Read the scorecard as a sequence, not a grade. The four dimensions affect each other: if retention is weak, customers you acquire leave soon even when efficiency looks fine on paper; if runway is short, everything else has to wait. That is why, on a tie, the tool puts cash first, then retention, then efficiency, then growth.

Some thresholds come from primary sources, some from logic and some are our own working thresholds; each row says which. Burn multiple bands are from Craft Ventures and the Rule of 40 is from Bessemer. Payback needing to be shorter than customer lifetime is plain logic. The churn and runway limits are not market data; they are practical limits we use in our advisory work.

If you report in a high-inflation currency, enter inflation. Nominal growth can look healthy while you are shrinking in real terms. When inflation is entered, growth and the Rule of 40 are calculated on real growth.

Leaving optional fields at 0 does not break the scorecard; that measure is simply left out. But NRR and net new ARR sharpen the diagnosis: NRR shows whether revenue from existing customers is growing, and burn multiple shows how much growth your cash burn actually buys.

This is a starting point. Averages hide differences between segments, channels and cohorts. The real work is to open up the weakest dimension and find which customer group or channel the problem is concentrated in.