Cash Flow Forecast

Know where your cash lands 13 weeks out — without rebuilding the spreadsheet every Monday.

Cash Flow Forecast is a fieldset that builds a rolling 13-week cash flow model from your accounting system, learns how your books map to inflows and outflows, and delivers a reconciled brief to your finance leads at the start of each week. You confirm the model once. After that, it runs itself.

What it does

Every Monday morning it pulls your latest general-ledger balances and open receivables and payables, projects 13 weeks of cash forward, checks last week's projection against what actually happened, and sends a plain-language brief with a week-by-week table and a flag on any week that dips below your shortfall threshold.

It runs as a four-agent pipeline:

Data pull — reads recent GL period balances plus open AR and AP from your accounting integration, through the On Belay proxy.
Formula discovery — on the first run only, Claude proposes how each cash line item maps to your accounts. You confirm these (see Review & approval below).
Forecasting — builds the 13-week projection from your confirmed formulas plus current ledger data.
Brief delivery — writes the summary and sends it to your finance leads in Slack.

On weekly runs it also reconciles: it compares the prior week's projection to actuals and surfaces the variances, so the model gets more honest over time.

Who it's for

Founders, finance leads, and controllers who want a forward cash view they trust without owning a fragile model. If someone on your team currently rebuilds a 13-week cash flow by hand, this replaces that ritual.

Prerequisites

You need one accounting system connected as an On Belay integration:

QuickBooks, or
Xero, or
Acumatica

One is enough — connect whichever you keep your books in. You also need Slack connected so the weekly brief and the formula-review prompt can reach your finance leads. Enabling the fieldset is admin-only, like every fieldset.

Setup

Go to Dashboard → Fieldsets and enable Cash Flow Forecast. You'll pass through the standard requirement check and consent step.
If your accounting system isn't connected yet, On Belay tells you which one to connect first. Connect it on the Integrations page, then come back.
The setup wizard walks you through connecting your accounting system, defining the cash line items you want to track, and choosing your delivery schedule and finance leads.
Finish setup. The first run kicks off the formula discovery step, which proposes how your line items map to your accounts and then pauses for you to confirm. Nothing is forecast until you do.

Configuration

Settings live at Dashboard → Fieldsets → Cash Flow Forecast → Settings. You can adjust:

Cash line items — the inflow, outflow, and balance lines the model tracks. Add a line (name plus category), edit an existing one inline, or delete it. You can keep up to 50 line items.
Shortfall threshold — the dollar level below which a week gets flagged as a risk in the brief (default $50,000).
Delivery schedule — the day, time, and timezone the brief is sent. Monday delivery is the available day today; other days are marked "coming soon."
Slack delivery — the channel the brief is posted to, with a Send test message button to confirm the connection.
Finance leads — the people who receive the weekly brief and the formula-review prompt in Slack.

The 13-week horizon is fixed.

Re-running formula discovery

The line-items card in Settings also has a Run formula discovery button. Use it when you've changed your line items or your books and want Claude to re-propose the account mappings. Discovery needs at least three line items to run; once it finishes, the new proposals come back through the Formula Confirmation gate for you to confirm before they're used. This is the main "reset" lever in the fieldset — it re-derives your formulas rather than wiping your history.

How it runs

The forecast runs weekly, Monday at 08:00 UTC. The scheduler enqueues a run for every org that has the fieldset enabled and confirmed. Each weekly run flows straight through data pull → reconciliation → forecasting → brief delivery, with no pause — that gate only exists on the very first run.

Review & approval

This is the part that earns the model's trust, so it's worth understanding.

On the first run, the formula-discovery agent proposes a mapping for each cash line item — which accounts feed it and how. Those proposals are saved as unconfirmed. The run then pauses and notifies your finance leads in Slack with a link to the formula confirmation screen, where you review each proposed mapping and confirm the ones that look right (see How do I confirm the formulas on the first run? below). Nothing is committed until you confirm.

When you confirm, the run resumes and produces your first forecast. From then on, weekly runs are autonomous — they use your confirmed registry and don't pause again. You can revisit your formulas any time from the formula registry; the brief explains its math from the formulas you approved, never from a black box.

The pause has a built-in timeout. If the formulas aren't confirmed within 7 days, the run expires (its status becomes "Awaiting confirmation"), the proposed formulas are set aside, and your finance leads get a Slack note to re-enable the Cash Flow fieldset to restart formula discovery — it won't quietly forecast on unconfirmed assumptions.

How do I confirm the formulas on the first run?

The first run discovers your formulas and then pauses for your confirmation before it produces any brief — this is the formula confirmation gate. Open it at Dashboard → Fieldsets → Cash Flow Forecast → Formula Confirmation (the link in the Slack notification goes here too).

The page lists every discovered formula that's still unconfirmed, one card per cash line item. Each card shows:

The line item and whether it's an inflow or outflow.
The agent's confidence in the mapping — high, medium, or low.
The formula type and the source accounts it mapped to (the GL accounts that feed this line).
Any agent notes explaining the proposal.

For each formula, tick Looks right to select it — or use Select all at the top. A progress bar shows how many of the total you've confirmed. When you're ready, click Confirm to lock in the selected formulas. You don't have to confirm everything at once: if you select only some, the rest stay unconfirmed and you can confirm them later. Confirming resumes the paused run and generates your first forecast.

Once every formula has been confirmed, the page shows an "All formulas confirmed" message and your weekly brief runs off the confirmed registry.

Where do I view and change my formulas after setup?

After your formulas are confirmed, manage them at Dashboard → Fieldsets → Cash Flow Forecast → Formula Registry. (There's also a Formula Registry button in the header of any run detail view.) The registry table lists every active formula with its line item, formula type, the GL accounts behind it, a Confirmed or Pending status, the agent's confidence, and when it was last updated.

From here you can:

Add a manual line — click Add manual line to open an inline form. Pick a line item, give the formula a name, set a fixed weekly amount, and add optional notes. This is how you encode a known fixed cost (for example, a flat weekly payroll) that you'd rather state directly than have discovered.
Delete a formula — click Delete on a row and confirm. This removes that formula from the active registry.

To re-derive mappings for your line items — for example after your books change — run formula discovery again from Settings (see below); newly proposed formulas come back through the Formula Confirmation gate for you to confirm.

How do I read a single run?

Every forecast run has its own detail view at Dashboard → Fieldsets → Cash Flow Forecast → . It's headed by the week the forecast covers, the run's status (Completed, Failed, Running, or Awaiting confirmation), and the 13-week horizon. A run-history dropdown in the header lets you jump straight to any of your recent runs, and header buttons link to Settings and the Formula Registry.

The run view brings the forecast together in one place:

Shortfall banner — if any projected week dips below your shortfall threshold (or goes negative when no threshold is set), a banner at the top flags how many weeks are at risk and which week is worst, with a jump link down to the weekly table.
Cash-position charts and KPIs — the opening balance, projected closing balance, the lowest point in the horizon and which week it falls in, and the single biggest variance from the reconciliation.
13-week forecast table — the week-by-week projection, with at-risk weeks marked against your threshold.
Variance review — for weeks that have been reconciled against actuals, a "Projected → actual" waterfall plus a card per line showing projected vs. actual and the percentage variance. You can annotate each variance with why it differed — one-time, new recurring, seasonal, or a data error — and the Forecasting Agent uses that classification to make better future projections. The panel flags how many variances still need annotation.
Formula quick view — a read-only summary of the confirmed formulas the forecast was built from.

Outputs & where they land

Slack — the weekly brief goes to your designated finance leads. It includes a short executive summary, your current cash position, any shortfall risks, and a 13-week table (inflows, outflows, closing balance, confidence) with a link to the full model.
Dashboard — every run is saved under the fieldset with its own run detail view: the 13-week table, the shortfall banner, the variance review for prior weeks, and a quick view of the formulas the forecast was built from.

Every data pull runs through the On Belay proxy, so credentials stay server-side and each call is recorded in your audit log.

Billing

Cash Flow Forecast is included with your base plan — it's a flat-rate fieldset with no per-run or per-event metering. Your On Belay subscription covers it. (See Billing for how plans and the trial work.)

Tips

Take the formula review seriously. Five minutes confirming the registry on day one is what makes every later brief trustworthy. Edit anything that looks off rather than confirming it blind.
Set a realistic shortfall threshold. It's the difference between a useful flag and noise — set it where you'd actually want a heads-up.
Keep your books current. The forecast is only as fresh as your accounting data; the model reads what's posted.
Let the reconciliation work. After a few weeks the variance panel shows where projections drifted from reality — use it to tune your line items and prompt.