The question every CFO asks first

Over the last few years I have sat across the table from a lot of CFOs and interim CFOs, usually because they were taking a look at Cashplannr. And almost always the same question comes first. Not: what was EBITDA last year. Rather: how long does our cash last, and where is the next tight moment?

I get why. When you walk into a new place, certainly as an interim or as a consultant in a CFO role, that is the only thing that really matters in the short term. And it is exactly the question the existing numbers leave you stranded on. The bookkeeping is up to date. The dashboard is full of charts. There is an annual budget in Excel. But a cash forecast that matches the reality of this week, fed by the invoices that are open right now, is rarely there. Or it existed once, in a tab that is by now three months old.

That is not a detail. It is the layer you get judged on.

Reporting looks backward. Cash is a question that points forward.

My background is in software, not in audit or finance, and when I rolled into this, one thing struck me immediately: almost all financial software is brilliant at what has already happened. Consolidating, closing, margins and variances against budget. Valuable work. But it looks backward.

Cash works the other way around. It is a question about the future, and one that shifts every day. A client who pays fifteen days later, a supplier term you renegotiate, an investment you push out a quarter: each of those small things moves your entire cash curve. A forecast built on the annual budget and then left standing still is fiction within a few weeks.

An outdated cash plan is not neutral. It looks like an answer, while it is really a photo from weeks ago.

And that is exactly the danger. Deciding on old cash data is worse than having no forecast at all, because you feel more certain than you should.

What “operational” means to me

There is a world of difference between a top-down cash budget and an operational forecast. A budget starts from goals: expected revenue, planned costs, neatly spread over twelve months. Fine for setting direction. But it knows nothing about this week.

An operational forecast starts from the bottom, from what actually moves. The customer invoices that are open, with their realistic payment date instead of the theoretical one. The supplier invoices and the commitments that are locked in but still have to land. The patterns you know from your own history: payroll, rent, VAT, loan repayments. And most important: it refreshes itself from your accounting and your bank, so no one has to keep a tab up to date.

We built Cashplannr around that idea, in layers. The closer an amount sits to “actually happened”, the harder it counts. The result is not a budget you make once a year, but a cash picture that is alive.

Why “up-to-date” is the whole thing

For you, the credibility of a number stands or falls with how current it is. You do not walk into your board or your shareholders with a cash forecast from last month. And you do not decide on a hire, an investment or a bridge loan on a static budget yourself.

That is why the difference between “a tool that also shows cash” and “a tool that forecasts cash operationally” is not in a chart, but in the answer that still holds today. Where is my lowest dip, and when? What happens if a big client pays late or a project runs over? And can I explain that in two sentences to someone who does not know the underlying data?

On that last point we deliberately went all in: the forecast is summarized every week in a short, readable note, so you do not have to build a story around the same curve every Monday. And for anyone tracking several companies or clients, and interim CFOs and consultants pretty much are by definition, the same live picture holds across entities.

What I would leave you with

I am not going to tell you to throw out your reporting stack. Consolidation, closing and management reporting stay necessary, and plenty of tools do them well. My point is more precise:

When you choose or recommend a financial tool, check whether operational cash forecasting is really in it, natively, and not as an add-on that in practice comes down to an Excel someone keeps by hand. Because that last one does not survive a busy month. And the question you get asked first stays the same: how long does our cash last, and where is the next tight moment?

That is what we built Cashplannr for. Not to redo your bookkeeping, but to turn the numbers you already have forward, into a picture you dare to decide on. Also, and especially, when you have just walked in and want to know quickly where you stand.

I genuinely like hearing how you handle this today, because that is where I learn the most myself.

Thomas Hysselinckx