I use Trenston everyday too! Ive been tracking all of the financials, all of the decisions I need to make, the tasks I have to make Trenston, ive been tracking on Trenston itself. The Ask Trenston feature helps me understand Trenston better too! :D

Mine is cash runway, meaning how many months I can keep going at the current burn. Everything else, like MRR, tasks and pipeline, matters less if that number is shrinking.

I check it first thing because it decides what I can do that day: whether I can spend on something, whether I should slow down, whether I have time to experiment. I look at it in Trenston's daily briefing, right next to anything that changed overnight.

Curious what yours is. Cash, MRR, signups, something else?

I keep it simple. Runway is cash in the bank divided by average monthly burn, so I just need those two numbers up to date.

What I do: log every expense as it happens, mark the recurring ones (subscriptions, tools) so they're counted every month, and update my cash balance whenever it changes. Once a month I look at where the money went by category, and I look at the runway number every day.

The mistake I see is only tracking it when money gets tight. By then you've lost the time to fix it. I built this into Trenston because I wanted it to just be there without me thinking about it, but a spreadsheet works too if you stay consistent.

How do you do it?

My dad runs a manufacturing company, and I grew up around it. More than once I watched the factory stop because a problem wasn't visible in the reports and messages until it was too late.

What stuck with me is that nobody was careless. The information was there, just spread across people, reports and messages, and nobody had the whole picture at once. My dad gets more than 10 reports a day by email, and he has to open each one to find the numbers that matter.

That's why I started building Trenston: one place where an owner can see what's happening in the company and spot problems early, and then decide what to do about it. I'm still early, and I'd love to hear from other owners and founders about problems that stayed hidden until it was too late.