How founders get a single daily view of the business with UpdateMate

How founders get a single daily view of the business with UpdateMate

You can’t run a company from disconnected dashboards. As a founder, you need to know cash, pipeline, product usage, and support health every day—but you don’t have time to log into Salesforce, Stripe, Intercom, GA4, and your bank portal before your first meeting. This guide shows you how to use UpdateMate to build a single “Command Center” view of your business that arrives automatically in Slack or email every morning.

Why it’s so hard to “know your numbers” every day

Most founders start with good intentions: a few favorite dashboards, a weekly report from finance, maybe a recurring email from the CRM. Over time, tools multiply, metrics change, and the simple question “How are we doing?” requires 20 minutes of tab-hopping and mental math.

Common failure modes:

• Too many tools, not enough time: You technically have the data, but it’s scattered across analytics, billing, CRM, and support.
• Stale or conflicting numbers: Different teams use different definitions, so you’re never sure which MRR or churn number to trust.
• No clear narrative: Dashboards show charts, not stories. You still have to interpret what changed and why.

The result is anxiety and reactive decision-making. You want a clear, trustworthy summary that you can scan in under a minute.

What a great founder dashboard actually looks like

For most B2B SaaS founders, a practical “founder view” has three layers:

• Daily pulse: Cash balance, new pipeline, signups, and support volume—delivered in one place every morning.
• Critical alerts: Immediate notifications for events that should interrupt your day (a big customer churns, burn rate spikes, production issues).
• Investor-ready history: Monthly metrics and narratives that are easy to turn into board and investor updates.

UpdateMate uses Agents to pull from your existing tools, interpret changes, and write the story in plain language so you can act quickly.

Before you start: pick your core founder metrics

First, decide what you personally want to see every day. A common starting set:

• Cash & runway: Current bank balance, monthly net burn, and estimated runway in months.
• Revenue & pipeline: New MRR/ARR closed yesterday, current open pipeline, and high-value deals in late stages.
• Product usage: Active users or active accounts compared to last week.
• Support signals: New tickets, backlog, and any spikes by category or severity.

Write these down in a short list—this becomes the blueprint for your UpdateMate setup.

Step 1: Build a CEO Morning Briefing in UpdateMate

The CEO morning briefing is a daily, written summary that lands where you already are—usually Slack or email.

1. Connect your core systems
   Connect UpdateMate to:
2. Your billing or subscription system (e.g. Stripe, Chargebee).
3. Your CRM (e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce).
4. Analytics or product usage tools.

5. Support platform (e.g. Intercom, Zendesk).

6. Describe the briefing in plain English
   In UpdateMate, create a CEO Daily Digest Agent and describe what you want, for example:

7. “Every weekday at 8:00 AM, pull cash, MRR, new deals, active users, and support volume.”
8. “Compare each metric to the same day last week and flag any changes over 10%.”

9. “Write a 3–5 bullet summary of the most important changes, in clear business language.”

10. Choose the delivery channel
    Most founders choose:

11. A direct Slack DM from the Agent.

12. Or a concise email with the subject line “Daily Brief – [Date]”.

13. Include a short narrative
    Ask the Agent to add one sentence of commentary, such as:

14. “Overall, the business is stable; the main movement today is a spike in support tickets after yesterday’s release.”

For a focused, step-by-step walkthrough of this flow, see:
- Automate the CEO morning briefing

Step 2: Set up a Burn Rate Monitor so cash surprises disappear

Next, you’ll use UpdateMate to watch expenses and cash continuously, instead of waiting for end-of-month reports.

1. Define your burn rate logic
   Decide what you want to monitor:
2. Monthly budget vs. actual spend by category (payroll, tools, vendors, ads).
3. Large one-off payments that should trigger a review.

4. Variance from your planned burn rate.

5. Create a Burn Rate Monitor Agent
   Configure an Agent with instructions like:

6. “Every night, pull transactions or expense summaries from our accounting tool and bank feeds.”
7. “Group expenses by category and compare this month to last month and to our budget.”

8. “If total spend so far this month is tracking 15% above plan, or if any single vendor invoice exceeds $X, post an alert.”

9. Deliver simple, actionable alerts
   Rather than a spreadsheet, you receive:

10. A Slack message: “Burn is tracking 18% above plan this month, driven mainly by +35% in paid media. Consider pausing campaigns X and Y.”
11. Or a weekly summary email you can forward to your finance partner.

You can see a more detailed how-to focused on this topic here:
- Monitor burn rate and large expenses

Step 3: Automate monthly investor and board updates

Investors care about consistency and clarity more than flashy charts. UpdateMate can pull the same metrics you already track and draft the update for you.

1. List the metrics your investors expect
   Common items include:
2. MRR/ARR, growth rate, net and gross churn.
3. CAC, LTV, payback period.

4. Cash, burn, and runway.

5. Create an Investor Update Agent
   In UpdateMate, describe the process:

6. “On the 1st of every month, pull the latest metrics from Stripe, our CRM, and our data warehouse.”
7. “Fill them into our standard investor template.”

8. “Draft a narrative that explains major changes and highlights key wins and risks.”

9. Keep a human in the loop
   Configure the Agent to:

10. Save the draft as a Google Doc or Notion page.
11. Tag you to review, edit tone, and add any strategic commentary before sending.

For a dedicated, deep-dive guide, see:
- Automate monthly investor updates

Step 4: Add “big deal” and incident alerts so nothing critical slips

Daily summaries are great, but some events should ping you instantly.

1. Define the events that should interrupt you
   Examples:
2. A deal above a certain size moves to “Contract Sent” or “Closed Won”.
3. A key customer churns or drastically reduces usage.

4. A production outage or severe support spike occurs.

5. Create focused Agents for each event

6. Big Deal Watch: Watches your CRM for deals over a threshold. When they hit “Contract Sent”, it sends you a short summary and suggests a quick note you can send to the champion.

7. Churn or downgrade alert: Monitors billing and product usage; if a high-value account cancels or usage drops sharply, it alerts both you and the account owner.

8. Keep alerts short and contextual
   Each alert should answer:

9. What happened?
10. Why it matters (e.g. ARR impact, strategic importance)?
11. What you might want to do next (e.g. “Send a congratulations note”, “Check in with the CSM”).

Example: A founder’s morning with UpdateMate

Here’s what your first hour might look like once this is live:

• You open Slack at 8:15 and see your CEO Daily Digest: “Cash: $3.2M (runway 17 months). MRR up 2.3% WoW, driven by 3 expansions. Support tickets up 18% after yesterday’s release; 70% mention the new onboarding flow.”
• You skim the suggested commentary and feel comfortable you understand the big picture.
• A separate message from Big Deal Watch lets you know: “Acme Inc. ($48k ARR) moved to ‘Contract Sent’—here’s a 2-line email you can send to the champion today.”
• Later in the week, your Investor Update Agent posts a draft of the monthly metrics email; you spend 10 minutes editing instead of 2 hours compiling.

You stay informed and in control without micromanaging dashboards or chasing updates from the team.

FAQ: Common founder questions

“Will this replace my existing dashboards or FP&A tools?”
No. UpdateMate sits on top of your existing stack. It uses the same underlying data to create narrative summaries and alerts that are easier for you to consume daily.

“Can I change what’s in the daily briefing over time?”
Yes. You can update the Agent instructions whenever your priorities change—e.g. adding new KPIs or removing metrics you no longer care about.

“How secure is this for financial data?”
Sensitive sources like bank balances or payroll can be scoped to a small set of internal users. UpdateMate respects your existing access controls and lets you decide who receives which summaries.

“Can my leadership team receive different versions?”
Yes. Many teams run a Founder/CEO briefing plus tailored digests for heads of Sales, CS, Product, and Marketing, all powered by the same underlying data.

Next steps

Start by setting up the CEO Morning Briefing and Burn Rate Monitor—two flows that usually take less than an afternoon to design. Once they’re live, layer on investor updates and critical alerts so you always know what’s happening without living in spreadsheets.

When you’re ready for step-by-step instructions, dive into the dedicated guides linked above or work with your team to design your first set of Agents in UpdateMate.

Related guides

• Automate the CEO morning briefing
• Automate monthly investor updates
• Monitor burn rate and large expenses