3-Year Financial Projections Template for SaaS Startups

What this template projects

Everything starts from revenue drivers. Each month MRR loses churn, gains expansion and adds new MRR, and new MRR itself grows by a set rate, so the sales engine gets bigger over time. Revenue in a month equals that month's MRR, the same rule as the SaaS budget template. Customer counts follow from ARPA: new MRR ÷ ARPA gives new customers, and the churn rate removes the same share of customers as of MRR.

Costs come from three places: COGS as a percentage of revenue, a dated headcount plan where each line has a department and a loaded monthly cost, and other operating costs that are part fixed and part a percentage of revenue. Capex is depreciated straight line. The cash flow statement then adds depreciation back to net income, subtracts capex and adds the equity raise in the month it closes.

This is deliberately smaller than a full SaaS financial model: there is no balance sheet, no annual prepayments and no debt. Use it to test whether a plan holds together before you build the detailed version; the model template guide lists what the full one needs.

Worked example: the default projection

The illustrative company starts Jan 2027 at $50,000 MRR ($600,000 ARR) with 100 customers at a $500 ARPA and $1,500,000 in the bank. New MRR starts at $6,000 a month and grows 3% a month; churn is 2% and expansion 1% a month. The team grows from 8 to 24 people, and a $4,000,000 round closes in Feb 2028.

Month 1 by hand: MRR is $50,000 − $1,000 churn + $500 expansion + $6,000 new = $55,500, and customers go from 100 to 110 (2 lost, 12 won). COGS at 22% is $12,210, payroll $95,000 and other opex $15,000 + 5% of revenue = $17,775, so EBITDA is −$69,485. With $2,000 of capex, cash falls by $71,485 to $1,428,515.

Over three years ARR grows from $600,000 to $4,381,205. The company never turns a profit, so no income tax is due and about $2,726,444 of losses carry forward. Cash bottoms out at $632,297 in Jan 2028, the month before the raise lands. Without the raise the plan runs out of cash in Sep 2028, which is the date the fundraise has to beat; the how much to raise calculator sizes the round from that gap.

Reading the metrics

Burn multiple falls from 0.88× to 0.62×: each dollar of new ARR costs less cash as the base grows. Benchmarkit's 2026 report sets best-in-class targets at under 1.0× for scaling companies and under 0.5× for efficient growers. Rule of 40 (ARR growth plus EBITDA margin) reads 78 in year 1 because growth from a small base is large; the same report puts the median at 25 and notes the measure becomes meaningful around $20M of ARR, so treat early-year scores with care (more in the Rule of 40 guide). The NRR approximation of 88.6% comes from 2% monthly churn against 1% expansion. Benchmarkit's median NRR is 102%, so in a real plan this is the first driver to question: at 1% churn and 1% expansion the same company would keep 100% of its base each year.

Download the Excel version

The Excel template has the same defaults and the same math as live formulas: an Inputs sheet, a Headcount sheet with department, count, loaded cost and start month, a 36-month Monthly sheet and an Annual sheet with the pro forma income statement, the cash flow statement and the SaaS metrics by year. No email needed. For a month-by-month P&L with SaaS COGS lines and department detail, use the SaaS P&L template.