How to: Health & readiness
Health & readiness helps you validate whether your model is complete and internally consistent. It highlights missing base-year inputs and runs checks so you can trust your statements, cash flow, dashboard and scenarios.
What health & readiness does
A completeness percentage based on whether the required base year fields are filled in (P&L + Balance Sheet).
A set of consistency checks across all years (e.g. balance equation, ratio sanity checks, and percentage-of-revenue limits).
You can open Health from the project top bar. After you press Save, Health refreshes so you can immediately see improvement.
How the readiness score is calculated
Readiness focuses on the base year (typically the last actual year). It checks whether key baseline amounts and Balance Sheet inputs are present, because those anchor all forecasts and scenario comparisons.
In Health, 0 is treated as missing (it’s assumed to be a placeholder) unless a field is explicitly allowed to be zero.
- • Revenue growth (P&L driver)
- • Dividend and equity contribution (Balance)
- • Short-term debt and long-term debt (Balance)
- • Revenue
- • COGS
- • Employee expenses
- • Other operating expenses
- • Depreciation (base year only)
- • Interest (base year only)
- • Taxes (base year)
- • Fixed assets (end-of-year)
- • Investments (also in base year)
- • Depreciation % (drives forecast depreciation)
- • Interest rate % (drives interest)
- • Inventory / receivables / payables
- • Other short-term assets & liabilities
- • Equity (end-of-year)
Debt is intentionally not required for the readiness score, because many models start without debt and add it later.
Checks you’ll see (and what they mean)
This is the most important integrity check. If it fails, your Balance Sheet doesn’t reconcile and cash flow outputs can’t be trusted.
Negative cash is flagged as a warning to highlight liquidity pressure. It can be valid in some cases, but it’s a strong signal to review assumptions or financing needs.
Working capital ratios outside a typical range are flagged to prevent unrealistic cash outcomes. If your business truly operates outside the range, you can still model it — just validate it’s intentional.
Health flags unusual percent-of-revenue values, such as:
- • Revenue growth outside 0–100%
- • COGS % over 100%
- • Employee % over 100%
- • Other OpEx % over 50%
These are guardrails: sometimes they’re valid, but often they indicate an input mistake.
Recommended workflow
- 1. Complete baseline inputs
Fill in your base-year P&L and Balance Sheet values first (end-of-year convention).
- 2. Press Save
Saving is important: Health updates after saves so you’re always checking the latest state.
- 3. Open Health
Review missing fields (base year) and then scan the checks across years.
- 4. Fix issues at the source
Don’t “patch” cash. If the model doesn’t reconcile, the cause is usually in P&L, fixed assets/investments, working capital inputs or equity/debt assumptions.
- 5. Save again and re-check
Iterate until readiness is high and the key checks pass — then your dashboard and scenarios are meaningful.
Once your model is healthy, you can confidently use dashboards and scenario analysis to support decisions and investor updates.