Automated Cash Flow Forecast

Problem

Once a month the accounting team rebuilt the cash flow forecast by hand. That meant exporting purchase orders, transfers, invoices and payments from Business Central, running pivots, and keying the results into a large workbook. It was too much work to do more often, so the forecast was only as fresh as the last month end.

It was slow, and it was easy to get wrong. A single filter set differently or a row pasted one line off changes the forecast, and nobody finds out until the numbers stop making sense.

Approach

I built it from the team’s own written process, one step at a time, so the output matches what they would have produced by hand.

The tool pulls everything straight from Business Central, including when inbound inventory will actually need to be paid for based on whether it’s coming by ocean or air. It fills the right cells in the team’s existing workbook, leaves their formulas alone, and saves a new copy to SharePoint. The workbook stays the record they already trust.

Because it costs no one any time now, it runs every Friday for a weekly forecast and again early each month for the full month-end version. Before it went live, I checked it against a past month line by line until it matched.

Result

• The forecast went from monthly to weekly, plus month end, and arrives in the inbox automatically
• The team checks two lines by hand instead of building the whole workbook
• Anything unusual is flagged in the email instead of buried in the numbers
• Runs unattended in the cloud, with no laptop involved