About Cashflow Forecast Templates
Cashflow Forecast Templates exists for one reason: to help business owners see their cash clearly before it becomes a problem. We publish free, plain-English guides on cash flow forecasting and build cash flow forecast templates for Excel and Google Sheets, including versions designed for thirty different industries.
The site was created by Fez Aly, a qualified chartered accountant with a background in finance, audit and accounting, who went on to found a technology business. With 12 years of experience behind it, the content here comes from years of seeing the same pattern from both sides of the desk: profitable businesses that ran short of cash, not because they were badly run, but because nobody had looked at the timing of what was coming in and going out. Read more about the author.
Why cash flow, and why templates?
As an auditor and accountant, you see the numbers after the event. As a founder, you live them in real time: payroll due on Friday, a big customer paying late, a tax bill landing in the quietest month of the year. The tool that bridges the two is a good cash flow forecast, and for most small businesses the most practical way to build one is still a well-designed spreadsheet.
Most free templates online are either too simple to be useful or quietly broken: opening balances typed in by hand, totals that miss a row, no way to see which week gets tight. We set out to build templates that an accountant would trust and a busy owner could actually use.
What you’ll find here
- Free guides covering the whole topic: what a cash flow forecast is, how to build one in Excel or Google Sheets, 13-week and 12-month forecasts, working capital, burn rate, presenting to your bank, and much more. Every guide is free to read, with no sign-up.
- Industry pages and playbooks for thirty kinds of business, from restaurants and construction to SaaS, nonprofits and farms, explaining why cash behaves the way it does in each, and the routines that keep it under control.
- Free templates: a simple 12-month forecast, a 13-week weekly forecast, a personal cash flow template and a startup runway calculator.
- Premium templates built for each industry, with a linked 13-week and 12-month view, a 3-year outlook, best and worst case scenarios, an actuals tab, a variance report, a dashboard and calculation tabs specific to the industry.
- A free calculator for quick checks without downloading anything.
How we build and test templates
Every template starts from the same forecasting engine, then gets the income and cost lines and the calculations that matter in its industry: progress billing and retainage for construction, food and card costs for restaurants, stock purchases ahead of sales for retailers, subscribers and churn for SaaS businesses.
Before release, each template is checked so that every formula calculates without errors, the closing balance of each period carries correctly into the next, the weekly and monthly views agree, and switching between expected, best and worst case updates every tab. Templates use no macros and no external links, and they work in both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
How we write guides
Guides are written for business owners, not accountants. Each one starts with a short, direct answer to its question, explains the method step by step, and uses worked examples with the arithmetic checked. We avoid jargon where we can and explain it where we can’t. Guides are reviewed and updated regularly, and the date at the top of each shows when it was last updated.
Guides and templates are educational tools for planning. They aren’t financial, tax or legal advice for your specific situation; for that, speak to a qualified adviser who knows your business.
Free and premium
The free guides and templates are genuinely useful on their own, and many small businesses will never need more. Premium templates save the time of building industry-specific calculations yourself and add the features that matter as a business grows. Selling templates is how we fund the free guides, and we try to make it clear which is which on every page.
Get in touch
Questions, suggestions for a template or an industry we don’t yet cover, or feedback on a guide are always welcome. Email hello@cashflowforecasttemplates.co.uk or see the contact page.
Cashflow Forecast Templates is operated by Digital Circle FZE.