James Morgan Reviews Cashflow in Acumatica and other mid sized ERP systems

When you start a business or project the next 12 months you normally create two forecasts;  a profit and loss statement and a cashflow statement.  They are different as the cashflow statement looks at when the money comes in and goes out.  It also includes things that are not on the P&L like loan repayments etc.  It's very important to have as cash is the life blood of a company.  The proper term is a cashflow forecast.

At the end of every year a company has to prepare financial accounts,  this is made up of a balance sheet and profit and loss.  For larger companies it includes a cashflow statement.  All of these reports are historical, they report on the past year.  They answer the questions; how did we do in the year?  (P&L), what is the financial position of the company? (BS) and what happend in the bank accounts? (Cashflow).

Many of the Mid-Range ERP (MERP) products have a cashflow report; there are none that I know of that are forecasts.  This is difficult to do in most systems becase the payment and receipt information is not stored anywhere.  It's also highly changeable.  You have to predict when customers will really pay you, when you will pay suppliers, you have to build in futue VAT payments and ther irregular transactions.  Thats why most of the time its done on a spreadsheet.

However a cashflow forecast is one of the most crucial foreacsts of a business and particularly a short term one.  You know what happens if you go over your limit on your bank account, the bank quickly react, do that too often and they will wthdraw the account. 

The Acumatica forecast is a big step in that direction.  It does keep cashflow information and allows you to change the expected dates of transactions.  It also allows you to add payments and receitps that you expect but are not driven off the historc accounts, like a future payment.

I still think that there is a need for a quick and clever 3 month cashflow forecast tool that sucks the data from the system as well as another database of items that are not on the system and provides the user with the ability to change expeced dates and work out who they can pay and when. At the moment ours is done on a Smartsheet but there is no integration with the accounts so we have to enter all the information manually.