Free tool

Runway calculator

Cash against trailing operating burn, in months, with the date the cash runs out and the urgency band the scoring rubric would assign. The engine computes this for all 676 issuers nightly from XBRL, and flags the figure when the underlying balance sheet is too old to trust.

The issuer

Latest reported balance sheet figure. On EDGAR, CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue.
Net cash used in operating activities. Enter it as a positive number.
Used to annualize. Micro-cap 10-Qs report this year to date, so check which period the figure covers.
Used for the zero-cash date and the staleness check.

Runway

Straight-line arithmetic, and burn is not straight-line. A clinical-stage issuer's spend steps up around a trial and down after it. Financing inflows, one-time items and working capital swings all move the real date. This is the same figure the rubric scores, and the rubric treats it as one component of six for exactly that reason.

The detail most screens get wrong

A stale balance sheet produces a confident number that means nothing.

The arithmetic above works on whatever cash figure you feed it. The hard part in production is knowing when not to trust the input. One issuer in an early version of this engine ranked in the top ten on a runway of 0.9 months computed from cash dated 1,336 days earlier. The arithmetic was right and the answer was worthless.

So the engine refuses to score runway urgency once the underlying cash figure is more than 270 days old, prints n/a rather than a number, and states the reason. A silently missing component looks like a bug. A printed zero with its reason is an audit trail.

270 days
after which runway stops scoring and prints n/a
20%
of the tracked universe carries a float figure over 400 days old
30 pts
the maximum runway urgency can contribute, out of 100
See how runway is scored Baby shelf calculator