Cash Flow Forecasting Template
Build a working 13-week cash forecast in the spreadsheet that comes with this book. See your lowest week and its date, and what a chased invoice, a deposit or a moved bill does to it in dollars.
What’s Inside
- The 13-Week Rolling Forecast, with a worked example that finds a payroll trough 6 weeks out
- A working forecast spreadsheet (Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets), with your own payment lag and seasonality built in
- Days-to-pay: each customer’s median from your own paid invoices, with slow payers flagged
- Seasonal index from 24 months of your own deposits
- Levers sheet: your lowest week before and after a deposit, a chased invoice or a moved bill
- Best, expected and worst case before any big decision
- Cost-of-money converter for advances, early-pay discounts and credit lines
- 10 paper worksheets and a Monday log with a baseline and 30 and 60 day look-backs
The Problem
Most owners know their bank balance today but not what it will be in 6 weeks. Cost goes out before customers pay, so a profitable business can still miss payroll. The busier the season, the deeper that hole gets.
Your cash is not tight because you are worse. The timing is invisible until you put it on a calendar.
The 13-Week Rolling Forecast
4 rows, 13 columns, 1 column per week. Updated in 10 minutes every Monday.
- STARTING CASH: bank balance only. Money owed to you goes in the week you expect it.
- INFLOWS: what you expect to collect each week, placed by each customer’s real days-to-pay.
- OUTFLOWS: what you must pay each week, including tax dates, renewals and 3-payday months.
- ENDING CASH: starting + in - out. Your lowest week, its date and your weeks of cash.
What’s in the Book
- Chapter 1: The 20-minute check. Guess your lowest week, then count it.
- Chapter 2: Why profitable businesses run out of cash: the timing trough and the 30-day test.
- Chapter 3: The 13-Week Rolling Forecast, weeks of cash and the lowest week.
- Chapter 4: Your 2 hidden inputs: days-to-pay and your seasonal index, plus the calendar traps.
- Chapter 5: Setting it up in the spreadsheet, sheet by sheet, in 2 hours.
- Chapter 6: The Monday 10 minutes: the gap, the gap % and your own slip factor.
- Chapter 7: When the forecast shows a trough: 6 steps, cheapest first, and the cost of money.
- Chapter 8: Worked examples: a timing trough, a seasonal trough, and one that went wrong.
Who This Is For
The owner of a small service business (a landscaper, a roofer, an HVAC shop, a cleaning company, a salon) who knows today’s bank balance but not what it will be in 6 weeks, and who has been caught short while the business was making money on paper.
Read it in your library.
This is included with The Standard, along with every other guide in the library. Your monthly re-audit tells you which one to open next. $497 to start, $297/mo to keep it running. Cancel any month and keep everything.
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