Why I stopped running ~$1.7M through a spreadsheet.

I’m Drew Washington. Before Caeros, I ran the ad budget at LTV SaaS Fund — about $1.7M a year across seven channels, three products, two categories. I ran all of it by hand, in a Google Sheet I built myself.

It worked, mostly. I paced daily spend off formulas only I understood, rebuilt the reconciliation every month-end, and answered “where do we stand?” a dozen times a week by reading tabs. Then I took a week off — and the whole thing stopped. Nobody else could operate the sheet. The budget system wasn’t a product. It was me.

That was the real problem. Not the spreadsheet — the fragility. A single point of failure sitting on top of seven figures of spend, looking backward when the decisions that mattered were all forward, with no memory of what changed or why.

So I built the tool I’d wanted the whole time. Something that paces the daily numbers cadence-aware and holiday-aware, catches overspend while it’s still cheap to fix, reconciles month-end in minutes, keeps an append-only record of every change, and tells the truth about what it saved — including the honest $0 when it saved nothing. That’s Caeros.