Flying With Your Eyes Closed: Where Will Your Cash Be in 90 Days?

5 min read · Published by Finite, LLC · Checked for technical accuracy by Sonny Senulis, CPA on September 25, 2026.

You Built Something Real

You've done an incredible job building your business.

You took an idea, accepted the risk, put in the long hours, and turned it into something valuable.

But have you ever felt like you're flying a beautiful airplane with your eyes closed? You know sales are coming in. You know the business is growing. But do you really know where your cash will be 30, 60 or 90 days from now?

Instinct gets a company off the ground. It rarely gives you the visibility to scale with confidence. A well-kept cash forecast does.

The question isn't whether you can build one yourself. It's whether the information you rely on is accurate enough to decide on.

The Question Behind the Bank Balance

Many owners check the bank balance daily. It is the most honest number in the business, but it only shows where you are, not where you are headed.

So: what is the lowest your bank balance will be over the next 13 weeks, and in which week? Not a feeling. A number and a date.

Most owners cannot, and that is not a failing. Their tools were never built to answer it.

Why Profit Does Not Tell You Where Cash Is Going

Your income statement records revenue when you earn it and expenses when you incur them. Right for measuring profit. Wrong for predicting your bank balance.

Cash moves on a different clock:

• Revenue is not receipts. You record a sale when you invoice. The cash arrives 30, 45 or 60 days later.
• Expenses are not payments. Payroll, rent and suppliers run on their own schedules.
• Some costs arrive in lumps. An annual insurance premium or a bonus can land in a single week, even though your books spread it across the year.
• Growth pulls cash forward. You pay for people and materials before the customer pays you.

So a business can have its most profitable quarter and its tightest cash month at once.

A 13-week rolling cash forecast answers the cash question. Each week the oldest week drops off and a new one is added. Thirteen weeks is long enough to see trouble coming and short enough to forecast in detail.

The hard part is the judgment inside it. When does this customer actually pay? Which payments can move?

An Illustrative Example

Take a hypothetical distributor, with simplified numbers. It has $200,000 in the bank, and its existing business turns about $30,000 a month into cash.

It wins a contract worth $150,000 a month in sales, with $105,000 of product costs and $15,000 of extra delivery labor. On paper, monthly profit doubles from $30,000 to $60,000.

The customer pays in 60 days. Suppliers want 30. Labor is paid as worked.

• Month one: $15,000 of new labor, nothing in. Balance: $215,000.
• Month two: the first $105,000 supplier bill plus labor. Balance: $125,000.
• Month three: the first $150,000 arrives against $120,000 of costs. Balance: $185,000.

A dip, then recovery. Now add a $45,000 insurance premium due in month two. The low point drops to $80,000.

Then the customer pays 20 days late, so the first $150,000 slides into month four. Month three becomes $80,000 plus $30,000 minus $120,000. The balance is minus $10,000.

A business with record profits and a signed contract can still be $10,000 short, and the income statement will not warn you.

A 13-week forecast shows that shortfall three months ahead. With that much notice, the options are calm: arrange a line of credit, negotiate a deposit, stagger the insurance payment, or ask the supplier for longer terms. With three days of notice, they are much worse.

What You Can Do Starting Monday

You need a few hours and honest inputs.

• Start with today's bank balance across all accounts.
• Build receipts from your receivables aging. For large customers, use the date they actually tend to pay, not the invoice due date.
• Build payments from payables, payroll, loan schedule and lease, plus anything annual or quarterly due within 13 weeks.
• Lay out 13 weekly columns. Write down the lowest balance and its week.
• Next Monday, compare expected with actual. Where were you wrong, and why?
• Update it and roll it forward one week.

Most of the value sits in the variance review. After a few weeks you know which customers are reliable and how much cushion you really need.

Warning signs: your forecast never shows a dip, it is built from revenue rather than collections, it is over two weeks old, or only one person understands it.

A Second Set of Eyes

You have already done the hardest part: a business customers pay for and people depend on.

The question is whether the numbers guiding your next decisions are as reliable as the business itself. A fresh look sometimes turns up a timing assumption, a missing payment or a customer habit that changes the picture.

Our team at Finite builds and maintains rolling cash forecasts with owners, and checks existing ones. If you would like someone to check whether you are seeing the full picture, we would be glad to have that conversation.