Template · Finance
Cash Flow Forecasting template
For seeing when you will run short of cash, month by month, even while the profit figures look fine. Leave it alone when you want to know whether you are profitable; this measures cash, not profit. Instead Financial Ratio Analysis, which reads profit from the accounts; the forecast only tells you whether you can pay the bills.
Download it
Nothing here asks for an email. The files are static and you can link straight to them.
Or work it through here
Enter your opening cash balance, what you expect to receive and pay out this period, and your average monthly outflow. The calculator shows the net movement, the resulting closing balance, and how many periods that balance would cover at your current burn rate, run it again each time the forecast rolls forward rather than treating it as a one-off. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
Inputs
Result
- Net movement this period
- £5,000
- Closing cash balance
- £20,000
- Cash runway at this burn rate
- 1 units
What you may do with it
This sheet, meaning our drawing and layout of it, is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Use it commercially, put it in a client deck, print it for a workshop, adapt it. Keep the attribution line that is printed on the sheet and you have met the licence.
Originator: Standard management accounting practice, with no single named originator. The weekly, 13-week format was formalised within corporate restructuring and turnaround practice, where lenders and insolvency practitioners made it the default liquidity-reporting discipline. The framework itself is not ours to license, and the written entry behind this page, its worked example, critiques and sources, stays all rights reserved. The full licence position is set out in plain English.
Before you fill it in
A blank template is the easy part. The entry behind it covers how to run Cash Flow Forecasting properly, a worked example, the pitfalls real teams hit, and the situations where it is the wrong tool and something else would serve better.