In every board meeting and every serious investor conversation, two numbers surface before anything else: burn and runway. "How much are you spending a month?" and "How long can you run before you need to raise again?" The answers shape whether a startup gets funded, gets a credit line, or gets the hard conversation about sustainability — and a founder who fumbles them loses the room quickly.
For Indian startups running on Tally ERP, both numbers already live in the books. The problem is getting them out cleanly. Done by hand, it means opening several Tally reports, doing arithmetic across ledgers, and redoing the whole thing every time a large payment or collection lands. QuamIQ turns that into a single question — and, more importantly, into an answer you can defend, because every figure it returns reconciles to the paise against your live Tally and shows the SQL it ran.
Defining the Numbers in Tally Terms
Burn and runway have precise definitions, and each maps to specific Tally ledgers. Getting the mapping right is where manual calculations usually go wrong.
Gross Burn
Total cash going out each month — every expense ledger plus capital expenditure payments. In Tally, that means summing the period's payment vouchers across expense-type ledgers and capital purchases. It answers: what does it cost to keep the lights on, before any revenue offset.
Net Burn
Cash out minus cash in from operations — the real monthly reduction in the balance. In Tally: total operating receipts subtracted from total payments for the period. This is the number that actually erodes your runway.
Cash Runway
Current liquid assets — cash plus bank balances in Tally — divided by net monthly burn, giving the months until cash reaches zero. It needs the live cash and bank ledger balances and a trailing average net burn, usually over three months to smooth out lumpy periods.
"How Long Can We Survive Without Collections?"
That exact question gets asked in nearly every Indian startup board meeting, and answering it well needs three figures from Tally:
- 1.Current liquid assets — the sum of all bank and cash ledger balances as of today
- 2.Monthly operating spend — the average of the last three months' total payment vouchers
- 3.Monthly operating inflows — the average of the last three months' receipts from operations
QuamIQ pulls all three in one compound query and returns: "At a net burn of ₹18.4L/month against current liquid assets of ₹2.2Cr, runway is approximately 11.9 months." A question that used to mean thirty minutes of Tally navigation and a spreadsheet is answered in about 2.9 seconds — and the working is attached, not assumed.
The Trend Tells You More Than the Month
A single month's burn is a snapshot; the trajectory is the real signal. A startup burning ₹15L this month that was at ₹12L a quarter ago is on a very different path from one that has held ₹15L steady for six months. QuamIQ surfaces the movement, not just the point:
- ●"Show monthly burn for the last 6 months" — a trend with month-over-month change
- ●"Which expense categories have grown most in the last 3 months?" — the burn drivers, named
- ●"What is our burn excluding one-time capex?" — recurring versus non-recurring, separated
- ●"On the current trajectory, when do we hit 6-month runway?" — a forward projection off the trend
Numbers an Investor Can Check
In a diligence conversation, burn and runway carry weight in proportion to how easily they can be verified. An unverified spreadsheet invites doubt; a figure traceable to the books ends the question. QuamIQ lets a founder say the following and mean it literally:
"Our net burn is ₹16.2L/month, averaged over the last three months — here is the exact query that computed it from our Tally books, and here is how it reconciles to our ledgers. Current liquid assets are ₹3.1Cr per our bank ledgers as of today. That's 19.1 months of runway."
Most investors want to see 12–18 months of operating cash before they commit to a round. A founder who can produce that from live Tally data, reconciled to the paise and shown with its working, is in a materially stronger position than one defending a number no one else can trace.
Watch It Weekly When It's Tight
During an active raise or a stretch of cash tightness, runway is a weekly number, not a monthly one. QuamIQ makes that practical: a founder can ask "what is our runway right now?" every Monday morning and get a reconciled answer in seconds, watching the figure move as payments go out and collections come in — without waiting for a month-end close to know where things stand.
"How long can we survive without collections? QuamIQ answers from live Tally data in seconds — and shows the query and the reconciliation behind the number, so it holds up in the room."
The Two Numbers That Define Your Options
Burn and runway set the boundaries on every strategic choice a startup has in front of it — how aggressively to hire, when to raise, what to cut. For Indian founders on Tally ERP, QuamIQ keeps both numbers current, instantly available, and verifiable against the books, turning the most stressful question in any board meeting into a quick query you can stand behind. See it run against your own Tally in a short demo.