Hi Glen
I looked at previous comments then one thing to clear up would be the nomenclature. A cashflow forecast is not the same as the cashflow statemet that one poster referred too although both would be good to have.
The cashflow statement would be a period end report that reconciles the company profit to the closing bank balances for a period. I use it with medium to larger companies to give structure to explaining where the money has gone. The cashfow forecast, on the other hand is designed to try and predict working capital requirements. I have Sage 50 clients who will not move to Quickfile because they depend on the built- in cashflow forecasting features of that software. I'm not familiar with Floatapp other than the fact that they seem charge £25 per month. Not sure if that's per client.
The logic behind the Sage 50 forecast tool is driven mostly by the due dates on sales and purchase invoices being added to a current bank balance. There is a separate tab where you can make entries for scheduled regular payments/receipts to add to those drawn from the sales and purchases sub-ledger. That, for instance, is where you would add in payments for wages, PAYE and other non-sub-ledger items in order for them to be taken into account.
Standard forecast is seven day and there is the option to use a start and close date picker to expand the scope of the forecast. I would like to see pre-sets for 30 day, 60 day and 90 day forecasts as well as the custom option. Another Sage50 feature is to exclude or include individual invoices from the calculated position. That's useful for bad debt sensitivity analysis or excluding annual charges entered into purchases sub-ledger
A forecast position remains open whilst the items that make up that position remain unpaid. Such items are continually stressed against the relevant bank account balance. The system can therefore display both how overdue a cash position is and the aggregated cash needed to clear all overdue positions at any given time. I attach a redacted screen shot from a live Sage50 system for illustration.
From the attached we can see that the client would need an additional €2078 in the bank to clear down all overdue payments assuming all overdue receivables can be collected in.
The information needed to add a cashflow forecast option to Quickfile is already entered. The only change to users would need to be to making sure the payment terms they have set up on the system are the real ones in force in the business.
One level of sophistication is that you can generate separate forecasts for each bank account. Doubt the need for that at this stage.
Happy to discuss
