What do investors check before a Series A?

The last full fiscal year plus current year-to-date.

Everything booked for the chosen period and the period properly closed.

By product, market, and your most important customers. Know who and what drives the top line.

Cost of sales by component and main supplier, plus your personnel cost base by function.

Be able to explain what your largest balances represent and how they have moved over the period.

Daily, weekly, and monthly routines, who is responsible, and on what timelines.

A clean, current cap table — shareholders, ownership percentages, options, convertibles, share classes, vesting.

Ideally produced every month across the current and prior fiscal year, not rebuilt for the raise.

How the monthly report is produced and who the stakeholders are.

Including any differences between statutory accounts and management accounts.

What gets done, by whom, by when.

Reconciled, reported, and traceable to the records.

Corporate and payroll tax accounts reconciled, with authority correspondence on file.

Recognised on transfer of control, in line with the standard you report under.

And broken down by stream, product, and market.

Cash received ahead of delivery recognised over time, not booked day one.

New, expansion, contraction, and churn reconciling to recognised revenue.

A current figure for cash on hand across all accounts.

Spend minus revenue, not gross spend, and whether it is rising. Investors read gross-vs-net gaps as a red flag, so it should tie to what actually left the bank.

Cash and net burn translated into a runway figure, and what extends it.

Every line supported with backup.

How each material balance is recorded and reconciled, and by whom.

Ideally by someone independent of transaction processing.

Open items listed by customer and supplier, with average collection and payment days.

Fixed asset register, Debtors and creditors tying back to the balance sheet control accounts.

Accruals, prepayments, provisions, and any shareholder loans — terms, balances, and movement over the period (where applicable).

The main lines traceable, not a single lump.

Tied back to headcount.

Material categories broken out, one-offs flagged.

CAC, LTV, payback, and gross margin per unit. Sourced to actual numbers, not assumed.

Retention curves by cohort, churn by segment, in usable form.

Monthly detail for year one, assumptions written down and defensible.

Current-year budget and forward forecast, key sensitivities named.

Including Payroll, VAT and supplier timing.

Why you are raising and what the money funds. Which hires, milestones, and how far it gets you.

Accounting/ERP, payroll, expense, invoicing — where they integrate, where someone bridges the gap by hand, and what is automated or planned.

Revenue, cash, personnel, and payables. Who approves, who reviews, what evidence is left. Light, not a full framework.