Capsule 001: Cash Forecast

Your cash forecast is wrong by day eight. Not because you built it badly — because you built it from accounting data. Revenue when invoiced, costs when incurred: accruals dressed up as a forecast of cash. The two move at different speeds, and in a small business they start diverging the moment one customer pays late or one supplier gets paid early. By day fifteen the forecast is meaningfully off. By day thirty it isn’t predicting anything — it’s describing what already happened. Every decision you make in between is made on a number you no longer trust.

This Capsule fixes the architecture, not the effort. You connect a live Open Banking feed from your business bank account — transaction-level, refreshed daily — and forecast from what has actually happened rather than what was invoiced. Your accounting platform stays exactly where it is; you’re adding a data source, not replacing one. On top of that feed you build a 13-week rolling forecast: week by week, because cash risk shows up in a rough week that a month-end view smooths over, and thirteen weeks because that’s roughly the lead time you need to actually do something about a problem.

By the end you’re running a rhythm, not a spreadsheet. Monday you re-baseline. Wednesday you check for drift. Friday you read your lowest projected week and make the call: above your cash floor, you can spend, hire or prepay against normal cash; below it, you have up to thirteen weeks’ notice to chase a receivable in, hold a payable back, or delay the spend. That’s the difference between a forecast you look at and a forecast you decide from.