7/30/2025

When people hear FP&A (financial planning and analysis), they often jump to sophisticated dashboards, rolling forecasts, or strategic modeling. But for most growing companies, FP&A doesn’t begin there. It begins with something much simpler—and far more essential: short-term cash forecasting.

In environments where capital is constrained, timing is tight, or decision-making is fast-paced, knowing what your cash looks like over the next 13 weeks is foundational. Until a company has visibility into how cash is moving on a weekly (or even daily) basis, long-range planning is a distraction at best and dangerous at worst.

Cash forecasting provides the one thing every CEO and leadership team needs: clarity - clarity about when money is coming in, what obligations are due, and whether you’ll have the flexibility to make payroll, pay vendors, or invest in growth.

A 13-week cash forecast gives companies a real-time understanding of working capital cycles, customer payment behavior, and potential cash gaps before they become crises. More than that, it builds a habit of financial visibility that includes:

1. regularly updating forecasts

2. reconciling actuals to projected cash

3. improving your assumptions over time.

You don’t need a fancy platform or automation tool to build a short-term forecast. In fact, Excel remains the best place to start. Create a grid that shows weekly columns and rows for major inflows (collections, new sales) and outflows (payroll, rent, vendors, debt service). The goal is not perfect precision—it’s directional accuracy and discipline.

As you build the habit, you’ll start seeing patterns. You’ll learn how timing shifts in receivables or a single large vendor payment can dramatically alter your runway. And you’ll begin proactively planning around those movements.

A successful forecast is not a solo effort. It requires collaboration across departments. Accounting owns the inputs—cash on hand, known obligations, and recent activity. But sales, operations, and leadership all contribute to assumptions around revenue timing and spend. This process helps elevate the accounting function into a more strategic role. It also forces the organization to communicate about money proactively—not just when there's a problem.

Once a business gets comfortable forecasting cash for the next 13 weeks, the next step is layering on a 12-month budget. This budget should align with strategic goals and include seasonality, hiring plans, capital projects, and revenue initiatives. Eventually, that budget becomes a rolling forecast, updated quarterly (and eventually monthly) to keep it relevant, but none of that matters if the company doesn’t know what’s happening in the next 30, 60, or 90 days.