Series D+ finance guide: Drive durability

You’ve come a long way since your last raise. Maybe you’ve doubled headcount, or even crossed 9 figures in ARR.

The good news: you’ve proven you have what it takes to run a durable business.‍

The bad news: nobody’s giving you a medal.

Expectations of the finance team are now at a new level. Your board and investors want to see public-company discipline, even if you don’t plan to become one. Additionally, finance must serve as the connective tissue that holds all departments together as they become more complex.

Whether you’re planning to file an S-1 or stay private as you scale, the mandate is the same: build toward a finance org and tech stack that’s public-market ready.

In this post, we’ll share best practices we’ve seen leading companies adopt to scale their finance function with the rigor this stage demands.

Series D+ do’s and don’ts

DO make finance a true business partner

With scale comes complexity. As departments get bigger and teams get more specialized, there’s a natural tendency to start operating in silos.

Finance has to swim against this current and keep everyone in sync. It’s on you to listen to what business partners need, then design (and continuously refine) a collaborative operating model that keeps the engine humming.

Balance controls with growth

Financial controls protect you from errors, leakage, and audit risk. That being said, more controls aren’t always better. As noted by CFO Secrets, each new layer comes at a cost, and piling them on for optics slows down the business without adding much upside.

The best finance teams find a happy medium: enough controls to keep investors at ease without weighing down the business. At this stage, that means a monthly close you can trust in five days or less, and guardrails that prevent waste without dragging finance into every hire or vendor decision.

Get this balance right, and you’ll earn trust across the org. Finance will be seen as a growth-enabler rather than a gatekeeper.

Decentralize planning without losing control

More budget owners means more complicated planning as you scale. Before you know it, you’re coordinating across dozens of teams, each with their own goals, vendors, and timelines. Chasing down inputs by hand is going to become increasingly unwieldy.

Finance’s role is to orchestrate the planning process, not micromanage it. That means:

• Time-boxing submissions to keep the process moving
• Enforcing shared definitions so everyone speaks the same financial language
• Rolling up inputs into a single version of truth, automatically
• Giving business leaders real ownership of their budgets and forecasts

It’s a mindset shift from “fill out this template” to “here’s how we’ll plan together.”

The trick is balance. Give business partners too much freedom and your plan becomes incoherent. Grip the wheel too tightly and you slow everything down.

The sweet spot is a system that guides contributors, prompting them with pre-built assumptions while keeping everything versioned and auditable.

Tweak your tooling to support collaborative planning

Your spreadsheet-as-budget era ends here.

Supporting the level of collaboration that Series D and beyond demand requires different tooling. At this stage, you need a platform designed for collaborative planning—where sales, marketing, and product can plug in directly, and finance can run point without being overwhelmed by version control and administrative tasks.

Other tooling needs here include:

• Controlled self-serve reporting so partners can answer routine questions without pinging FP&A
• Modern tools and AI that extend self-serve further
  
  • For example, lightweight dashboards or even agents in Slack that can answer the majority of stakeholder questions without finance having to step in

Make reporting push + pull

As your planning and tooling become more collaborative, your reporting has to follow suit. Hopefully you’re sensing a theme here: it’s time to ditch static decks and spreadsheets.

Think about it in terms of a push and pull framework. Finance should still push structured reporting on a predictable cadence: close packs, exec summaries, board materials.

But just as important is the pull: enabling business partners to get answers themselves, without waiting on finance. Can a marketing lead track vendor spend in real-time? Can a sales manager see headcount vs. plan without submitting a ticket? That’s your new standard.

DON’T waste energy acting like you’re public before you are

That may sound like the opposite of what we're prescribing here. The nuance is subtle. Your systems and processes should meet certain public company standards pre-IPO, but that doesn’t mean actually running your company like it’s public yet.

This boils down to a minimum viable level of controls, reports, and forecasts. You should have sufficient governance to pass an audit, but you don’t necessarily need Sarbanes-Oxley checklists yet. Reporting should be fast, clear, and decision-oriented. Glossy decks meant to “look mature” are overkill and a poor use of resources.

Too many finance leaders waste time building investor-friendly dashboards, tightening controls, and layering on process—not because the business needs it, but because they think it looks the part. It’s performative, not productive. And it inevitably leads to over-engineered processes and slower decision-making.

Soon enough, you’ll yearn for the lean scrappiness that defined you as a startup. Don’t give it up before you need to.

DO map out a path to optional profitability

If you're not profitable yet, it’s a good idea to start thinking about how you can break even at this point. Nothing improves late-stage negotiating leverage like the option not to raise.

Even if you’re investing hard and running unprofitable by design, you need a clear path back to profitability—one you could execute faster than your remaining runway if the market turned.

This requires:

• Zero-based budgeting
• Strong (but not suffocating!) controls
• A willingness to reallocate capital as necessary

Also, make sure you don’t overlook the GTM information gap. Sales teams are rewarded on bookings, not cost, so the natural bias is always toward asking for more resources. Left unmanaged, that creates a constant upward pull on spend.

Finance’s role is to reset the terms of the conversation—shared definitions, unit economics, and spend thresholds that make trade-offs transparent to both executives and investors.

Optimize your capital structure

Planning for profitability doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s tied directly to balance sheet management.

Keep the cap table clean and model dilution alongside runway. Decide when and where debt makes sense. A modest revolver or venture debt line can buy flexibility, while covenant-heavy facilities that limit hiring or pricing flexibility will keep you locked in.

Revisit the structure quarterly, and make sure your capital structure is supporting your strategy rather than constraining it.

DON’T wait for bankers to prep for an IPO

Ever since this whole thing started, an IPO has been a distant pipedream. For those that have gotten this far, it’s now a real possibility in the next year or so. Let that reality sink in fast, because getting there is going to require a lot of legwork.

Going public is a financial event on paper, but in the trenches, it’s an operational transformation. The bar for accuracy, transparency, and predictability climbs steeply.

It’s not enough to “clean things up” a quarter or two before filing your S-1. If you’re waiting until the bankers show up to start acting like a public company, you’re already behind.

Series D is the time to turn aspiration into infrastructure. That means:

Monthly close should be fast, clean, and accurate

Month-end close should be a well-oiled machine by now. Any Excel gymnastics and side-channel reconciliations need to be rooted out, stat.

The new benchmark is speed. Every other monthly process hinges on the close. If it becomes a bottleneck, FP&A’s forecasts end up stuck in limbo, and executives can’t make decisions based on the latest numbers.

Right now, you should target a five day-or-less close. That’s the bar public companies set, and for good reason: it allows FP&A to grab the baton and start using actuals to build forecasts and support decision makers.

Forecasts should resemble reality

Once you’re public, you’ll be judged less on long-term TAM pitches and more on your ability to hit EPS projections. Telling a compelling story is becoming less important than day-to-day operational credibility. In other words: create accurate forecasts, and hit them reliably.

Systems and processes need to scale

That includes revenue recognition, headcount planning, audit readiness, and internal controls. Hopefully, each of these is supported by robust systems by now. If not, put that at the top of your priority list.

DO start shaping your org for its next chapter

There’s a fine line between LARPing as a public company and preparing to become one. Skip the pretty decks and mock earnings calls and focus instead on putting structures in place that you’ll need post-IPO.

Even if you don’t end up going that route, it will set you up well for whatever’s next.

1. Embrace specialization

Whoever your FP&A generalist is at this point, they’re about to hit their limit, if they haven’t already.

It’s time to break finance into clear swim lanes:

• Top-line FP&A (pipeline, pricing, bookings/ARR)
• Opex FP&A (headcount, vendors, functional budgets)
• Controller
• Tax
• Treasury
• Corporate development/M&A

You probably don’t need embedded BU finance yet. “Finance-lite” partners in RevOps/data can cover local needs while FP&A keeps the operating model consistent.

The same specialization applies to your stack. Static spreadsheets and FP&A add-ons won’t scale well from this point forward.

Instead, move to a collaborative planning environment—something like Pigment or Aleph. Your goal should be to orchestrate the process while pushing ownership of the numbers back to the people closest to the inputs.

2. Operate like you’re public

Didn’t you guys just say don’t act like you’re public before you actually are?

Yes, we did. It sounds contradictory, but hear us out—the nuance is important:

When we say “operate like you’re public,” we mean the discipline part—accountability, clean data, and a reliable close process. We don’t mean wasting time and resources putting together glossy investor decks.

You want to set the tone that a higher level of rigor is expected from here on out. Build that muscle memory now, and your team will be well prepared once public investors and the SEC put your numbers under a microscope.

DON’T let the top line mask underlying inefficiencies

Breakneck growth can mask a lot of sins. Just because revenue is up and to the right doesn’t mean tool sprawl and inefficient processes aren’t lurking below the surface. Fast ≠ efficient.

Your goal now is durable growth. That means rooting out drag wherever you can find it.

Focus on leverage, not volume

What matters now is the cost to produce the next dollar of ARR, and whether that cost is going down as you scale. If bookings are up but close time, rework, and variance are all rising, you’re compounding operational debt.

Use your new push/pull reporting muscle to make this visible. Start tracking:

• Plan-to-actual accuracy (especially around GTM spend)
• Time to close the books
• Volume of ad-hoc questions routed through finance

Right-size people before you resize budgets

Pre-IPO, it’s tempting to “hire the problem away.” Don’t.

Modern planning platforms now automate large chunks of what junior analysts used to do—pulls, re-forecasting, variance analysis, etc.—meaning smaller teams can still crank out a ton of output.

Aim to keep scarce human time focused on review/approval and nuanced decision support, not repetitive pulls and slide-building. If your first response to reporting backlog is a new req, see if you can fix the process and self-serve first.

Here’s a simple playbook to root out hidden drag:

• Headcount leverage: for every 10% top-line increase, does finance’s manual workload go down or up? If you’re adding analysts to keep pace with questions, invest in self-serve (i.e., “chat with your data”) before adding headcount.
• Tooling value: list the finance/reporting tools that only FP&A touches. If budget owners can’t collaborate directly—or if version control still lives in email—graduate to a collaborative planning platform.
• Process latency: measure days to close, days to publish the forecast refresh, and % of questions answered without finance intervention. Trend them, set targets, and review monthly.
• Zero-based budgeting: ditch the automatic roll-forward and build your annual budget from scratch each year. Force every dollar to be re-justified against today’s priorities.

The outcome you’re after is obvious on paper and hard in practice: more output per dollar and per person as you scale. Don’t let a pretty top line hide the fact you’re lugging an anchor. Find the inefficiencies now while you still have the runway and multiples to fix them.

Ryno Blignaut, Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, summed this concept up well in our recent webinar Metrics that Matter: How Silicon Valley VCs Look at Your Company:

Finish the last mile strong

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve done a lot right. The last stretch is about balance—knowing when to lean on your own team and when to empower business partners to take the wheel.

Do the unglamorous work now so all of your doors stay open, whether that’s graduating into the public markets or scaling privately on your own terms.

This wraps our series on best practices for VC-backed finance teams, but there’s plenty more great content where this came from.

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