Cash Flow Forecast Template (Free Excel Download)

A cash flow forecast template is a spreadsheet that lists the money you expect to come in and go out week by week or month by month, starting from your current bank balance, so you can see your closing cash position for every period ahead. Download the free template below, enter your opening balance and your expected inflows and outflows, and it calculates each period's closing cash for you.

Download the cash flow forecast template (Excel)

Monthly and 13-week tabs, worked example included. Free, no email required. The file opens in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice, and it works in Google Sheets if you upload it to Drive and open it there.

What a cash flow forecast template contains

A cash flow forecast template holds five things: your opening cash balance, your expected cash inflows, your expected cash outflows, the timing rules that say when each one lands, and a closing balance for every period. The closing balance of one period becomes the opening balance of the next, which is what turns a list of numbers into a forecast.

Timing is what the template tracks. A profit and loss report records an invoice when you raise it. A cash flow forecast records it when the customer actually pays. If your terms are 30 days, the template shows that revenue a month later than your P&L does, and that gap is where most cash surprises live.

How do I create a cash flow forecast?

Start with your bank balance today, list what you expect to receive and pay in each period ahead, and work down to a closing balance for each one. Six steps:

1. Enter your opening cash balance. Use the actual figure from your bank account, not your accounting system's cash figure, if the two differ.
2. List your expected cash in. Customer payments first, then anything else: loans, grants, tax refunds, owner contributions.
3. List your expected cash out. Payroll, rent, suppliers, software, marketing, professional fees, tax, loan repayments.
4. Apply the timing. Put each amount in the period the cash actually moves, not the period the invoice is dated.
5. Read the closing balance line. This is the output. Every other row exists to produce it.
6. Set a minimum buffer and mark the periods that fall below it. The template shades those cells so a shortfall is visible before it arrives.

Pull the first version from six months of bank statements rather than from memory. Your statements know how late your customers actually pay. Your recollection is optimistic.

How to make a cash flow forecast in Excel?

Use the "Monthly forecast" tab in the template above, or build it yourself with four formulas. In Excel the structure is:

Two Excel settings are worth the minute they take. Lock the formula cells (Review, then Protect Sheet) so a paste does not overwrite them, and apply conditional formatting to the closing-cash row so any period below your buffer turns red. That second one is the whole early-warning system. Both are already set up in the file above.

The same file works in Google Sheets. Upload it to Drive, open it with Google Sheets, and the formulas and conditional formatting carry over. Sheets is the better choice when more than one person updates the forecast, because you get comments and version history without emailing files around.

What should a cash flow forecast look like?

It should read as a single row you can follow across time. Here is the "Example" tab from the template, a 13-week view for a business opening with $50,000:

Illustrative figures, not a customer's numbers.

Read week 2. Cash drops to $27,000 because a $20,000 outflow lands before a large customer payment arrives in week 3. Nothing is wrong with this business. If the week-3 payment slips by ten days, though, week 4 is where payroll gets difficult, and the forecast is what tells you that in advance instead of on the day.

A forecast earns its place by showing you the periods where timing, not profitability, is the problem.

How to do a 12 month cash flow forecast?

Use the monthly tab and change what you put in it. A 13-week forecast is built from known invoices and known bills. A 12-month forecast is built from assumptions, so make the assumptions visible and few:

• Revenue growth, as one monthly percentage rather than a figure per customer.
• Payment terms, which decide how much of a month's sales land as cash inside that month.
• Hiring, entered in the month a salary starts and never earlier.
• The annual and quarterly items most forecasts forget: tax payments, insurance renewals, software billed yearly, bonuses.

Keep those four on the assumptions tab and the whole forecast can be re-run in a couple of minutes when one of them changes. Bury them inside the month columns and nobody will touch the file again after the first build.

Do not expect a 12-month forecast to be accurate. Expect it to answer a question: can this business afford the plan it has written down? A forecast that is wrong in month nine but correct that you run short in month four has already done its job.

Which time horizon should you use?

Most businesses need the first two. The 13-week view is the one that prevents a shortfall. The 12- month view is the one that informs a hiring or financing decision. For the 13-week horizon specifically, Cash Flow Frog publishes a dedicated file and walkthrough at 13-week cash flow forecast.

Common mistakes that make a template useless

• Recording invoice dates instead of payment dates. The most common error, and it makes the forecast optimistic in exactly the weeks that matter.
• Forgetting the irregular items. Quarterly tax and annual renewals are the two that turn a comfortable month into a tight one.
• Never comparing the forecast to what happened. A forecast nobody checks against actuals does not improve, because nothing corrects the assumptions.
• Rebuilding the file every month. Update the inputs and leave the structure alone. A forecast is only comparable over time if its shape stays the same.

Set one recurring 20-minute slot a week, update the actual figures, and note why anything differed. That habit is worth more than any refinement to the spreadsheet.

What tools can I use for cash flow forecasting?

A spreadsheet is the right starting point. The template above will serve a business with one bank account, straightforward terms and someone willing to update it weekly. Two things eventually make the manual version hard to sustain: the update itself, which means re-keying figures your accounting system already holds, and any complexity your spreadsheet was not designed for, such as a second entity, a second currency, or a question like "what happens if this customer pays 30 days late" that needs a comparable scenario rather than an overwritten cell.

That is the point at which forecasting software earns its keep. Cash Flow Frog connects to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, Sage Intacct, Odoo, Zoho Books and FreshBooks, and builds a rolling forecast up to three years out from the data already in your books, updated daily. QuickBooks records what happened. Cash Flow Frog projects what is coming. You can drill from any figure in the forecast down to the transaction behind it, switch between scenarios, and consolidate multiple entities and currencies in one view.

For accountants and bookkeepers the calculation is different again. Maintaining a spreadsheet per client does not scale past a handful of them, and a client-ready forecast you can share is worth more in an advisory conversation than a workbook you have to talk them through. Cash Flow Frog is built for that pattern, with client-ready branded reports as the shareable output.

Use the spreadsheet while the spreadsheet works. When updating it becomes the reason the forecast goes stale, that is the signal to move.

Keep the file, or start with the software

Download the template, forecast the next 13 weeks, and see whether the closing-cash line ever dips under your buffer. That exercise costs an afternoon and tells you more than a month of watching your bank balance.

If you would rather the forecast built itself from the books you already keep, Cash Flow Frog does that, and a free trial will forecast your real numbers rather than a template's.

Download the cash flow forecast template (Excel)