In the current climate of global economic uncertainty, Cash is King (or Queen). If you're uncertain how you'll manage your cash over the next 6 - 12 months or are growing so fast that you're unsure of how much and when the next tax bill will hit, we're here to help.
We've been assisting clients in managing their cash flow and planning for the future. What is our biggest tip? The right software. The Xero ecosystem includes hundreds of add-on applications, so we thought we’d start sharing some of our favourites and how we use them.
This month, we focus on our favourite cash flow forecasting tool, Float.
“Float tracks cash across your project pipeline, spots dangers in advance, and offers a visual forecast of the future – so you can make sustainable decisions.”
What we love
- Integrated with Xero, Float imports your live data, including sales invoices and bills to pay. It then forecasts the exact cash-in or cash-out date based on the due date or your “planned date” from Xero.
- The simple-to-use budget input tool allows you to tailor your recurring cash flows to the exact day of the week, fortnight, etc., for high costs, e.g. payroll “fortnightly on Wednesdays”, super “quarterly on the 21st” or BAS (GST and PAYGW) quarterly. (Noting these cash payments differ from your Profit & Loss statement; for example, your “Wages” include the total wage (net wage + PAYGW), whereas in reality, the net wage payments are paid fortnightly, and PAYGW often quarterly)
- Knowing your daily cash balance during the month (rather than a month-end balance), can be crucial for managing tight cash flow and inevitably mismatched supplier or employee payments and sales receipts (this is what your P&L won’t tell you)
- Scenario function to visualise the cash impact, for example, a potential project, investment or recruitment decision.
- No. More. Spreadsheets.
Check out more visuals (from the experts!) here: https://floatapp.com/features/
What we do
- Help small to medium businesses set up the Float integration with Xero and provide guidance through the optimal budget setup, e.g., A 3-6 month view is typically the most accurate
- Monthly check-in meetings to review and re-forecast, including scenario testing
- Provide software support and training
- Advise on cash flow management and financial decision-making
We love helping our clients and implementing the right software to drive your business forward. If you’d like a complimentary chat to discuss streamlining your processes or levelling up your reporting and cash flow forecasting, please book a chat with me, Lisa, https://calendly.com/lisajumar...
In the months ahead, we’ll take a look into more of our favourite apps, including:
- HubDoc for receipts processing (free with your Xero sub)
- Fathom for financial reporting, which can be highly customised from simple sales breakdown visuals to complex KPIs and metrics appropriate to your business and consolidation of multiple entities.
- It would be rude not to mention Xero’s in-house budgeting function, which is very popular if you want to set an annual budget and track its progress monthly simply. These reports can also be customised according to your needs and split by multiple tracking categories(another great under-utilised Xero feature).
We’d also love to hear about your favourite finance software product so that we can learn about it and share it with the Longboard community.
