A weekly view of what will actually be in the bank for the next quarter. It is the one report that tells you whether you can take the job, make the hire, or need to ring the bank — and how long you have to decide.
Free, no email address required, yours to change. Built for Irish businesses — VAT and PAYE lines are already in it.
A twelve-month forecast is guesswork dressed up as planning. You do not know what you will sell in August, so the back half is invented and everybody treats it accordingly.
Thirteen weeks is different because you can build almost all of it from things that have already happened. The invoices you have raised are already on the sales ledger. The bills you owe are already on the purchase ledger. Payroll is known. VAT and PAYE dates are fixed. For most of a quarter you are not predicting — you are scheduling money that is already committed in one direction or the other.
It is also the horizon over which you can still act. A shortfall seen in week nine can be fixed by chasing debtors, delaying an order, or ringing the bank while you still look organised. The same shortfall discovered on the Friday it lands is a different conversation entirely.
This is a cash report, not a profit report. Nothing in it comes from your P&L.
Not the balance in your accounts software. The balance on the bank statement this morning, after everything that has genuinely cleared. If those two numbers differ, find out why before you go any further.
Go through the sales ledger invoice by invoice and put each one in the week you expect to be paid — not the week it falls due. Add cash sales, any VAT refund and any grant drawdown.
Suppliers from the purchase ledger, payroll, subcontractors, rent, insurance, loan and lease repayments, drawings. Then the lumpy ones: VAT and PAYE on the dates they actually leave the account.
Each week closes where the next one opens. The number that matters is the lowest closing balance across the thirteen weeks and the week it happens in. Everything else is working.
Drop the week gone, add a new week thirteen, put in last week's real closing balance. Comparing what you forecast against what happened is what makes the next one more accurate.
Almost always one of these five, and the first is the big one.
| The mistake | What it does to the forecast |
|---|---|
| Using agreed terms instead of actual behaviour | A customer on 30 days who reliably pays at 52 will wreck three weeks of your forecast. Use what they do, not what they agreed. Your ledger already knows. |
| Leaving VAT and PAYE out | These are the payments that turn a comfortable week into an overdraft. They are large, they are fixed-date, and they are the most commonly forgotten lines. |
| Forgetting drawings | Owner's pay and drawings leave the account like any other payment. Omit them and the forecast flatters you by exactly the amount you live on. |
| Using invoice dates for receipts | Raising an invoice is not the same as being paid. This is the difference between a cash flow forecast and a sales report. |
| Building it once | A forecast made in March and never touched is worthless by May. The value is in rolling it, and in seeing where last week's guess was wrong. |
Get these into the right weeks and most of the surprises disappear.
The other dates worth putting in before they surprise you: insurance renewal, the annual accountancy fee, commercial rates, any preliminary corporation tax, and lease or loan repayments that fall on a fixed day. None of them are a shock when they are in the sheet. All of them are when they are not.
| Sheet | Contains |
|---|---|
| 13 Week Cash Flow | Thirteen dated week columns that set themselves from one start date. Six receipt lines, eleven payment lines including VAT and PAYE. Each week opens on the last one's closing balance automatically, and the low point and the week it falls in are calculated for you. |
| How to use it | A page of plain instructions, including the mistakes above and how to roll it forward each week. |
Blue cells are yours to type over. Black cells are formulas. There is a headroom line if you have an overdraft, and a facility limit you can set. No macros, no protection, no sign-up.
They will project forward from your ledgers, and it is a reasonable start. What they cannot know is which customers actually pay late, which supplier you intend to hold back this month, or that you are buying a van in week seven. A 13-week forecast is a judgement document. The software supplies the raw material.
Profit and cash are different things and they move at different times. A growing business funds stock, work in progress and debtors before it collects anything, which is exactly why fast-growing businesses run out of money. Profit tells you whether the work was worth doing; this tells you whether you can pay for it in the meantime. There is a fuller explanation of where the difference actually goes.
Week one should be close to exact. By week thirteen you are estimating. That is fine — you are not trying to predict the balance to the euro, you are trying to find out whether there is a problem and roughly when. Rolling it weekly is what tightens it.
As a format, yes — this is the standard shape a lender expects. What they will press on is the assumptions behind the receipts, and whether you have shown a downside. If it is going to a bank as part of a facility request, it is worth having the workings able to stand up to questions.
Yes. A 13-week forecast, rolled and reviewed monthly, is part of the Analyse tier. It is built from your actual ledgers rather than typed in, and it comes with the monthly accounts so the two agree with each other.
Yes. No email address, no sign-up, no attribution. Use it, change it, send it to whoever you like.
Twenty minutes on the phone, no charge. Tell me what the business does and what the cash has been doing, and I will tell you whether a rolling forecast would change anything for you. If it would not, I will say so.