Does your cash flow forecast update itself?

If you run a small or medium services business, there’s about 50% chance that you have started to do cash flow forecasting at some point but have since quit.

Why did you quit forecasting?

Not because you don’t see the value in planning. Most probably you agree with conclusions of this EY report that cash flow forecasting is essential. But forecasts only help you if they are updated on regular basis. And it can take a huge amount of time to ensure that.

If you use spreadsheets for planning and are doing weekly update sessions, they probably start with checking your bank account statement to see which of the planned transactions have already materialized.

If your company has accounts with several banks and several dozen transactions per week in each, this can easily take 15-20 minutes. And by the time you have completed this you don’t have any energy left to do the actual review. I.e. to compare whether your assumptions for the next few months are still realistic given the latest that you know about the status of each of the client projects.

Can you avoid this tedious work?

Yes! If you do your planning in Tailwind financial planning app, your forecast will update itself every time you log in.

Tailwind allows you to activate automatic data import from your bank in line with the rules set out in the PSD2 directive of the European Union.

Every time you log in to your Tailwind forecast, it will request the latest transaction data from your bank and will compare it to transactions in your forecast. If there is a match, the transaction will be marked as received or paid and will be removed from the forecast.

This way you can jump straight into reviewing the transactions that are yet to happen. And just 5-10 minutes per week will be enough to be in control of your cash flow!