Cash flow dashboard for a small business: seeing the gap before it opens

Why the P&L is not the cash answer

A profit and loss statement records a sale when you invoice it. Your bank records it when the customer pays. Between those two moments sits every cash problem a healthy small company ever has. The measure of that gap is DSO — days sales outstanding, the average number of days between invoicing and getting paid. If you invoice on thirty-day terms and your DSO is fifty-two, you are financing your customers for three weeks longer than you planned, every month, out of your own account. Nothing in the P&L shows that. It will show a good month. The same asymmetry runs the other way on what you owe. Payroll does not wait, and neither does rent or a supplier on tight terms. A cash view is simply both sides of that timing put on the same calendar.

The rolling 13-week forecast

Thirteen weeks is one quarter, and it is the horizon where a cash forecast is both actionable and honest. A month is too short to give you room to do anything about what you find. A year is a budget, not a forecast — the error bars past a quarter are wider than the decisions you would make from it. CEODash builds that view from three things you already have. The opening cash position, taken from your closing cash or your balance sheet. The plan for what comes in and goes out, from your budget where you have one, and from a run rate over closed periods where you do not. And the real timing — the terms you actually collect on and pay on, rather than the terms printed on the invoice. It rolls, which matters more than it sounds. Each week the window moves forward, so the question is always "the next thirteen weeks from today" rather than a forecast written in January and quietly diverging by March.

Committed versus conditional

This is the single most useful distinction in the whole view, and almost no spreadsheet makes it. When the forecast shows a gap, there are two very different situations that look identical on a chart. In the first, the gap closes on money you are already owed — invoices issued, work delivered, customers who pay eventually. That is a collections problem. It is unpleasant, it is manageable, and the levers are known. In the second, the gap only closes if deals that have not been signed land on time. That is not a collections problem. It is a bet, and the difference matters enormously for what you do on Monday. CEODash types the gap explicitly as one of three states — none, conditional, or unconditional — so the view answers the question rather than leaving you to work it out from two charts. A conditional gap that you read as a committed one is how a company discovers in week nine that it needed to act in week two.

What to do in the week a gap appears

These are decisions, not advice, and which of them is right depends on facts only you have. On the money coming in: chase the specific invoices the forecast is leaning on rather than the whole ledger, since the forecast tells you which ones matter and when. Consider deposits or staged billing on new work. Look at whether your worst-paying customers are also your thinnest-margin ones, which is more often true than owners expect. On the money going out: the timing of discretionary spend is usually more moveable than its size, and moving a payment two weeks is cheaper than cutting it. Supplier terms are negotiable more often than they are negotiated. On price: a gap that keeps reappearing is rarely a timing problem. It is usually a margin problem arriving on a delay. What this guide will not do is tell you whether to take on debt, factor your receivables or raise money. Those are regulated decisions with consequences specific to your circumstances, and they belong with your accountant or adviser — who will make a better call with a thirteen-week view in front of them than without one.

Setting it up from what you already have

The fast path is a file. Export your P&L and balance sheet from whatever you already keep the books in, upload them, and the forecast builds from those figures. File uploads are free and unlimited, so this costs you nothing to try and takes minutes rather than a project. The connected path is different work, and it is deliberately not your work. The setup promise on the home page is exact: your accountant or bookkeeper sets it up in a day, and you do not set anything up. They already know which ledger is authoritative and which accounts to map, and that knowledge is most of the job. On accounting systems specifically: QuickBooks and Xero connectors are in build. Until they land, getting your ledger in is something we do with you rather than something you wait for — an export on a schedule, or a read-only connection straight to the database your numbers already sit in. Both produce the same forecast. If your setup is unusual, say so when you talk to us; shaping the intake around how a particular company actually keeps its books is the normal case here, not a special request.

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