Getting Started with Prune

Prune is a financial planning platform that connects to your real financial data, builds it into a live financial report, and lets you forecast hiring, model revenue, plan scenarios, and share dashboards with your team and investors.

When to use this page: Read this first if you’re new to Prune. It walks through the recommended setup order and links to the detailed page for each step. You don’t have to complete every step to get value — even connecting your bank gives you an instant runway number — but following the order below gives you the most accurate plan.

Setup at a glance

Connect your financial data
Review your Financial Report
Build your Hiring Plan
Model revenue and other drivers
Plan scenarios
Build and share a Dashboard

Step 1 — Connect your financial data

Everything in Prune builds on your actual financial data, so connect a data source first. Go to the Accounts page and choose the option that matches how you keep your books:

Accounting software (recommended if you use it). Connect QuickBooks Online or Xero to sync your chart of accounts and transactions through a secure, one-way API connection.
Bank and credit card accounts. Connect directly through Plaid to sync posted transactions. This is the path if you’re using Prune for bookkeeping rather than a separate accounting tool.
CSV import. Upload historical transactions from a spreadsheet. You can connect more than one source. Once a source is connected, your data appears categorized on the Financial Report.

Step 2 — Review your Financial Report

Your synced chart of accounts and transactions populate the Financial Report automatically. Before you forecast, take a moment to:

Adjust what’s visible using the column display options (months, annual summaries, total).
Set opening balances if you connected banks or credit cards directly (not needed for QuickBooks or Xero).
Optionally tag transactions so you can filter them and run custom reports later.

Step 3 — Build your Hiring Plan

Payroll is usually the largest expense for an early-stage company, so the Hiring Plan drives much of your forecast. You can:

Import existing employees by connecting your payroll provider through Finch.
Add hires manually if your provider isn’t supported or you don’t run payroll yet.

Then review your Hiring Plan Settings — default payroll account, payroll tax rate, bonus payout, and annual raises — so your headcount costs are accurate.

Step 4 — Model revenue and other drivers

The Models feature is where you build the forecasts that aren’t already coming from your books — revenue, KPIs, custom per-employee costs, and anything else you’d otherwise build in a spreadsheet. A model is made of three kinds of variables:

Inputs — your key assumptions and drivers (for example, monthly growth rate or starting customer count).
Formulas — calculations built from inputs and other variables.
Outputs — the formula values you map onto the Financial Report.

You can reference your Financial Report and Hiring Plan data directly inside formulas, and pull live numbers from Google Sheets.

Step 5 — Plan scenarios

Once your base plan lives on your Main branch, create additional scenarios (branches) to explore best/worst cases, fundraising plans, or sensitivity analysis — without disturbing your base plan. You can compare scenarios side by side on the Dashboard, and promote a scenario to Main if it becomes your reality.

Finally, build a Dashboard to track the KPIs that matter to you. Add charts, scorecards, and a runway chart, then share the dashboard with teammates or generate a password-protected external link for investors.

Where to go next

Need help? Contact Prune at [email protected]