Burn rate is a synonymous term for negative cash flow. It is a measure for how fast a company will use up its shareholder capital. If the shareholder capital is exhausted, the company will either have to start making a profit, find additional funding, or close down.
The term came into common use during the dot-com era when many start-up companies went through several stages of funding before emerging into profitability and positive cash flows and thus becoming self-sustainable (or, as for the majority, failing to find additional funding and sustainable business models and thus going bankrupt). In between funding events, burn rate becomes an important management measure, since together with the available funds, it provides a time measure to when the next funding event needs to take place.
Some claim that part of the reasons behind the dot-com bust was the unsound management and financial investor practices to keep the burn rate up, taking it as a proxy for how fast the start-up company was acquiring a customer base.
The term burn rate can also refer to how quickly individuals spend their money, particularly their discretionary income. For example, Mackenzie Investments commissioned a test to gauge the spending and saving behavior of Canadians to determine if they are “Overspenders.”
Read more about Burn Rate: In Project Management
Famous quotes containing the words burn and/or rate:
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“If you could choose your parents,... we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt—at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault—we’d rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn’t take responsibility for anything.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)