Runway is burn against dated inflows, not division
Cash in the bank divided by monthly burn is a comforting number and a wrong one. Studio inflows are lumpy and conditional: a publisher pays on milestone acceptance, not delivery, and acceptance can slip weeks past the build going up; platform payouts follow their own statement cycles; a credit refund waits on a certificate and an assessment. Real runway is a rolling twelve-month cash forecast with every inflow dated and every date stress-tested — what happens if the beta milestone slips six weeks, if the acceptance review adds a revision round, if the refund lands a quarter late. A slipped milestone moves cash, not cost, and the forecast has to show which. Headcount is the only lever that moves quickly, which is why the forecast and the hiring plan are one document, reviewed monthly. For studios in Mississauga and across the GTA we run this as a standing monthly session, not a deck produced once for a raise and never updated.
Capitalize or expense: decide what your statements say while you build
Under Canadian standards for private enterprises, a studio can choose to expense development costs as incurred or to capitalize costs that meet the development criteria. Neither choice changes cash, and neither, by itself, changes what the credit programs or the tax return will do — those follow their own rules. What the choice changes is the story the statements tell during a multi-year build:
| What it changes | Expense as incurred | Capitalize qualifying development |
|---|---|---|
| Statements during development | Deep visible losses — burn on the face of the P&L | Smaller losses; the build accumulates on the balance sheet |
| Statements after launch | Clean margin on every sale | Amortization runs against each title's revenue |
| What it demands | Very little | A per-title cost ledger and an honest write-down when a title misses |
| Who tends to prefer it | Founders who want the cash reality undecorated | Readers who want cost matched to the title that earns it |
We make the call deliberately, once, with the studio's lenders, investors and credit claims all in view — and if capitalization is chosen, we build the per-title discipline it demands, because an intangible that never gets impaired is the first thing a diligence team distrusts.
A refund on the way is not money in the bank
The credit stack is real financing, but it pays in arrears: year-end closes, the certificate application goes in, the claim rides the T2, and the refund arrives after assessment. March payroll cannot wait for it. CFO work sequences that gap — accruing the credit as eligible labour is spent, so the entitlement is visible; dating the expected refund conservatively in the forecast; and, when the gap threatens payroll, running the financing conversation early. Lenders do advance against filed research and media credit claims, and weighing that cost against a raise or a scope cut is exactly where Walla's banking and corporate finance background earns its keep — formally through Business Financing Advisory when a facility is on the table. When a lender or a publisher's finance team wants statements with a CPA's name on them, a compilation engagement produces them from the same ledger, without a scramble.
Deal math before the signature
The biggest financial decisions a studio makes are deals, not line items: take the publisher advance or self-fund on credits and savings; sell a work-for-hire contract to fund the original IP; price the porting work so it carries its share of overhead. A Fractional CFO engagement puts numbers under each option — advance size against recoupment rate against the royalty share after recoup, per-title contribution after the platform's cut, what each path does to runway and to ownership. Live-ops adds its own version of the question after launch: whether the next content drop earns its team back, and when a tail has thinned to the point that the people on it belong on the new project instead. The output is a monthly decision package a founding team can actually use: burn against plan, dated runway, milestone status, credit accrual to date, and the one or two calls that need making this month. The numbers underneath come from studio books that record payouts gross — CFO work is only as good as the ledger it stands on.
