The 13-week cash forecast: the one report every CEO should see weekly

The annual budget and the rolling forecast tell you whether the year is working. Neither tells you whether you can make payroll on the twenty-eighth. For that you need a different instrument: a thirteen-week cash forecast, built from actual receipts and payments rather than from the profit and loss, and refreshed every week.

Why thirteen weeks

A quarter is long enough to see the next payroll cycles, tax payments, rent, and any large supplier or capital commitments. It is short enough that the receipts side can be built from real invoices and known customer behaviour rather than from assumptions. Beyond thirteen weeks, a direct cash forecast degrades into guesswork and the rolling forecast takes over.

How it is built

• Opening cash from the reconciled bank balances, not the ledger.
• Receipts by week, from the debtor ledger and expected payment dates, adjusted for how customers actually pay rather than when they are due.
• Payments by week, grouped into payroll, suppliers, taxes, rent and facilities, debt service, and capital spend.
• A closing balance each week, with a minimum threshold marked clearly.
• Last week's forecast against actual, so the forecast learns from its own misses.

The first version takes a day or two to build from a clean ledger. Each subsequent week takes an hour, because most lines roll forward and only the first few weeks need attention.

What it changes

Once the forecast exists, decisions that used to feel like guesses become arithmetic. Can we bring the hire forward a month? Should we take the early-payment discount? Do we need to chase that one large debtor this week or next? Is the facility we are negotiating actually the right size? The forecast also changes behaviour in the rest of the business, because sales and operations start to see the cash consequence of the commitments they make.

Who owns it

The forecast is prepared by finance and owned by the CEO. It should be the first page of the weekly leadership meeting, take five minutes to review when nothing has changed, and be the document everyone turns to when something has. If the finance function you have cannot produce it weekly, that is the first thing to fix.