Cash Flow Forecast
Know where your cash is going before it gets there.
What changes when you build this
The gaps you're living with today,
and what this tool fixes.
Problems
- Cash position lives in ERP, billing, and bank feeds — and the numbers never agree until someone manually reconciles them
- Controllers spend the first hour of every week rebuilding the same 13-week rolling forecast in a spreadsheet
- Variance between forecast and actuals only surfaces at month-end close, when it's too late to course-correct
- Incoming payments sit in a "received" state for days because nobody owns the reconciliation step
- Approval requests for unbudgeted spend get lost in email threads with no audit trail
Solutions
- One dashboard pulls from ERP, billing, and bank data so the cash position is always current without manual reconciliation
- Rolling 13-week forecast updates automatically as actuals flow in — no more Monday morning spreadsheet rebuilds
- Variance alerts fire as soon as a line item drifts past threshold, giving the team days instead of weeks to respond
- Payment reconciliation states are visible in a single queue with clear ownership and aging indicators
- Spend approvals route through a tracked workflow with timestamps, decision reasons, and escalation rules
Mistakes to avoid
These are the failure patterns teams hit most often
when building this.
Category drift across systemsFix: Lock category enums in your data model and validate incoming transactions at ingest — don't let free-text categories creep in from CSV uploads.
Category drift across systems
Fix:Lock category enums in your data model and validate incoming transactions at ingest — don't let free-text categories creep in from CSV uploads.
Approval bottlenecks on a single personFix: Set SLA timers per approval stage and auto-escalate to a backup approver after 48 hours.
Approval bottlenecks on a single person
Fix:Set SLA timers per approval stage and auto-escalate to a backup approver after 48 hours.
Variance detected after month-end closeFix: Configure daily variance checks against budget by cost center — catch 10%+ drift the day it happens, not two weeks later.
Variance detected after month-end close
Fix:Configure daily variance checks against budget by cost center — catch 10%+ drift the day it happens, not two weeks later.
Unreconciled payment statesFix: Model payment transitions as explicit status changes with timestamps so you can see exactly where items stall.
Unreconciled payment states
Fix:Model payment transitions as explicit status changes with timestamps so you can see exactly where items stall.
Forecast based on stale assumptionsFix: Auto-refresh projected amounts when actuals land — a forecast that doesn't update itself is just a snapshot someone forgot about.
Forecast based on stale assumptions
Fix:Auto-refresh projected amounts when actuals land — a forecast that doesn't update itself is just a snapshot someone forgot about.