The Next Eight Weeks, Written Down in One Place
Work you finished in May on net-60 terms is not money you can spend until July. Payroll still runs twice a month in between. Suppliers want paying in thirty days, the remittance has its own date, and the sales tax sitting in your account is counted as your balance by everybody except the government it belongs to.
All of it is knowable in advance. Almost none of it gets written down in one place, which is why a cash squeeze feels sudden when it was, in fact, scheduled.
Cash flow reporting writes it down. Every month you get the Cash Flow statement for the period that closed and a rolling forward position: what is due in, what is due out, and on which dates. A forward view is only worth reading if the starting balance is real, so it comes off the same reconciled books as the rest of your period inside our full-cycle bookkeeping package.
Seeing the gap while it is still weeks away
Almost every cash problem was visible before it became one. What was missing was one page holding all of it at once, so the collision was obvious.
That is the page you get:
- Outstanding invoices, with the dates they are genuinely expected to land
- Payroll runs and the source deductions that follow them
- Sales tax and any remittance falling inside the window
- Loan and equipment payments
- Anything large you have told us is coming
The one number you do not control is when your customers actually pay, which is why we also handle the chasing of late invoices that turns an expected date into a real one.
Payroll is a fixed date and everything else is an estimate
Some obligations negotiate and some do not. A supplier will usually wait a week. Your people will not, and the source deductions that follow the run are due whether the customer paid you or not.
The Eagle Meadows Business Park in Pitt Meadows, roughly seventeen acres built for logistics operators, shows how sharp that gets. Trucking corporations pay drivers and fuel this week and invoice the freight at net-30 or net-60. Money goes out on a schedule set by employment law and comes back on one set by the customer. Your forecast maps those two calendars against each other, so a tight week is planned around rather than discovered on a Thursday night.
A good month and a tight month are often the same month
Growth consumes cash before it produces any. You win the larger contract, and the materials, the extra crew, and the deposit all land before the first progress payment does. On paper it is the best month you have had. In the account it is the worst.
This catches experienced operators, not beginners. Profit is measured over a period. Cash is a balance on a specific morning. We report both and show where they separate, so you can take the bigger job knowing which three weeks will be uncomfortable instead of finding out once you are committed.
Deciding on the hire, the truck, or the deposit without guessing
Our founder’s test for a properly run business is blunt: somebody wakes you at two in the morning with an opportunity that needs an answer now, and you either know whether you can fund it or you do not.
That is what the forward view is for. When a decision comes up the position is already assembled, so the question stops being whether the money exists and becomes whether the timing works. You see what the commitment does to the next eight weeks before you make it, rather than deciding by feel and checking the balance afterwards to see how it went.
Cash Flow Reporting FAQs
Far enough to be useful and not so far that it becomes fiction, which for most operating businesses means eight to thirteen weeks. That window covers roughly two payroll cycles, a remittance, and the collection period on work already invoiced. Beyond that you are forecasting sales rather than tracking commitments, and the two should not sit in the same column.
No. The Cash Flow statement is historical. It explains what happened to your money during a month that has already finished. The forward position is a different document built from your actual commitments, meaning outstanding invoices with their expected payment dates, scheduled payroll, remittance deadlines, loan payments, and known purchases.
Lumpy revenue is the case it was built for. Steady businesses rarely need it. The forecast does not attempt to guess sales you have not made yet. It works from what is contracted, invoiced, or scheduled, and shows you the position that results, so an uneven month is visible in advance rather than discovered in the account balance.
Realistic payment dates for your bigger customers and a heads-up on anything large before you commit to it. A new hire, a piece of equipment, a deposit on a lease. Everything else comes from your books. The forecast drifts when a purchase decision reaches us after the money has already left.
It can tell you what the position looks like with that salary and its source deductions added on the dates they are actually due, against the receipts you can reasonably expect. It will not make the decision for you, and it does not need to. Most owners already know the answer once the numbers are in front of them instead of in their head.
