Zero-Based Budgeting for a Series B SaaS Startup

The CFO had been telling the board the company had 18 months of runway. Technically true. What she suspected, and couldn't easily prove, was that a meaningful chunk of the burn was money nobody would miss if it disappeared. Post-Series B, every department had submitted a budget by taking last year's number and adding 15%. No justification, no trade-off, no challenge. She'd approved it all because she didn't have bandwidth to question every line item alone. That nagging feeling that they were paying for things they'd forgotten they had had been sitting with her for months.

Zero-Based Budgeting is not popular because it requires people to justify things they've always taken for granted. We ran 22 structured sessions across six departments over six weeks. The conversations that produced the most uncomfortable moments were consistently about software subscriptions: tools four teams were paying for separately, tools no one had cancelled after switching vendors the previous year, tools three people were using and forty were paying to license. That work found ₹1.4 Cr of recurring spend that could be cut without touching a single salary.