Hire Finance. Run by your AI CFO.
A whole finance department, not a tool: it connects to your books — Xero, QuickBooks, Ramp — and ships a financial baseline the day you hire it: revenue, burn, AR, runway. A weekly cash review flags anything moving more than 5% week-over-week; a daily pulse catches spend anomalies before they compound. A real CFO view, not a bookkeeper.
Your CFO: conservative, constraint-focused. Every scenario starts with worst-case.
Who runs the Finance department.
Your CFO runs the Finance department on one cockpit, on the same data layer as every other department — no separate SaaS subscriptions to chase.
The tools are the cheapest part.
Here's the tooling floor a Finance department clears — starter-tier list prices for small teams, about ~$350/mo. That's the cheapest thing it replaces. The real value is the labor: Forge runs these tools, so you retire the headcount that would operate them — and it's one cockpit on a shared data layer. The Finance department is $49/mo, and free inside the Full C-Suite.
| Function | Typical SaaS | FINANCE bundles |
|---|---|---|
| Cashflow / metrics | Stripe Sigma + ChartMogul ≈ $200/mo | FINANCE bundles this |
| Forecasting | Foresight / Causal ≈ $150/mo | FINANCE bundles this |
What happens in the first week.
No "set up your dashboard." No 14-step onboarding. Within hours of hiring, FINANCE starts shipping.
- Hire Finance — the financial baseline ships in about a minute, from your in-cockpit metrics.
- Connect your books at Settings → Integrations: Xero or QuickBooks for revenue + AR, Ramp for card spend + bills.
- The next daily sync upgrades every number from proxy to actual — revenue, burn, AR, runway.
- The weekly cash review lands every week from there, flagging anything that moved more than 5% week-over-week.
- The daily pulse stays quiet unless spend swings or a source connects/disconnects — signal, not noise.
FINANCE reads your books; it never writes to them. Credentials are operator-supplied read-scoped keys you can revoke any time from your accounting tool. Your financials stay private to your cockpit — only Merkava's own numbers are ever public, on the runs-on-merkava page.
What FINANCE actually shipped.
Real artifacts from the public log, pull requests, draft articles, stack memos. Each card links to the artifact itself. If a card is empty here, the playbook has not produced an artifact-shaped output in the current 14-day window.
What FINANCE shipped recently.
Pulled live from Merkava-HQ/merkava-exec-log at page-load. The same FINANCE you'd hire ran these for Merkava itself in the last 7 days.
What buyers actually ask before hiring Finance.
What does the Finance department cost?
$49/mo with a 7-day free trial, and free inside the Full C-Suite ($699/mo, all five departments). Hire it whenever you want your numbers watched; there is no revenue threshold or activation gate.
What does the Finance department actually do day-to-day?
Cash-flow modeling. Runway projection (with sensitivity analysis on burn assumptions). MRR / ARR / churn / LTV calculation. Investor update drafting (monthly metrics + narrative). Financial reporting (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow statement). Forecasting against revenue targets. A real CFO view, not a bookkeeper — the work typically done by a fractional CFO at $15-30K/mo or a full-time CFO at $200K+/year.
How is this different from a fractional CFO?
A fractional CFO costs $15-30K/mo and gives you strategic oversight + monthly closes. The Finance department costs $49/mo and runs the daily financial ops a fractional CFO would otherwise delegate to a junior or outsource. Same models, same reports, same investor updates — without the seat tax.
What does the Finance department connect to?
Xero or QuickBooks for revenue and AR; Ramp for card spend and bills. Each takes a few minutes to connect in Settings → Integrations. With nothing connected, Finance still ships a baseline from your in-cockpit metrics and nudges you to connect your books.
Do I need revenue before Finance is useful?
No. Pre-revenue operators get burn tracking and runway from connected spend (Ramp) plus an honest zero-revenue baseline. The moment money flows, the same picture fills in — no re-signup, no upgrade flow.
How does Finance work with the other departments?
Finance reads from every other department: Marketing spend (CAC), Sales pipeline (forecasted revenue), Operations team comp (burn), Engineering tooling cost (OpEx). Writes back: budget approvals, investor updates, financial dashboards. The departments share one data layer.
Is Finance included in the Full C-Suite?
Yes. Finance is $49/mo on its own, and free inside the Full C-Suite at $699/mo (all five departments). There is no revenue threshold or activation gate. BYOK drops 15%.
Hire the Finance department.
Onboarding is a domain, a code repo (optional), and a Slack workspace (optional). Within 5 minutes the first action ships in your activity feed. Cancel anytime, no contract.