ClariFi Decision Engine · Agentic AI
Meet ClariFi Decision Engine
Your AI finance team. It closes, watches, explains and answers, and our experts sign off.
ClariFi is the AI CFO for startups. Its AI agents draft your close, watch your cash, and map your books to the KPIs investors ask about. It explains exactly what moved each number and why, works out what it would take to hit a target, and answers in plain English with a cited source for every figure. Every number is calculated from your books, never by the AI, and a person approves before anything reaches you. On Growth, bring your own AI assistant over MCP.
Included by default in the Growth plan. Available as an add-on on Foundation.
ClariFi at a glance
- What it is
- ClariFi is an AI CFO for startups: an AI finance team that closes the books, watches cash, explains what moved and answers questions, built by StartupCFO.
- Who it is for
- Venture-backed and bootstrapped startups, pre-seed to Series B, across 15 industries including SaaS, AI software, fintech, biotech and e-commerce.
- What the AI does
- ClariFi's agents draft the monthly close package, flag burn spikes, propose trial-balance mappings and accounting schedules, and answer plain-English questions with a citation on every number.
- What the AI never does
- ClariFi's AI never computes a figure and never writes to your books. Deterministic code calculates every number, and our finance team reviews every deliverable before anything reaches you.
- Works with
- QuickBooks Online, Xero, Zoho Books, Ramp and Carta, synced daily, plus a Google Sheet your team already works in. On Growth, any MCP-compatible AI assistant, such as Claude.
- How to get it
- StartupCFO's team works in ClariFi on every plan. Direct access is included in Growth and is an add-on on Foundation.
Your AI Finance Team
Four jobs, done every day, checked by people
ClariFi does the analyst work a finance team spends its week on. Agentic AI drafts and explains; deterministic code calculates every figure; our experts review before anything reaches you.
Closes the books
Close Copilot drafts your close package with month-over-month variances flagged. Agents propose your trial-balance mappings and accounting schedules, and check accrual cutoff and tie-outs. A bookkeeper makes every entry.
Watches your cash
Cash Sentinel flags burn running more than 20% above your three-month average, on top of runway alerts at 12, 9, 6 and 3 months. Spend Guardrails show what is safe to spend.
Explains what moved and what went wrong
Every change is broken down exactly into the parts that made it, from ARR down to new, expansion and churned MRR, and every miss is diagnosed against your budget, a goal or last period. Change an input and every metric built from it recalculates.
Answers and reports
Ask ClariFi answers in plain English from your own data, with a citation on every number. The same figures feed your CFO memo, board pack and investor updates, and on Growth your own AI assistant over MCP.
“Explains what moved” runs on a metric tree of your business, starting from a default for your industry: 15 industries and 371 defined metrics, with definitions that follow QuickBooks where bookkeeping products differ. Browse the free metric trees by industry.
AI-Native Finance, By Stage
What you can actually ask ClariFi
Our team works in ClariFi on every plan, so every question below gets an answer. What changes as you grow is the question, and whether our team answers it for you or you ask ClariFi yourself.
At Launch (Founder + bookkeeper)
You ask, our team answers from ClariFi. Direct access isn't part of Launch.
“What were revenue, expenses, and net income last month?”
→ GAAP financial statements from your latest close: P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow, with the change against prior months.
“What did I actually spend on AWS last quarter?”
→ Spend by account from your monthly close, with the trend against prior quarters.
“Did my January close finish on time?”
→ Day-by-day timeline of every reconciliation, with anyone blocked called out.
“What tax deadlines are coming up next month?”
→ Federal, state, franchise, sales tax, all in one calendar with prep status.
At Foundation (Founder + CFO + ops)
Your CFO answers from ClariFi. Add ClariFi to Foundation to open these answers yourself.
“When does cash run out?”
→ Runway and burn from your latest close, with alerts as you approach 12, 9, 6, and 3 months of runway.
“Why did gross margin drop 4 points last month?”
→ The metric tree shows what moved: which line drove the change and by how much, with your CFO's read on why.
“What's our CAC payback, and is LTV keeping up?”
→ Unit economics from your books and KPIs: CAC, LTV and payback, trended month by month.
“Where is spend creeping up, and how much is safe to spend?”
→ Spend by category trended month over month, with Spend Guardrails showing what's safe to spend.
“How concentrated is our customer base?”
→ Top-customer share of revenue and how it's trending, so concentration risk shows up before an investor asks.
At Growth (Founder + CFO + board)
Ask ClariFi directly in plain English, or from your own AI assistant over MCP. Our team works in the same numbers.
“What happens if we delay the next raise by 6 months?”
→ Runway Modeler, Headcount Plan and Dilution Model, run on the same numbers: runway, hiring room and dilution if you raise smaller.
“Draft my board deck with actuals vs plan and top 3 risks.”
→ Our team generates it in Board Pack from your actuals and plan: narrative from your reviewed CFO memo, KPI and variance tables, and risks, every number traceable to source.
“What would it take to hit $2M ARR by June?”
→ The metric tree works back from the target to the input that has to move. Set it as a goal and give the metric an owner.
“How much runway do we lose if we hire two engineers in March?”
→ Ask ClariFi answers in plain English and cites where every number came from.
Every number traces back to where it came from and when it was reconciled, whether our team hands you the answer or you ask ClariFi yourself. This is what AI-native finance looks like.
Excel became finance's infrastructure and locked founders into a monthly cycle: exports, reconciliations, fragile models, and board decks delivered after decisions were due.
- Manual exports & reconciliations
- Fragile spreadsheet models
- Month-end close takes weeks
- Board deck by heroics
- Every change explained, part by part
- Safe-to-spend signals
- Board packs generated on demand
- Answers in plain English
Founders deserve finance that helps them decide, not just report. On-demand intelligence, spending guidance, and compliance that runs in the background, delivered in plain English with expert review.
Legacy tools can't fix what they created. That's why we built ClariFi, an AI finance team that turns your financial data into decisions you can act on, with experts accountable for every number.
48 KPIs Powering Every Decision
Your data tells a story. ClariFi reads it across 8 categories and turns it into board pack narratives, spend signals, and proactive alerts, so you act on intelligence, not just review numbers.
- Revenue, expenses, profitability, cash, metrics, unit economics, AR/AP, and workforce KPIs
- Custom KPIs your finance team sets up, including manually tracked ones, by dimension and more often than monthly
- KPIs kept in sync with a Google Sheet your team already works in
- Intelligent anomaly detection with severity levels
- Configurable views and personalized insights
Metric Tree: See What Moves Your Numbers
The engine behind “explains what moved”: your metrics laid out as a tree, from the outcome you care most about down to the operating KPIs that lead it, starting from a template built for your industry.
- Growth, profitability and survival, each drawn as a tree with 12-month trends
- Every change broken down exactly, so you can see what moved and why
- What-ifs on any input, with every metric built from it recalculated by the tree's own formulas, and what it would take to hit a number
- Targets with a pace line, and an owner on the KPIs that matter
- Operating KPIs and their drivers, each link labelled as a stated assumption or a relationship measured in your own data (measured on Growth)
Investor-Ready Financial Statements
18 report types, from P&L and Balance Sheet to Budget vs. Actual and custom reports, all generated automatically and exportable in seconds.
- Income statement with waterfall chart visualization
- Balance sheet, cash flow statement, and budget comparisons
- PDF, Excel, and CSV export with one click
Model Any Decision Before You Make It
How much runway do you have if you hire two engineers? What happens if Q2 revenue comes in 20% below plan? Sixteen planning tools share one always-current set of numbers, so you decide with data, not gut.
- 13-week forecast seeded from your latest close
- Three scenarios: base, optimistic, and pessimistic
- Runway modeler, hiring impact, break-even, and dilution modeling
- Pro forma P&L built line by line from contracted revenue, observed renewals, weighted pipeline, and planned hires, each line tagged with its source
- Debt vs. equity comparison, use of funds, and pricing models
- 6-month predictions for revenue, MRR, expenses, cash, burn and customers, with 95% confidence bands
Know Exactly What You Can Afford, Every Day
Runway and burn aren’t just metrics to track. They’re the basis for every spending decision. ClariFi delivers safe-to-spend signals and proactive alerts at 12, 9, 6, and 3-month runway thresholds.
- Cash balance trends and monthly burn rate charts
- Runway in months with color-coded comfort zones
- Revenue vs. expenses comparison over time
- Proactive runway alerts at 12, 9, 6, and 3-month thresholds
Ask Any Question. Get a Cited, Decision-Ready Answer.
On the Growth plan, Ask ClariFi is your always-on analyst. Ask anything about your financials in plain English and get an answer grounded strictly in your own data. Every number carries a clickable citation back to its source, so you can verify instead of trust.
- Answers only from your data, read-only by design
- Source citations on every AI-generated number
- Monthly executive summaries and CFO memos
- Investor updates and board packs built from the same cited numbers
- Expense optimization recommendations and contract analysis
- Connect your own AI assistant over MCP (Growth plan)
See How You Compare, and What to Do About It
Seventeen financial ratios, fifteen of them benchmarked against 15 industries and 6 stages. ClariFi doesn’t just tell you your gross margin is 62%; it tells you that’s 8 points below your peer median, and your finance team recommends what to do about it.
- Current Ratio, Quick Ratio, and Cash Ratio for liquidity
- Gross Margin, Net Margin, and EBITDA Margin for profitability
- Color-coded status badges: Good, Warning, and Critical
- Industry benchmarks across 15 industries and 6 company stages, each AI-researched figure approved by a person, with its sources, before it is used
From Numbers to Decisions
What moved, what went wrong, what you could do, and whether it worked
ClariFi takes you from the close to the call in four steps, all on the same numbers. The AI does the analysis and never computes a figure; your decision-maker makes the call.
Explains what moved
Why did this number change?
Every change is broken down exactly into the parts that made it, and the same explanation feeds your CFO memo, board pack and AI assistant.
Diagnoses what went wrong
Against which plan, by how much, and is it real?
Against a named reference, such as your locked budget, a goal, a target or last period, ClariFi measures the gap both ways, walks it down the tree until the pieces add up exactly, and puts data problems, timing and one-offs ahead of the business. A cash bridge explains why runway moved. Anything unexplained stays on its own line.
Evaluates your options
What could we do, and what would each option change?
For each real problem, options against your own limits, such as a runway floor, with doing nothing as the baseline: what each closes, what it costs, how reversible it is and what it does not model. Never ranked or recommended. What-ifs, the Runway Modeler and Hiring Impact run on the same numbers.
Records the decision, checks the outcome
Did it work?
Your decision-maker makes the call and ClariFi records it with the forecast it was made on. At every close it compares that forecast with what actually happened, alongside targets on a pace line and goals graded monthly.
Diagnosis against last period works on every plan. Diagnosis against budgets and goals, evaluated options and decisions, board packs and the Runway Modeler and Hiring Impact are part of the Growth plan; the cash forecast, Spend Guardrails and runway alerts start on Foundation.
Board Pack Generator · Growth
Board packs your board will actually read
Built from your actuals and plan, with the narrative from your reviewed CFO memo, the variances that matter flagged, and every section checked by our experts before it goes out.
See a sample board packAI-Native · Secure MCP integration
Your data. Your AI assistant. One secure connection.
ClariFi is your AI finance team, with FP&A models, 48 KPIs, runway, your metric tree and board-ready reports. Its MCP server gives your AI assistant secure access to that information and the output of ClariFi’s models, so every answer is grounded in your real, reconciled data, not generic advice. You bring the data. The AI brings the reasoning.
Your ClariFi data
metric tree, FP&A, KPIs
MCP server
secure, built-in OAuth
Your AI assistant
Claude web, desktop, or Claude Code
Answers
grounded in your numbers
Your assistant can also propose updates, such as a customer contract or a month of KPI figures, but nothing changes until it is approved in ClariFi. Build your own agent or read MCP for founders and finance teams.
Built-in OAuth 2.1. Scoped to one company, revocable anytime. Included in the Growth plan.
Run a fractional CFO or advisory practice? ClariFi is multi-tenant and white-labeled. Your firm can run on the same platform, under your brand. ClariFi for Firms →
AI that does the work. Numbers it can’t make up.
- The AI never computes a figure: code calculates every number from your books.
- Read-only by construction: a build check blocks any agent from writing to your ledger.
- Every number cited to its source, and a person approves before anything counts.
Built-In From Day One
What you see follows your plan. On Launch, our team delivers ClariFi-powered reports and KPIs. On Foundation, direct access is a paid add-on. Growth includes everything below, and cards marked Growth are part of the Growth plan only.
Tax & Compliance Autopilot
Compliance deadline tracking across all 50 states, with auto-generated deadlines and year-over-year rollover. Our team does the filing.
- Federal and all 50 states tracked
- Auto-generated compliance deadlines
- A real year-end close on top of the 14-step monthly close
Cap Table & FundraisingGrowth
Manage your cap table, track funding rounds, and stay fundraise-ready with a composite readiness score.
- Share classes, option grants with vesting schedules
- Pre/post-money valuations and exit waterfall analysis
- Fundraising readiness score (0-100)
Board Packs & Data RoomsGrowth
Our team generates your board pack from actuals and plan, with the narrative drawn from your reviewed CFO memo, and our experts check every section before it goes out. Always-on data rooms for due diligence.
- Board pack PDF with KPI summary, budget variance, and cash tables
- 7-section due diligence data room
- Document vault with secure external upload links
Document Vault, Diligence-Ready
Every receipt, contract, and filing in one organized vault: folders shared with your finance team, per-folder access control, and a full audit trail. Audit-ready at all times.
- Secure upload links for auditors, lawyers, and banks, no account needed
- Per-folder access control with role-based permissions
- Audit trail and version history on every document
Advanced Analytics, Beyond the Statements
Beyond core statements: the deeper analysis a fractional CFO would run, built in.
- Segment P&L showing which segments actually drive profit
- Working-capital cycle (DSO, DPO, CCC) and concentration risk
- Real cohort tables: retention, vintage, and cumulative curves
- Leading Indicators (Growth): which of your KPIs move ahead of your financials, and by how many months
- Automatic anomaly detection on KPIs and financial lines, plus industry-aware trial-balance mapping
Know How Much Revenue Is Already Signed
One customer contract register drives concentration, contracted backlog, upcoming renewals, and pipeline, so the question “how much of next year is already won?” has an answer.
- Customer and vendor contract registers, with customer contracts bulk-loaded from CSV (Foundation and Growth)
- Concentration risk, backlog, and renewal dates from the same records
- Feeds the pro forma P&L, so plans start from signed revenue
Curious what AI-native finance actually looks like? See 30 questions you can ask →
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is ClariFi?
- ClariFi is StartupCFO's AI finance team: agentic AI that does the analyst work, with a finance team that reviews it. It explains exactly what moved each figure and why, tracks 48 KPIs across 8 categories, produces board packs on the Growth plan, provides safe-to-spend guidance through Spend Guardrails, and tracks tax and compliance deadlines across all 50 states. Its AI agents draft the monthly close package, watch cash and flag burn moving outside its pattern, and propose how trial-balance accounts map to your KPIs. It is read-only by construction: your books stay in QuickBooks, Xero, or Zoho, and your finance team reviews every draft before anything reaches you.
- What is an AI CFO?
- An AI CFO is software that does the analyst work of a finance function with AI: closing the books, watching cash and runway, explaining why numbers moved, and answering finance questions in plain English. ClariFi is StartupCFO's AI CFO. Its AI agents draft the work, deterministic code calculates every figure, and human finance experts review the work before anything reaches the founder, so the judgement calls still sit with people.
- Can an AI CFO replace a fractional CFO?
- Not on its own, and ClariFi is not designed to. ClariFi takes over the repetitive analysis: the close package, cash monitoring, variance explanations and reporting. A fractional CFO still owns the judgement: fundraising strategy, board conversations, hiring plans and pricing. On StartupCFO's Foundation and Growth plans you get both, with the CFO working from ClariFi's numbers.
- Does ClariFi help with fundraising readiness?
- Yes, on the Growth plan. ClariFi scores fundraising readiness from 0 to 100, builds a due-diligence data room on demand, manages your cap table with Carta sync, and produces Investor-Ready board packs and financial statements, every number traceable to its source and reviewed by our team.
- Which ClariFi is this?
- This is ClariFi by StartupCFO, the AI CFO and finance platform behind StartupCFO's accounting, tax and fractional CFO service for startups (StartupCFO is a service of Rubric Financial). The app lives at clarifi.startupcfo.ai. It is not affiliated with other products or companies that use the name Clarifi.
- How does ClariFi help me make decisions?
- In four steps on the same numbers. ClariFi explains exactly what moved each figure. It diagnoses what went wrong against a named reference, such as your budget, a goal, a target or last period, measuring the gap both ways and putting data problems, timing and one-offs ahead of the business, with a cash bridge that explains why runway moved. It evaluates options for each real problem against your own limits, with doing nothing as the baseline and what each option closes, costs and leaves unmodelled; options are never ranked or recommended. And it records the decision your decision-maker makes, then compares the forecast it was made on with what actually happened at every close. The AI never computes a figure.
- Does ClariFi replace my accountant or bookkeeper?
- No. ClariFi works alongside your existing accountant or StartupCFO's in-house team. The platform automates data ingestion, FP&A modeling, and reporting; our accountants and CFOs check every number before it reaches you. Most customers use ClariFi as part of the bundled StartupCFO service rather than standalone.
- What platforms does ClariFi integrate with?
- ClariFi syncs natively with QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Zoho Books. Corporate card spend flows in from Ramp with department mapping, and your cap table syncs from Carta, including option grants and valuation history. Data syncs daily, and KPIs can also sync with a Google Sheet your team already uses. Built-in messaging and notifications keep you and your finance team in one thread, and on the Growth plan an MCP server connects your own AI assistant. New integrations are added on demand for enterprise customers.
- Can I connect ClariFi to my AI assistant?
- Yes, on the Growth plan. ClariFi runs a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, so you can connect your AI assistant and ask about your KPIs, runway, metric tree, and reports in plain language. You connect with a secure web connector or a personal access token, scoped to a single company and revocable at any time. Your assistant can also propose updates, such as a customer contract or a month of KPI figures, but it never writes directly: each proposal waits in ClariFi until it is approved: you approve contract updates, your finance team approves KPI figures and tasks, and every decision is logged.
- How much does ClariFi cost?
- Direct ClariFi access is included in the Growth plan ($799/mo), alongside full fractional CFO support and board packs. Launch and Foundation plans receive ClariFi-powered reports and KPIs delivered by our finance team, and Foundation can add direct ClariFi access for an additional fee. Standalone ClariFi access for companies that prefer to keep their existing finance team is also available; contact sales for pricing.
- How long does it take to onboard ClariFi?
- Your finance team is live in 2 business days. Onboarding consists of connecting your accounting platform, importing the chart of accounts, mapping KPIs to your business model, and producing your first financial statements and KPI report. On Growth, your first board pack follows. Our team does all of the configuration.
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