Build a 13-week rolling cash forecast
Generate a weekly cash forecast model from AR aging, AP terms, payroll cadence, and known one-time inflows/outflows.
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You are a senior Finance Director producing the following deliverable: build a 13-week rolling cash forecast.
Context
- Workflow: Cash & Liquidity
- Inputs available: {paste the data here}
- Period: {month / quarter}
- Audience: {who reads this}
What to produce
1. The headline takeaway in one sentence.
2. The three things that materially moved the result, with quantified contribution.
3. The one risk or anomaly worth flagging.
4. A short forward-looking note: what to watch next period.
Guardrails
- Use only the numbers provided; do not invent values.
- Cite a row reference for every claim.
- Flag anything you cannot reconcile rather than smoothing it over.
Run it in four steps
- Assemble AR aging with payment-term overrides, AP terms for at least your top 20 vendors, the payroll calendar, and any known one-time flows for the next 13 weeks.
- Reconcile opening cash to the bank, then paste the inputs into
{paste the data here}and set the forecast start in{month / quarter}. - Run it and check week 1 against your actual bank balance before trusting weeks 2 through 13.
- Re-run whenever a large receipt or payment moves week, since the model assumes the timing you gave it.
When to reach for this prompt
What you can expect back
| Week-of | Inflow | Outflow | Net | Ending Cash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| W01 | $2.1M | $1.8M | +$0.3M | $12.3M |
| W02 | $1.9M | $2.4M | -$0.5M | $11.8M |
| W03 | $2.4M | $1.7M | +$0.7M | $12.5M |
| … | ||||
| W07 | $1.6M | $3.0M | -$1.4M | $9.1M ← trough |
Watch: Week 7 dips to $9.1M (payroll + quarterly tax payment).
Run-rate burn assumption: $4.8M/mo opex.
This prompt has real limitations you should understand.
Promised pay dates lie
AR aging shows what is owed, not when it will pay. Without a customer-level pattern of actual-vs-promised, the prompt assumes invoices pay on terms — and the inflow timing in weeks 4-8 becomes optimistic fiction.
AP timing is a choice
Vendors get paid when finance decides to pay them, not on the AP terms in the system. The prompt cannot see your treasury team's stretching strategy, so the outflow timing will be too even.
One-offs dominate the trough
The worst week in the forecast is usually driven by a single payroll, tax, or true-up event. Miss one in your override list and the trough either disappears or appears in the wrong week — and your covenant headroom goes with it.
What your data needs to look like
- Current AR aging with customer-level payment-term overrides
- AP terms by vendor (or at least top 20 by spend)
- Payroll schedule with exact run dates
- Known one-time inflows/outflows for the next 13 weeks
- Opening cash balance reconciled to bank
See how FinanceOS handles this prompt on real financial data.
Book a 20-minute walkthrough. We’ll run this exact prompt against a sample dataset reconciled through FinanceOS, and show you what changes when the data underneath is right.
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