Cash · 13-week forecast
DashboardTreasury and FP&AA 13-week cash forecast that rebuilds itself every morning
Most 13-week cash forecasts live in a spreadsheet that one person rebuilds on Monday. Here is a dashboard that pulls the same inputs every morning, warns when a week dips below the minimum balance and sends the CFO a PDF each week.
Valnora & Elric team5 min read
Largest items in the next four weeks
| Week | Item | Source | Amount | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| W2 | Payroll, all entities | Payroll calendar | -$1.12m | Scheduled |
| W3 | Northwind Retail, INV-4471 | Receivables | +$0.64m | Overdue |
| W4 | Quarterly sales tax | Payables | -$0.71m | Scheduled |
| W4 | Freight carrier, 3 bills | Payables | -$0.38m | Due |
Daily
Forecast rebuilt from source data
Illustrative: a morning load replaces the Monday spreadsheet rebuild.
5 min
How often the monitor can re-check
The minimum-balance monitor can check as often as every 5 minutes.
~1 day
Finance time freed a week
Illustrative estimate for one analyst who rebuilt the file by hand.
Illustrative example. Figures show how the workflow is measured; they are not customer results.
A 13-week cash forecast answers one question: will we have enough cash each week for the next quarter? In many finance teams it lives in a spreadsheet that an analyst rebuilds every Monday, pasting in bank balances, the open receivables report, the open payables report and the payroll dates. By Wednesday it is out of date, and by the time a gap shows up there is little room to act.
This post walks through a dashboard built with Agent Serve Dashboards that rebuilds the same view every morning from the source systems. The figures shown are illustrative.
Loading the inputs every morning
A workflow with a Schedule trigger runs at 06:00 on working days and writes four tables in Tables:
- Bank balances and transactions. Each bank's daily export, uploaded to a folder in Files or sent to a mailbox, is parsed and written with the account, date and balance. Banks have no native block; if yours has an API, the generic API block can read it with a key stored as a workspace secret.
- Open receivables. Open invoices from QuickBooks or NetSuite, with customer, amount, due date and days overdue.
- Open payables. Open bills and approved purchase orders, with supplier, amount and payment terms.
- Payroll. Pay dates and expected totals from a payroll calendar table the payroll team keeps up to date.
Each load stamps its time on the rows, so the dashboard can show when the data was last refreshed. If one source fails, the run log shows which block failed and the rest of the data still loads.
Turning rows into weeks
The semantic model holds the logic that the spreadsheet used to hide in formulas:
- Expected receipt week. Due date plus the average days late for that customer group, so a customer who always pays 12 days late lands in the right week.
- Expected payment week. Bill due date, or the next payment run after it if you pay suppliers on fixed days.
- Receipts, disbursements and net flow by week, as named metrics.
- Closing balance: today's bank balance plus the running total of net flow.
Because these are shared definitions, the chart, the tiles, the monitor and the PDF all read the same numbers. When treasury changes the late-payment assumption, every view moves together.
What the dashboard shows
- KPI tiles. Cash today, the lowest projected week, the minimum balance and overdue receivables.
- Closing balance against the minimum. The chart answers the core question at a glance. In the illustrative view, week 6 comes close to the floor because payroll and a quarterly tax payment fall in the same week.
- Largest items. The biggest inflows and outflows in the next four weeks, so the conversation is about the three items that matter, not the three hundred that do not.
- Filters by entity, currency and bank account, with row-level access so entity controllers see only their own entities.
Panels refresh as new rows land after the morning load. Data sources can also be connected directly where your ERP data sits in a warehouse such as Snowflake or BigQuery, refreshed on a schedule as often as every 15 minutes or queried live.
The minimum balance monitor
What the solution produces
Minimum balance alert (illustrative)
Record- Monitor
- Projected closing balance below minimum, any of the next 13 weeks
- Week
- Week 6 · projected $1.42m against a $1.50m floor
- What changed
- Northwind Retail invoice of $0.64m moved from week 3 to week 7 after the due date passed without payment.
- Biggest outflows that week
- Payroll $1.12m, quarterly sales tax $0.71m
- Sent to
- Treasury lead and CFO, in-app and in the #treasury Slack channel
A monitor watches the projected closing balance for every one of the 13 weeks. It alerts when any week drops below the minimum the CFO set, and it can re-check as often as every five minutes, which matters on days when someone uploads a fresh bank file mid-morning. Alerts go in-app, by email and to a Slack channel.
The alert says which week, by how much and what changed since the last load, such as a large invoice that slipped a week. It does not move money or delay payments. Treasury decides whether to chase a customer, move a supplier payment run or draw on a facility.
The weekly PDF to the CFO
A scheduled report sends the dashboard as a PDF to the CFO every Monday at 07:00, before the weekly finance meeting. Scheduled reports can go daily, weekly or monthly, as PDF, PNG or a link, to workspace members or to external email addresses such as a board member or lender if you choose.
Keeping the forecast honest
How to measure it
Daily
Forecast rebuilt from source data
Illustrative: a morning load replaces the Monday spreadsheet rebuild.
5 min
How often the monitor can re-check
The minimum-balance monitor can check as often as every 5 minutes.
~1 day
Finance time freed a week
Illustrative estimate for one analyst who rebuilt the file by hand.
Illustrative example. Figures show how the workflow is measured; they are not customer results.
A forecast is only useful if someone checks it against what happened. Add a panel that compares last week's projected closing balance with the actual bank balance, and keep a short note of the reasons for big differences. Over a few months, those notes show which assumption needs work, usually customer payment timing.
Controls and governance
Row-level access
Row-level policies narrow what each person sees in tables, dashboards, exports and scheduled reports.
Roles and permission groups
Admin, write and read roles per workspace, plus permission groups that limit which models, blocks and integrations a team can use.
Run logs
Every workflow run records each block’s inputs, outputs and errors, so a reviewer can trace how a result was reached.
Audit trail
Proposals, approvals, declines and executed actions are written to the workspace audit log, which admins can export.
SSO and SCIM
Sign in through your identity provider with SAML 2.0 or OIDC, and provision people with SCIM.
Self-hosting
Run Agent Serve in your own cloud or data centre, next to the systems it reads.
More on how Agent Serve handles access, data and audit on the security page.
For currency exposure on top of the cash view, see treasury FX hedging. For the inputs on the payables side, see AP invoice intake.
From bank, ledger and payroll to a weekly cash view
Data · Inputs
- 01Bank exportsDaily balance and transaction files from each bank, uploaded or dropped in a folder.
- 02QuickBooks or NetSuiteOpen invoices with due dates, and open bills and purchase orders with payment terms.
- 03Payroll calendarPay dates and expected net pay, taxes and benefits from the payroll team.
- 04Morning loadA scheduled workflow writes each input to a table and stamps the load time.
Dashboard · Cash view
- 05Semantic modelMeasures for receipts, disbursements, net flow and closing balance by week.
- 0613-week dashboardClosing balance against the minimum, inflows and outflows, and the biggest items.
- 07Minimum balance monitorAlerts treasury when any projected week falls below the floor you set.
- 08Weekly PDFSent to the CFO every Monday at 07:00 as a scheduled report.
What you need
- Daily bank balance and transaction exports from each bank, in CSV or a format your bank offers
- QuickBooks or NetSuite connected, with due dates on invoices and payment terms on bills
- A payroll calendar with pay dates and expected totals, maintained by the payroll team
- Rules for when customers actually pay, such as average days late by customer group
- A minimum balance agreed with the CFO, and named people who get the alert
- One owner who reviews forecast against actual cash each week