Calculating Your Quick Ratio

Matt Preuss
Marketing Manager

The Importance of Your Quick Ratio

Some investors refer to the quick ratio as a company’s acid test. Basically, the quick ratio indicates a company’s short-term liquidity and ability to pay current bills. The nickname and the quick ratio’s ability to demonstrate how well a company can operate in the near future should give you an idea of its importance.

You can easily calculate your quick ratio by adding up cash, short-term investments, immediate receivables, and cash equivalents. For the quick ratio, consider assets that you could transform into cash without losing value within 90 days. Then you divide this number by your current liabilities.

You can see this calculation’s formula below:

Cash + Short-Term Investments + Current Receivables + Cash Equivalents / Current Liabilities

For example, you might have $12,000 in cash and $8,000 in receivables. If you have $20,000 in debt, you would divide $20,000 by $20,000 to get a quick ratio of one.

What's a Good Quick Ratio?

If you have at least enough cash to meet your short-term obligations, that’s considered a positive sign for a new company. In other words, a good quick ratio would be at least one. A number over one might be even better, but any number less than one demonstrates that you could have to struggle to pay your immediate bills. On the other hand, too high of a value may mean that a company isn’t using their short-term assets to fund growth as well as they could.

SaaS Quick Ratio

Alternatively, there is a SaaS Quick Ratio. A SaaS Quick Ratio is similar to the standard quick ratio above but gives a SaaS company an overview of how efficiently their company can grow. The higher the SaaS quick ratio, the more efficiently a company can grow. In short, the formula divides any new MRR by any lost MRR. An example of a SaaS quick ratio can be found below:

SaaS Quick Ratio= (New MRR + Expansion MRR)/(Churned MRR + Contraction MRR)

While a higher new MRR growth rate can help fuel a good quick ratio, the best-in-class SaaS companies often have a lower churn rate which allow for a significantly higher quick ratio. With a lower churn rate, companies will have a much more reliable source for predicting future revenue and growth.

Your Quick Ratio in Visible

Tracking your quick ratio in Visible in incredibly easy thanks to our formula builder. To get started you’ll want to make sure you have all of your revenue metrics in Visible. We suggest creating a user provided metric or connecting Google SheetsHubSpotSalesforce, or ChartMogul to get started. From here, you’ll be able to create the quick ratio formula (as shown above) in the formula builder.

Once the quick ratio formula is created in Visible it will automatically update as your data sources refresh. We suggest sharing your quick ratio with management and executives so they have a quick view of how the company is performing and growing. Generally, we do not see founders share their quick ratio with their investors and rather share the underlying metrics.

Current Ratio

The current ratio refers to a number that indicates how well companies can pay bills that might crop up over the next year. To calculate the current ratio, you simply divide current assets by current liabilities like this:

Current Assets / Current Liabilities

If you company has $100,000 in current assets and $100,000 of debt, your current ratio would equal one.

What is a Good Current Ratio?

A good current ratio may need interpretation in light of averages for a specific industry or business. As with the quick ratio, a value of at least one indicates that a company has at least as many assets as liabilities. Some companies may consider using excess assets more productively as well. For instance, you can count inventory as an asset; however, you bring in revenue when you move inventory.

Quick Ratio Vs. Current Ratio

Quick ratio and current ratio sound similar but mean different things. To make sure you understand the difference, browse these comparisons of quick vs. current ratio:

  • Quick ratio: This formula only uses short-term debt and liquid assets that you can turn into cash within 120 days.
  • Current ratio: In contrast, the formula for the current ratio uses all assets and liabilities.

To understand the difference between the quick and current ratio, consider a simple example of a company with $100,000 in current liabilities:

  • Cash and cash equivalents: $10,000
  • Short-term marketable securities: $20,000
  • Accounts receivable: $50,000
  • Inventory: $112,000
  • Prepaid expense: $8,000

You get a current ratio of 2 by dividing total assets of $200,000 by liabilities of $100,000. In contrast, you would have a quick ratio of .8 when you divide $80,000 by $100,000. This difference between the numbers could mean that you should consider freeing up a bit more liquidity for short-term obligations. Again, you have to interpret the metrics in light of the unique situation.

That’s why you might include prepaid expenses in your current ratio. You can weigh prepaid expenses against your current liabilities; however, you might not include them in the quick ratio. For instance, you may have to purchase plane tickets for travel. In one sense, those could count as an asset, but they may not be easy to convert back into cash to satisfy an obligation.

Liquidity Ratios

Sometimes people use liquidity ratio to mean the same thing as the quick ratio. They may also refer to the quick ratio as the quick liquidity ratio. In a broader sense, liquidity ratios refer to various metrics that help investors and owners understand how well companies can meet their current debt obligations.

Related Resource: From IPOs to M&A: Navigating the Different Types of Liquidity Events

Besides the quick and current ratio, liquidity ratios could also include the operating cash flow ratio. You simply calculate this number by dividing liabilities by cash flow, but you don’t take other assets that you can quickly convert into cash into account. That means that this number will probably be a little lower than your quick ratio calculation. This number tells you how well a company can meet their obligations with the cash they have on hand and without having to collect receipts or liquidate cash equivalents or short-term investments.

Why are Liquidity Ratios Important?

Quick, current, and all liquidity ratios are important. Obviously, companies need to pay their typical operating expenses. They may also need funds for unexpected expenses and to take advantage of growth opportunities. All of these metrics give investors a quick way to judge the solvency of a company. That’s why they’re the kind of numbers that investors want to see. In addition, they are helpful guides for company owners and managers.

Related resource: Dry Powder: What is it, Types of Dry Powder, Impact it has in Trading

You may also enjoy:
Customer Stories
Turning Portfolio Data Into an Advantage: Inside Emergence Capital’s Workflow
When Andrew Crinnion joined Emergence Capital as Director of Portfolio Analysis, he stepped into a role that required more than crunching numbers. As a Series A investor in B2B SaaS companies, Emergence prides itself on being data-driven, but that only works when the correct data is accessible, consistent, and actionable. The challenge? Their portfolio was growing fast, but performance tracking lived in scattered spreadsheets and inboxes. "Before Visible, it was Excel Sheets and lots of manual emails," Andrew explained. "We were a pretty data-driven firm, which gave me a good foundation. But we needed a better way to scale." A Central Source of Truth Andrew was tasked with finding a portfolio monitoring solution that could grow with their fund and simplify performance data management. After evaluating platforms like iLevel, Dynamo, and Standard Metrics, he ultimately chose Visible. What stood out? "Flexibility," he said. "The ability to build dashboards and calculate our own metrics was huge. Before, I'd ask for something like burn rate and NDR, and I wasn’t always sure how it was being calculated. So being able to calculate it within the system was a big help." The transition was smooth. After merging their existing data into a more structured format, onboarding to Visible was seamless. “It was real smooth to load that into Visible and move forward.” Driving Better Decisions With Visible in place, Andrew can surface insights faster and share them more effectively with the general partners. "Once a company responds to our Visible Request, it graphs it out. I can see if burn rate increases or if runway is dropping off, and it prompts me to ask the right questions to the GPs. It keeps us aligned." The dashboards are a core part of portfolio reviews and one-off requests alike. "They don’t really see how it’s getting made,” he said, “but it makes it a lot easier for me to answer their questions.” Better Data = Stronger LP Relationships When communicating with LPs, the value of Visible became even more clear. When LPs are digging into performance, portfolio metrics, and fund-level questions, the Emergence team is ready. "Visible helps me quickly respond to all our LP requests. I have a repository of data that makes it easy to pull what they need. It also helps GPs answer LP questions faster, with more confidence." By having a centralized system to rely on, Emergence offers transparency and builds trust with its limited partners, a key ingredient in any relationship. Turning Internal Value Into External Impact As Emergence’s data infrastructure matured, Andrew saw an opportunity to scale the value of what they were learning. Portfolio companies were coming to him with questions like, “What should my CAC payback be?” and “How much should I be spending on R&D?” Thanks to the insights they’d built internally with Visible, Emergence launched the Beyond Benchmark report, an external study based on data from over 560 companies. What began as a tool for internal alignment became a valuable resource for the broader SaaS community. Support That Scales With You Throughout the process, Visible’s Customer Success team remained a key part of the experience. “They’ve been great. I’ve shared product feedback, and it’s been implemented. They’re responsive and invested in helping us succeed.” Emergence Capital didn’t just choose Visible, they built a system around it. For funds building out platform or investor relations teams, he recommends investing early in the right metrics and infrastructure. The payoff? Faster answers, stronger LP conversations, and the confidence to scale with clarity. Check out how you can join Emergence Capital and leverage Visible for your portfolio monitoring and reporting here.
Fundraising
Lead With Your Strengths with Jonah Midanik
Operations
Storyselling with Kristian Andersen of High Alpha
Metrics and data
Using Benchmarks as a Diagnostic with Kyle Poyar