Tracking burn, runway, and subscriptions without a finance team

Vertical: Tech

Mercury products: Insights, Invoicing API, Payroll

As COO of Intuist.ai, Ann Stewart Zachwieja wears a lot of hats. The company was founded in 2023, with a mission to democratize AI, making it accessible to people who don’t write code but still want to build with it. Its Veda Platform supports over 70 integrations and 80 workflow actions, and gives anyone the tools to create AI assistants, agents, and automated workflows without an engineering background. Building such an ambitious startup means Ann moves between marketing, product, customer success, sales, and operations on any given day.

Running a business at this stage means every cost decision compounds. The tech stack alone is a growing line item: software subscriptions, API charges, infrastructure. For Intuist, revenue comes through recurring contracts and invoicing, and at this stage, there’s no finance team and no time to build elaborate tracking systems. Zachwieja needed a way to monitor the money flowing in and out without pulling her away from the work of actually growing the business.

Zachwieja’s previous approach to understanding cash flow was functional but manual. She’d open Mercury’s Transactions page, filter by keywords, scan for patterns. It gave her a good general sense of where money was moving. But unless she knew what to look for specifically, she might not immediately surface whatever mattered most that week.

Now she visits the Insights page a couple of times a week. The Overview tab gives her a snapshot of burn rate, runway, and top spending categories in a single view. Money-in and Money-out breakdowns let her drill into inflows and outflows by category, and the Cashflow timeframe shows the full picture over any specific period.

“[Insights] does a good job giving highlights,” Zachwieja says. For a team building across product, sales, and operations simultaneously, that kind of clarity — delivered without a spreadsheet — is the difference between making decisions on instinct and making them on data.

Like many AI companies, for Intuist, software spend is the largest and most volatile expense category. Subscriptions, API charges, and infrastructure costs shift as the product evolves, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s accumulating. Zachwieja watches this closely because at Intuist’s stage, the math is simple and unforgiving: if revenue is X and fixed costs are Y, she needs to know exactly what the gap looks like to stay ahead of it.

The categorized spend tables in Insights break down outflows by type, and software consistently surfaces as the top category. Not surprising, since Intuist runs on the tools it builds with, but having that data grouped and visible without manual reconciliation gives Zachwieja a running audit of the tech stack at any point in time. She can spot when a new subscription starts, see how costs shift month over month, and flag anything that looks off before it compounds.

For a company whose product is built on top of third-party APIs and cloud services, that visibility isn’t the difference between a cost structure that scales predictably and one that drifts.

Most financial questions at an early-stage startup eventually reduce to one: are we okay? Insights calculates runway by dividing the current available balance by average monthly burn, giving Zachwieja a real-time read on how long the company can keep operating at its current pace. No need to run manual formulas or switch tabs between account balances and spreadsheets to get a clear number.

The AI-powered Financial recap adds another layer, automatically surfacing the most relevant changes in cash flow — revenue trends, cost increases, spending spikes — and presents them as a written summary alongside the charts. Zachwieja finds this especially useful when large one-off payments land. Rather than skewing her read of the underlying trend, the recap gives her the context to separate noise from signal.

When the summary confirms that outflows are consistent and software remains the largest category, that’s not just data: It’s validation that the business is operating the way she expects. And when it doesn’t, she knows before any costs or actions compound.

Revenue at Intuist comes in from multiple channels, including through Stripe and Mercury’s Invoicing API. Zachwieja pays close attention to Insights when monthly recurring payments arrive, using the money-in tab to confirm that clients are paying on time and to gauge how the company is tracking against larger recurring revenue goals.

The invoice status indicators in the financial summary add another touchpoint. Seeing “2 of 4 invoices paid” at a glance keeps accounts receivable front of mind without requiring a separate check. For a COO who is also managing sales relationships and a host of other things, that kind of ambient visibility prevents things from slipping through the cracks.

At their current growth stage, the line between a late invoice and a cash flow problem is uncomfortably thin. Knowing which of four invoices have landed without opening a separate AR tracker keeps that line visible.

With Insights native to their Mercury account, Intuist has moved from ad hoc transaction filtering to a structured, twice-weekly operating rhythm without adding any tools, growing headcount, or exporting a single CSV. That means:

• Twice-weekly financial reviews through Insights offer consistent visibility with minimal effort
• Complete visibility into software spend, the largest and most volatile expense category, through auto-categorization
• Real-time burn rate and runway calculation in a single view, replacing the mental arithmetic of checking balances against spreadsheets
• Accounts receivable monitoring with invoice status visible at a glance, keeping cash collection on track without a separate AR process
• AI-powered financial recaps that contextualize spending trends and flag anomalies, answering “are we okay?” without manual analysis

Intuist is built on the idea that powerful tools shouldn’t require specialized expertise to use. It’s fitting, then, that the financial infrastructure running underneath it follows the same principle. Zachwieja doesn’t need a finance background or a dedicated hire to know where the money’s going, whether clients are paying, or to track runway.

As the company’s Veda Platform scales and the cost structure grows with it — more API calls, more infrastructure, more subscriptions — those biweekly check-ins become the operating habit that keeps complexity from outrunning clarity. The question never changes, the answer just gets more precise.