Preparing a biotech board meeting without losing your nights

In many early-stage biotechs, every quarterly board meeting is preceded by several weeks of manual rebuilding, because the executive—often from a scientific background—carries the financial responsibility alone while the CFO only steps in part-time or from the outside. Excel files multiply and assumptions evolve with no record kept, so the executive, their CFO and the lead investor end up walking into the meeting with three different definitions of runway.

This isn't a matter of competence but of tooling, because a spreadsheet was never designed to run multiple programs, multiple scenarios and multiple users at once, nor to keep a memory of past decisions. Cash forecasts in it are regularly wrong, not out of negligence but because the file's structure can't hold the complexity of R&D paced by milestones.

The context doesn't help, since financial consistency has become a genuine selection criterion since 2023. A serious investor expects truly comparable base, downside and upside scenarios, a data room free of contradictory versions and a readable history of assumptions, whereas a weak presentation only multiplies requests, slows down due diligence and wears out management at the worst possible time.

What changes everything is centralizing assumptions in a single shared source of truth instead of scattering them across tabs, then versioning the scenarios so they stay comparable from one board to the next rather than rebuilt every time. By linking each decision to its effect on runway, you can answer the question "what's the impact if the trial slips by three months" right in the meeting, and the board reporting then exports directly, with no last-minute reformatting.

The idea isn't to replace the executive's judgment but to give them, like a pilot, the right instruments at the right moment, because a meeting that starts from a common base stops being a negotiation over the numbers and becomes a discussion about the decisions.

Sources

k38 Consulting, "The Truth About Cash Runway" · Abacum, "Rolling Runway for Biotech Cash Forecasting" · Panorama France HealthTech 2026 (EY / France Biotech)