Twelve months, live formulas, and the two things founders get wrong — a balance that chains month to month, and a runway row that tells you when the money runs out. Free, no email wall.
Most cashflow templates are a grid with your name on it. This one does the two calculations founders actually need and usually get wrong: how many months of cash are left at the current burn, and whether rolling sales have crept up on the VAT threshold.
It is a spreadsheet with live formulas, not a picture of one. Change a number and the runway row moves.
| It shows you | How | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Runway, in months | Closing balance ÷ recent average burn, recalculated every month | Reads "cash positive" when you are and "OUT OF CASH" when the balance goes negative. Blunter than most templates and considerably more useful. |
| A balance that chains | Month two opens where month one closed, through to month twelve | The single most common error in home-made forecasts is each month restarting from the opening balance, which makes an unsurvivable year look fine. |
| VAT threshold watch | Rolling sales totalled against £90,000 | Cross it without noticing and HMRC backdates the liability to the day you crossed, on sales where you never charged VAT. |
Just the one figure. The other eleven months chain from it automatically, which is the whole point.
In the month the money actually moves, not the month you invoice. If you invoice in March on thirty-day terms, that is April’s cash — and if the client is a slow payer, it is May’s.
It is at the top for a reason. Under six months is a decision point; under three months your options narrow to cost and collection.
A forecast written once is worthless. A mediocre one kept current is the most useful management tool a small company owns.
Push every customer receipt back a month and look again. That is not pessimism, it is the single most likely thing to actually happen.
It shows cash, not profit. They are different numbers and both matter. A business can be profitable and insolvent at the same time, which is how most otherwise healthy small companies get into trouble.
It assumes your customers pay when you say they will. They will not. The average UK small business invoice is paid days beyond its terms, and late payment is a leading cause of small business failure. Build a month of slippage into every receipt line and see whether the year still works.
If your forecast needs to survive somebody else’s scrutiny — a lender, an investor, a Start Up Loan assessor — that is a different job again, and one we do properly rather than in a template.
A 12-month cashflow with money in, money out, net movement and a closing balance that chains month to month, plus a runway row that tells you how many months of cash you have left at your recent burn, and a VAT watch that totals your rolling sales against the £90,000 registration threshold. You type into the blue cells; everything else calculates.
It is free and there is no email wall. Download it, use it, never speak to us. We would rather be the firm whose template you used than the firm whose form you abandoned.
Yes. It is an .xlsx file, so Excel opens it natively and both Google Sheets and Numbers import it with the formulas intact. If a formula ever looks odd after importing, the usual culprit is a locale setting turning commas into semicolons — the fix is in your spreadsheet settings, not the file.
Profit is what you earned; cashflow is what actually moved. A profitable business runs out of money when customers pay in ninety days and staff are paid in thirty — the profit is real and so is the empty bank account. This template deliberately models cash, in the month the money moves rather than the month you invoice, because that is the number that decides whether you survive to collect the profit.
Monthly, in about twenty minutes, replacing forecast with actual as you go. A forecast written once and admired is worthless; a mediocre one updated every month is the single most useful management tool a small company has. If you would rather not do it at all, that is roughly what management accounts are for.
Act on the number of months, not the size of the deficit. Anything under six months means the decisions get made now — cutting costs, chasing debtors, raising, or repricing — because every option gets worse as the runway shortens. Under three months your options are largely down to cost and collection. This is also the point at which most founders start talking to us.
