while we scrambled to clean up numbers in a spreadsheet.”
— CEO & Co-Founder, Applied AI Platform
Books that run two weeks behind hide your real runway, burn, and margins.
A founder whose books are being kept like a corner store usually complains about something administrative first: “My bookkeeper doesn’t understand our cloud bill.”
That complaint hides a dangerous bottleneck. In an AI startup, accounting isn’t a year-end compliance checkbox. It controls your actual burn rate, your fundraising leverage, and how many months you have left to survive.
The damage shows up in three traps:
Our reference startup has 7.7 months of forecast runway tied up in R&D credits.
// Month 1The first month supports a $45,028 estimated refund, equivalent to 0.64 months of baseline burn. It is a receivable forecast, not cash collected.
// Illustrative sample telemetry for Loop Labs Inc.
Runway (months)
⇔ Drag to scrub, month by month
Bad bookkeeping actively degrades your valuation, burns your executive bandwidth, and artificially starves your runway.
Stage 03 // The two books
// “Our investors wanted to see our real software margins, but our tax filer wanted everything categorized as R&D so we could get our SR&ED refund check. Our bookkeeper didn’t know how to do both, so we had to pick between looking profitable or getting our tax cash.”
— CTO & Co-Founder, Enterprise AI Agents
You need one set of books to raise and another to take cash from the gov't, so we build both from the source.
Founders who finally realize generic accounting is starving their runway and damaging their fundraising leverage usually reach for an expensive fractional CFO first.
That instinct usually fails because it treats the symptom rather than the underlying structure. Adding an advisory layer on top of broken books just gives you prettier slide decks about inaccurate numbers.
Solving this problem for an AI-native company requires replacing backward-looking reconciliation with an active, continuous financial operating system. This system must bridge technical infrastructure (API keys, cluster workloads, GitHub commits) with corporate and tax reality.
An effective solution rests on five operational pillars:
// Illustrative sample telemetry for Loop Labs Inc. · illustrative B.C. CCPC
Annual refundable-credit forecast
+$226,939
Corrected delivery margin vs. reported
+15 pts
AWS · $14,800
Other delivery · $21,800
Engineering payroll · $70,000
Other · $63,400
One book
Every dollar, one place
Generic result
No claim schedule. Research costs mixed into delivery COGS.
38% margin · $0 SR&ED, unfiled
Training · $8,400
Inference · $4,200
Dev/staging · $2,200
Delivery models & hosting · $21,800
Qualifying payroll · $70,000
Laptops · $2,900
Software · $1,100
Other operating cash costs · $59,400
Financial book
Venture reporting
Tax book
Tax filing
Financial-linked
74% margin
Delivery costs allocated
Tax-linked
+$45,027.50/mo
SR&ED, accrued
An investor asks for diligence, and you send a link in sixty seconds instead of losing three weeks rebuilding spreadsheets. Clean books, verified daily, ready for scrutiny whenever you need them.
Stage 04 // The architecture
// “Every time something crossed between corporate law and taxes, both sides pointed at each other and asked me to get the other guy on the phone. I was paying thousands a month just to forward attachments between my own vendors.”
— Founder & CEO, Agent Workflow Platform
We are an integrated bookkeeping, tax and law firm, with legal and tax wired directly into your books.
Right now, you’re juggling three vendors who never talk to each other: a bookkeeper who categorizes receipts weeks late, a tax accountant who reconstructs your year eleven months after it ends, and a corporate lawyer billing $900 an hour to clean up a contractor dispute your contracts and payment records should have addressed from the start. You’re the one stuck routing PDFs between all three.
Nimble & Cross replaces that whole vendor chain. Our software agents run the daily books, and our in-house CPAs and attorneys hold Power of Attorney to execute, file, and defend whatever the software legally can’t.
Here’s how it works, layer by layer:
// Illustrative sample telemetry for Loop Labs Inc.
Stop being the router between your bookkeeper, your lawyer, and your accountant. One firm runs the books, handles the structure, and signs for it.
Stage 05 // The data room
// “With our last company, diligence was a month of pure stress trying to explain our numbers to investors, and we didn’t get around to filing SR&ED until six months after year-end. This time, our data room was already up to date, and the tax paperwork was practically done before we even asked for it.”
— Founder & CEO, Applied Reasoning Labs
We give you a data room ready for investors, and tax filings that get your money back.
Investors ask to see your numbers, and you send them a link right away. Tax season arrives, and your R&D credits are already documented and ready to file. No fire drills, and no missed cash.
Onboarding takes days, not months: no spreadsheet templates, no endless kickoff calls, just read-only access to the accounts you already use. From there, we run a retrospective audit on the R&D you’ve already done and file for any credits your last bookkeeper missed.
Here’s what stays permanently ready in your data room (illustrative company shown):
// Illustrative sample telemetry for Loop Labs Inc.
// Audit telemetry, Series A diligence readiness
[ Artifact index ]
[ Live artifact inspector ]
Venture P&L (ASPE reference case)
Your books tell a story just as important as your pitch deck.
Get set up in 48 hours[ Terms of art ]
- COGS
- Cost of Goods Sold. Costs assigned to delivering the product under the company’s documented policy, including customer-serving inference, hosting and directly attributable delivery personnel. Research and administrative work are tracked separately.
- OpEx
- Operating Expenses. The overhead that keeps the business running regardless of how many customers you have: rent, software subscriptions, and administrative salaries.
- GAAP
- Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The standard rulebook for reporting your financial performance to investors, board members, and auditors.
- Capitalizing
- Recording qualifying expenditure as an asset and recognizing its cost over its useful life under the applicable accounting policy. Prepaid services are tracked separately and expensed as consumed; neither treatment changes the payment already made.
- SR&ED
- Canada’s Scientific Research & Experimental Development program: eligible work and expenditure can generate investment tax credits. Refundability and the rate follow the claimant’s status and applicable limits; the claim needs technical and cost evidence.
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