Not more numbers.
The one number that matters.
Knowing your cash cushion matters. Without a cash cushion you might not be in business for long.
Why this exists
Cash is the reason startups keep going, or close.
Since 2010 I've looked after the numbers for more than a hundred startups. I've tracked sales and profits, but cash has been the reason they kept going or closed. Cash cushion has been the number which correlates directly to stress levels and sleep quality. I've struggled speaking with business owners or CEO/MDs that can't tell me how many months of cash they've actually got.
Nobody finds out they're running out of cash while it's still cheap to fix. They find out when it's touch and go whether they can make payroll or a tax bill. When it's that tight then every option left on the table is an expensive one, or worse.
So, I built the thing I'd want to know about your business: your cash cushion, in months, out of your own Xero, every week. No spreadsheets to build or update. No one else to ask. No dashboard to learn.
The demo
Connect Xero. Choose the latest completed month. See the number.
This is the demo I'd give you if you rang me up. Xero's own Demo Company, connected live, and the briefing that comes back out of it. Nothing's been tidied up to look better than it is. The company is in trouble and the number says so.
Who is behind it
A real finance director, with a name and a face.
Ciaran has spent his career being the person a founder rings when the cash gets tight. Not a platform, not thirty anonymous experts behind a login. One named finance director whose way of reading a business shapes every briefing, so what comes back is plain-English education, not a dashboard.
"There's one number that tells you whether you're close to the cash cliff edge. It's not the one you're watching… not sales, not margins, not profits, not just cash on its own."
- FD/CFO of the Year, 2019 British Accountancy Awards.
- Three-time Accounting Excellence Awards finalist, 2023, 2024 and 2026.
- 100+ startups since 2010. The longest-standing client is 11 years and counting (from £250k turnover to £12m).
- Startups set up for success. A 4-person team that has gone on to close a $200m+ raise and now 300+ heads. A £33m exit. An insolvent small business now profitable with a cash cushion. A startup with a £520k monthly cash burn.
Who builds it
The engineer who keeps the numbers honest.
Twenty-six years in enterprise technology: Nortel, then eighteen and counting at Cisco. Architecting the data pipelines and observability that keep global voice and video platforms honest. Building AI agents and systems that turn multi-day incident investigations - and slow business operations - into minutes. A career spent learning which technology survives production and which only demos well.
He built Own Your Numbers the same way: instrumented, tested, boring on purpose. "Keeping your numbers safe" means something specific: read-only by design, read on demand then discarded, never used to train any AI model.
Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer Certified Kubernetes Administrator and Application Developer Anthropic Claude Partner (Claude Code)
What founders say about working with Ciaran
The calm of knowing where you stand.
"In a year of serious complexity, it's been completely calm. That is worth more than any number on a spreadsheet."
"The biggest impact is peace of mind."
"The metric I would use is the fact that I sleep far better now."
"He makes this world of accounting and finance easy, organized, and most of all, you stop panicking."
"Everything is just so slick, everything runs like clockwork."
"We know our numbers in a format that is easy to understand."
"Every CEO needs a Ciaran."
Six founders, in their own words, on what changed once somebody was actually watching the cash with them.
Free, every week
Three places I turn up, whether you buy anything or not.
Tutorials and beach talks
Most weeks I go for a walk on my favourite beach on the Isle of Wight and tell a story. A testimonial for Kevin Keegan. Jaws in space. Or asking a great question. I love stories and analogies to explain lessons I've learned about business.
The founder community
A room full of founders with their Cash Cushion in front of them, and a free cash session every Friday where I answer whatever you put in front of me, live. Bring the question you're slightly embarrassed to ask your accountant. Nobody scores points and it costs nothing to join.
Ciaran on LinkedIn
I check in often to post about cash, startups and other musings. I also get a pulse of what is stressing out startup founders. Years of watching good businesses get caught short, boiled down to help you avoid mistakes others have made. Welcome to engage or lurk, I really don't mind. Say hello, I answer.
The product, briefly
What Own Your Numbers actually is.
The web app connects to your Xero read-only and sends you one briefing: your cash cushion and runway in months, a risk rating from low to critical, who owes you, what is due, and the five things to do about it. It takes about a minute to read. It's built for UK small business owners to run it themselves. Or it can be run by their accountants and bookkeepers who update their affairs and look after them. You choose the time of day it arrives, and whether it comes by WhatsApp or email.
£79 a month after a 14-day free trial, no card to start. If it doesn't tell you something you didn't already know, leave.
See my cash cushion14 days free · no card · read-only.
Your data
Read-only. Read, then discarded. Never used to train AI.
Three short sentences carry a lot of weight here, so it is worth spelling out what they mean. Read-only by design means the connection to your Xero physically cannot create, edit, approve, reconcile or post anything. There is no write-back of any kind, so nothing we do can ever touch your books.
Read, then discarded means your numbers are read on demand to build each briefing, and then let go. The plain-English analysis runs on Vertex AI Enterprise in Google Cloud, UK region, as inference only. Never used to train AI means exactly that: your data is never used to train, fine-tune or improve any AI model, ours or anyone else's.
And the reason is the honest one: we don't need your data to build you a briefing, so we're not going to keep it. Not because a regulation forced us. Because a product about trusting your numbers has to start by being trustworthy with them.
FAQ
The questions owners actually ask.
Can Own Your Numbers change anything in my Xero?
No. It's read-only by design. It cannot create, edit, approve, delete, reconcile or post anything in your Xero, ever. There is no write-back of any kind.
Do you store my data or train AI on it?
No. Your Xero data is read on demand to build each briefing, then discarded. It is never used to train, fine-tune or improve any AI model. The plain-English analysis runs on Vertex AI Enterprise in Google Cloud, UK region, as inference only.
What do I actually get free?
Two things. Your first real Weekly Cash Score on your own numbers, inside a 14-day trial with no card to start. And the community, the weekly session and the YouTube channel, which are free.
Is this a cash flow forecast tool?
No. A forecast is a guess about the future. Own Your Numbers tells you where you stand right now: your cash cushion and runway in months, from live Xero data. Most owners who keep a cash flow forecast spreadsheet find they stop opening it.
When is the right moment to run it?
When your books are complete and reconciled, because the score is only as good as the ledger it reads. If you or your bookkeeper post the weekend's transactions on a Monday morning, run it after that, not before. Start with one report when a month is closed, then repeat. If your financials are solid and your cushion is steady, monthly as a final check on your close is enough. If you're feeling nervous, or you're not sure how your trading turns into net cash, run it weekly and watch the number move: you'll raise your understanding of your cushion, your net cash and your business. Cash never stops, and the cushion changes how you do business, whether you're static, growing, recovering or rebuilding.
I'm an accountant or bookkeeper. Can I run this for clients?
Yes. Connect multiple Xero organisations under one account, each with its own Weekly Cash Score, and share a briefing with a client without anyone getting write access to the books.
Who is behind it?
Ciaran O'Donnell, a fractional FD/CFO and FD/CFO of the Year 2019 at the British Accountancy Awards. He's worked with more than a hundred startups since 2010, and the analysis is shaped by that, not by a template.