Cash-Flow Forecasting

Project your bank balance forward from the invoices, bills and recurring transactions already in your books — and see the week you run short while there is still time to do something about it.

Creating a Forecast

Open 📈 Cash-Flow Forecast from the sidebar. The first time you visit there is nothing to show, so click + Create Forecast and fill in the short setup form.

Give it a Name — "13-Week Cash Flow" is a sensible default
Choose a View: weekly for day-to-day cash control, monthly for annual planning
Set the number of Periods (13 weeks or 12 months are the usual choices)
Pick a Start date, normally today
Choose how to handle payment timing — see the next section
Tick which sources to Include: open invoices, open bills, recurring transactions, budget fallback
Tick Use for the dashboard tile if this is your main forecast

Two scenarios, Best case and Worst case, are created automatically alongside the forecast so you have something to compare against straight away. The unmodified projection is called Base case.

Tip: You can keep several forecasts side by side — a 13-week operational view and a 12-month planning view, for example. Only the one marked as default feeds the dashboard tile.

Payment Timing — the Setting That Matters Most

This is the single most important choice in the whole feature, because it decides when money is assumed to arrive. There are three modes.

Mode	What it does	When to use it
Use their payment history (default)	Works out the median number of days each customer runs past the due date, from your own records, and shifts their open invoices by that amount.	Almost always. This is the realistic option.
Assume they pay on the due date	Money is expected exactly when the invoice says it is due.	Only if your customers genuinely pay on time, or for a deliberately optimistic comparison.
A fixed number of days late	Applies one flat offset to every customer.	When you have a house rule of thumb, such as "everyone pays about two weeks late".

A customer needs at least three settled invoices before BizBooks Pro will use their personal rate; below that they inherit your company-wide median. If your company has fewer than ten settled invoices in total there is not enough history to draw any conclusion, so the forecast quietly falls back to due dates and tells you why in the bar at the top of the report.

Why the default is history, not due dates: a forecast that assumes everyone pays on time overstates your cash in every single period. It is always wrong in the direction that hurts — it tells you money is available when it is not. The active assumption is printed across the top of the report so you always know which one is in play.

Reading the Forecast

The chart plots your projected closing balance across every period, with a dashed red line at zero and a dashed amber line at your low-balance floor if you set one. Points that fall below zero are drawn as larger red dots.

The table underneath breaks each period into five columns:

Opening — the balance at the start of the period. The first period uses the current total of all your bank accounts; every later period opens where the previous one closed.
Money in — invoice payments expected, recurring income, positive adjustments
Money out — bills falling due, recurring costs, negative adjustments
Net — money in minus money out
Closing — opening plus net

Click any row to expand it and see exactly which documents produced those figures. Each line is tagged with its source — invoice, bill, recurring, adjustment or budget — and anything that is an estimate rather than a real document carries a projected badge. Invoices show how many days they were shifted by the payment-history calculation.

Shortfall Warnings

Any period whose closing balance drops below zero is shaded red in the table and called out in a banner above the chart, which names the first period that goes negative and the lowest point across the whole horizon.

If you keep a cash buffer, or your bank requires a minimum balance, put that figure in Warn me below in the forecast settings. Periods that fall under it are shaded amber — a softer warning than going negative, but usually the one you actually want to act on.

Manual Adjustments

Your books cannot know about things that have not happened yet: a loan completing next month, a quarterly tax bill, a new hire starting in March. Add these as adjustments and they become part of the projection.

Click + Adjustment and provide:

What is it — a short label such as "SBA loan drawdown"
Amount — positive for money coming in, negative for money going out
Expected date
Confidence — committed, likely or possible
Repeats — leave as one-off, or repeat weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, optionally until a stop date

Confidence is not decorative. Committed means the amount is certain — a signed facility, a filed tax assessment — and scenarios will never scale it up or down. Likely and possible are treated as estimates, so scenario multipliers do adjust them.

Scenarios

A scenario re-runs the same forecast under different assumptions. Pick one from the Scenario dropdown to switch the whole view; choose Base case to return to the unmodified projection.

Each scenario carries three settings:

Money in × — multiplier applied to projected income
Money out × — multiplier applied to projected costs
Pay later (days) — pushes all expected receipts further out

The multipliers only ever touch predictions — recurring templates, budget fill-ins and adjustments marked likely or possible. An invoice you have already issued is a fact, and inflating it by a best-case multiplier would be inventing revenue, so BizBooks Pro never does. The collection-delay setting is different: it moves real invoices later, because "what if my two biggest clients pay a month late" is a question about timing, not about whether the money exists.

Worked example: Worst case ships with money in at 0.85, money out at 1.10 and a 14-day collection delay. A $20,000 tax payment marked likely becomes $22,000. A $15,000 loan marked committed stays at $15,000 but lands two weeks later.

Filling Gaps From Your Budget

Beyond a few weeks out you tend to have very few open invoices or bills, so a long forecast can look misleadingly empty. Tick Fill gaps from my budget and BizBooks Pro will use your budgeted figures for periods where no real document exists.

It will not double-count. For each period, any income or expense account that already has a real invoice or bill attached is skipped — the budget only fills genuine gaps. Budget amounts are apportioned across periods by day, so a monthly budget line spread over weekly buckets divides correctly. This option needs an existing budget; see Budgets to create one.

Checking Forecast Accuracy

A forecast nobody checks is just an opinion. Click 💾 Snapshot to store the current projection. Once a period has finished, click 🎯 Accuracy and BizBooks Pro compares what it predicted against what actually moved through your bank accounts.

You get three headline figures:

Periods scored — how many closed periods have been measured
Accuracy — how close the projected closing balances were, on average
Bias — whether the forecast leans optimistic, conservative or balanced

Bias is the number to watch. An optimistic forecast repeatedly predicts more cash than turns up, and that is the failure mode that eventually bounces a payroll run. If yours reads optimistic, the usual cause is payment timing — check that you are on Use their payment history rather than due dates.

Tip: Take a snapshot on the same day each week. Saving more than once in a day simply replaces that day's snapshot, so the back-test is never inflated by duplicates.