Financial Modelling Freelancing: Per-Project Income from Excel Skills

The formula error was off by 40x, and nobody on the founding team had noticed.

A startup founder sent me his investor deck for a quick sanity check, as a favor. Year 3 revenue jumped 40 times over Year 1, which is the kind of number that either means you've built the next unicorn or you've fat-fingered a cell. I opened the sheet. Someone had typed a number directly into a formula cell, overwriting the calculation, and added an extra zero somewhere in the process.

He was mortified, then asked if I did this kind of work professionally. I hadn't, not outside my day job. Four days later he became my first paying financial modelling client: Rs 8,000 for a full investor-ready model with three scenarios, conservative, base, and aggressive.

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This is just my day job, done for someone else

I work in FP&A (financial planning and analysis) at a mid-size company, four years in. Budgets, forecasts, answering department heads' questions in spreadsheet form, that's the daily rhythm. Three-statement models, sensitivity tables, variance reports, all in Excel, all the time.

It genuinely never occurred to me this was a sellable skill outside the building. The idea that people would pay separately for something I do between 10 and 6 every day took an awkward pitch-deck moment to surface.

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The first real project: three scenarios and a founder who didn't know his own numbers

A D2C skincare brand, raising a seed round, needed three things: a 3-year revenue projection, unit economics (CAC, LTV, contribution margin), and a cap table showing both existing and incoming investors.

My first question was simple: what's your current CAC? The answer: "roughly 450, I think." Roughly. I think. Those two words told me the actual job wasn't plugging numbers into cells. It was extracting real numbers from someone who'd been guessing at his own business metrics for months.

Two calls just to lock the assumptions. The model itself took 14 hours. More time went into the phone calls clarifying inputs than into the spreadsheet.

Rs 8,000 landed. The founder was thrilled because when an investor asked "what happens if CAC doubles" on a call, he had the answer in ten seconds, toggling a cell in his own file.

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The pattern that took months to notice

One client in month one. One in month two. Zero in month three. That zero month felt like proof I'd picked the wrong direction entirely.

Actually, that's not quite the honest read. I hadn't done any outreach that month, buried under quarter-end at my day job. Work doesn't arrive on its own here. You ask for it, repeatedly, or nothing happens. That took an uncomfortably long time to learn.

From month four I set a rule: message five newly-funded startups on LinkedIn every week, right after their funding announcement hits. Something like "congrats on the round, happy to build an investor-ready model if useful." Response rate was thin, maybe 1 in 12. But the ones who replied converted at a surprisingly high rate.

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Cap tables turned out to be their own skill entirely

One client wanted only a cap table, no projections at all. ESOP pool, existing investor dilution, who owns what percentage after the new round. I assumed it would be the easy half of the usual job.

It wasn't. Convertible notes, their conversion triggers, and the math across different valuation caps combined into a genuinely fiddly problem. Six hours for one scenario, then the client asked for three more "what if" versions on top of it.

Rs 4,500 for the whole thing. Reasonable on an hourly basis, but the project taught me cap table modelling deserves its own pricing line, not a bundled-in afterthought. I now quote it separately.

One short note here: no two cap tables I've built have looked the same. Every founder's structure is a little different, which kills any hope of a fully reusable template.

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The accounting-firm referral I hadn't planned for

A CA, related to a friend, reached out with a client who needed 5-year projected financials for a bank loan application. Her firm didn't do this level of detailed spreadsheet work in-house.

Different job entirely from the startup work. No investor to impress, a bank to satisfy instead. More conservative assumptions, heavier documentation, less "story." The deliverable read more like a compliance document than a pitch.

Rs 6,500 for that project, and she referred two more clients afterward. Now roughly one CA-referred project lands per month, a steadier and less glamorous stream than the startup side but reliable in a way the startup work isn't.

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The numbers, honestly

Averaged over the last 5 months, this side income sits around Rs 17,300 a month on top of salary. Best month: Rs 24,600, when two startup models and a CA-referred project landed together. Worst month: the zero one.

Time cost runs 6-9 hours a week, mostly Sundays plus one weeknight.

The mistake that still stings: I built a full model for a startup without any milestone payment. Delivered everything, then the founder went silent for three weeks before finally paying. Those three weeks were rough. Every project now includes a 40% advance, no exceptions, and I don't feel bad asking for it anymore.

And here's a thing nobody warns you about: founders forget their own numbers constantly. Ask "what was your burn rate last month" and you'll often get silence on the other end of the call. I now send a checklist before the first call: these 8 numbers, have them ready. Cuts the back-and-forth by more than half.

Next on the list is turning some of this into a small tool instead of rebuilding the same template in Excel every time. Still just an idea scribbled in a notes app, though. Haven't