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Early Warning System for Your Business

Your Business FinallyHas a Doctor.

Helcyon reads every transaction against the baseline that is normal for your business, catches the deviation the day it begins, traces it to the exact cause, and writes the fix in plain language before the damage compounds.

Read-only access. Delivered to your inbox. Zero maintenance.

This Month's Findings
Live Monitoring

Margin Temperature

37.5%

Anomaly detected

Baseline 41.0% · 12-week window

Margin drift detected

Gross margin slipped from a 41% baseline to 37.5% over six weeks.

-$34,000/mo and accelerating

Vendor cost anomaly

One supplier raised wholesale cost 9% over the same window.

+$21,600/mo in added cost

Product mix shift

A premium SKU is losing volume to a cheaper substitute at the counter.

14 repeat customers traced to

Versus What You Already Use

Your accounting software records it.
Helcyon reads it.

QuickBooks, Xero, and your bank feed are the lab. They print accurate results and stop there. Nothing in them knows what is normal for your business, notices when a number starts to drift, or tells you what to do. Here is the same month, seen two ways.

What your accounting software shows

Revenue$847,293
Cost of goods sold$529,558
Gross margin37.5%
As oflast close, 30 days ago

Why did margin move?  Not answered.

Correct to the penny, and completely silent on the cause, the trend, and what to do about it. You still have to notice the problem, diagnose it, and decide. By month end.

What Helcyon shows

Flagged in week 9, the moment margin left its healthy range, not at month end.
Cause traced: Vendor 7 raised wholesale cost 9%, and a premium product kept losing volume to a cheaper substitute.
Impact priced: -$34,000 a month, close to $400,000 a year if it holds.
Looking forward: at this rate, cash runway tightens to 34 days from 41.

℞ The move

Renegotiate Vendor 7 and reprice the substitute SKU so margin recovers without losing the counter sale.

Projected recovery: ~$400,000 annually

Accounting software
Helcyon
Records what already happened
Detects what is changing, as it happens
Reports on demand, after the period closes
Reads every transaction continuously and flags in-week
Shows you the number
Traces the number to the vendor, product, or customer behind it
Treats every business by the same generic categories
Calibrates to the baseline that is normal for your business
Leaves the interpretation and the decision to you
Prescribes the move and prices it in dollars
Looks backward at what closed
Projects the cash runway forward

Who It Is For

Built for the businesses
that have something to lose.

Helcyon is made for established operators with real financial complexity, the kind of business where a quiet margin slip or a creeping fee costs real money before anyone notices.

Revenue

Businesses doing $500K to $50M a year, where the numbers are big enough to hide problems.

Stack

Owners running on QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe, or Plaid, with data already flowing.

Finance team

Companies with no finance team, or a lean one, where no one is reading the signals every day.

Mindset

Operators who want warning before a problem turns into a loss, not a post-mortem after.

Built for businesses with real financial complexity. Not for pre-revenue startups or early-stage projects.

The Framework

Five Vital Signs.
Monitored continuously.

Every diagnosis is grounded in the signals that determine financial health. Helcyon watches liquidity, sales momentum, profitability, customer concentration, and expansion capacity, and investigates the cause the moment any one of them weakens.

71

Cash Pulse

Liquidity health

84

Revenue Blood Pressure

Sales momentum

52

Margin Temperature

Profitability risk

88

Customer Heartbeat

Retention health

76

Growth Oxygen

Expansion capacity

Business Vital Signs Console
Live Monitoring

Cash Pulse

34d

Revenue Blood Pressure

+2.1%

Margin Temperature

37.5%

Customer Heartbeat

88%

Growth Oxygen

1.4x

℞Active Prescription

Margin Temperature is the active concern. Renegotiate Vendor 7 and reprice the substitute SKU. Projected recovery: near $400,000 annually.

Last updated: 4 minutes agoNext brief: Feb 1, 2025

What Continuous Monitoring Looks Like

Every vital sign, watched against
what is normal for you.

This is one signal over twelve weeks. The shaded band is the range that is healthy for this specific business. The engine does not wait for the quarter to close. It flags the moment the line leaves the band.

Margin Temperature · specialty pharmacy

Gross margin vs calibrated baseline

Healthy range
Your margin
Breach
45%40%35%healthy range 40% to 43%FLAGGED · WEEK 9Margin had slipped only 1.4 points.A quarterly P&L would have missed it.W1W8W12

Baseline

41.0%

Current

37.5%

Flagged at

Week 9

Monthly impact

-$34K

If uncorrected

~$400K/yr

Diagnosis in Action

One business, one month,
start to finish.

This is a real diagnosis, anonymized, on a specialty pharmacy doing about $850,000 a month. It is the read Helcyon delivers, and it is the kind of problem most owners find a quarter too late.

Case file: specialty pharmacy
Margin Temperature

The signal

Margin Temperature fell from a 41% baseline to 37.5% over six weeks. The engine flagged it in week 9, the moment it left the healthy range.

The cause

Two things at once. Vendor 7 raised wholesale cost 9%, and a premium product kept losing volume to a cheaper substitute at the counter.

The cost

About $34,000 a month, near $400,000 a year if nothing changed.

The move

Renegotiate Vendor 7 and reprice the substitute SKU, so margin recovers without losing the counter sale.

The outcome

Projected recovery of roughly $400,000 a year, caught while it was still a 1.4 point slip rather than a crisis.

What You Receive

A CFO-level read of your business.
Every month. Without the CFO.

An owner carries the whole company and cannot read every number every day. The monthly brief is the read a CFO would give you: where the business is heading, what moved and why, and the moves to make this month, ranked by the dollars at stake. It lands in your inbox, with critical alerts the instant something cannot wait.

Monthly Intelligence Brief

CFO Report · January 2025

Delivered

Revenue is stable. Margin is the problem this month, and it is accelerating. One vendor and one product are the cause. Cash runway has tightened but is not yet critical.

Attention required · ranked by dollar impact

1

Margin erosion

Vendor 7 cost increase and product mix shift

-$34,000/mo

2

Fee drift

Card processing fees creeping upward

+$847/mo

Forward cash runway

34 days down from 41

℞ First move this month

Renegotiate Vendor 7 and reprice the substitute SKU.

Projected recovery: ~$400,000 annually

  • Forward, not just historical

    It tells you where cash is heading, not only where it has been.

  • Causal

    Every finding is traced to the vendor, product, or customer behind it, with the transaction-level evidence attached.

  • Ranked by dollars

    You see the biggest leak first, never an alphabetized list of line items.

  • Prescriptive

    It ends with the move to make this month, quantified, not a chart for you to puzzle over.

  • Monthly and instant

    The full read arrives monthly. A duplicate payout or a settlement stuck past terms reaches you the same day it happens.

  • Plain language

    Written for an owner to act on, and clean enough for an accountant to put their name on and send to a client.

For Accountants, Fractional CFOs, and Advisors

You read financial statements for a living. Helcyon does the monitoring underneath, so the anomalies surface on their own and your judgment goes where it matters, whether you advise one business or fifty. The brief is clean enough to put your name on and send to a client.

Why this slips by

The problem was never the data.
It was the reading.

Owners do not miss these problems because they are careless. They miss them because the numbers that matter are buried in thousands of transactions, the change is small at first, and by the time it is large enough to show on a statement it has already been compounding for a quarter.

Helcyon was built by operators who have run businesses through real pressure, and the rule set was pressure-tested by working CFOs. So it reads the early, quiet signals the way an experienced finance chief would, and it does it every day, on every transaction, without being asked.

Founded on Original Research

The method is not a black box. It rests on four working papers published on SSRN and a documented scoring methodology, shaped by operators and pressure-tested by working CFOs. The full method and the research are laid out on the How It Works page.

Security

Built for owners who take
their money seriously.

Tested across hundreds of businesses in 20 industries, now monitoring live financial data in private beta. Enterprise-grade security from the first day.

SOC 2 Type II

Certified

256-bit AES

Encryption

Read-Only

Access

24/7

Monitoring

GDPR

Compliant

Bank-level encryption

256-bit AES protects your data in transit and at rest, the same standard major financial institutions use.

Read-only access

We observe your financial data. We never modify, transfer, or transact. Ever.

SOC 2 Type II

Independently audited controls for data handling, access, and incident response.

Zero data selling

Your data stays yours. Never sold, never shared, used only for your diagnosis.

Connects with the tools you already use

QuickBooks
Xero
Stripe
Plaid

Common Questions

Questions, answered.

What is Helcyon?
+
Helcyon is an automated financial diagnostic engine that continuously monitors your business health, tracking cash, margins, revenue stability, and customer risk, and delivers plain-language prescriptions to your inbox.
What are the Business Vital Signs?
+
Five core metrics that determine financial health: Cash Pulse, Revenue Blood Pressure, Margin Temperature, Customer Heartbeat, and Growth Oxygen. Helcyon monitors all five continuously.
How is this different from QuickBooks or my accountant's reports?
+
Accounting software records what happened and produces statements. It does not know what is normal for your business, notice when a number starts to drift, or tell you what to do. Helcyon reads every transaction against your own baseline, traces the cause, and prescribes the move. It works alongside your accountant, surfacing the issues so their judgment goes where it matters.
Do I need to check a dashboard?
+
Not unless you want to. Helcyon delivers a monthly brief and critical alerts directly to your inbox, so the answers reach you without logging in. There is also an optional dashboard for when you want to dig deeper, and advisors managing multiple businesses can use a multi-tenant view.
How does Helcyon access my data?
+
Read-only access through secure integrations with your accounting software, bank, or payment processor, or you can upload spreadsheets directly. We observe. We never transact.

Stop guessing.
Start knowing.

Your first diagnostic is ready within minutes of connecting.

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Helcyon

The Diagnostic Engine™ that interprets your financial documents — automatically and dashboard-free.

Product

How It WorksLibrarySample DiagnosisPricingScenario Engine™

Vital Signs

Cash PulseRevenue Blood PressureCustomer HeartbeatMargin TemperatureGrowth Oxygen

Protection

Financial Immune System™

Solutions

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Company

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Founded on original research. The Revenue Illusion: Payment Settlement Data as an Early Warning System for Small Business Failure — published on SSRN, April 2026.

© 2026 Helcyon. All rights reserved.

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